‘We Unify’ Has Become the Party of Transphobes

At the next council meeting of the City of Victoria, two of us from 1 Million Voices For Inclusion will reach out to the council demanding it reverse its decision to allow We Unify’s Reclaiming Canada conference at the Victoria Conference Centre on June 22-23, in opposition to its own “Declaration of Ongoing Solidarity with Gender-Diverse Residents of Victoria.”

That gives me half of a 3-minute period to explain why We Unify has become the party of homophobes and transphobes, lending its platform to divisive speakers flagged for hate speech. That won’t be nearly enough. I could spend thirty minutes on the topic and it still wouldn’t be enough.

And it’s not just the personal opinions of conference speakers, but that of the organisation as a whole, as evidenced for example by this recent entry on Substack postering this article on Global News about the decline in support for LGBT rights among Canadians.

Our group spent a considerable amount of time researching the conference’s speaker lineup, and we’ve documented several so toxic that they’ve repeatedly made headlines:

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Lauren Southern

She is infamous for racist propaganda, which generated such backlash that she was basically forced out of public life. She spoke against transgender people being allowed to compete in sports. She ended up being banned in the UK after distributing flyers reading “Allah is trans” among other inflammatory statements, and also barred from entry in Australia and New Zealand. She was also banned from Twitch and Patreon for hate speech, after stunts such as declaring herself “gender non-binary” in order to change her sex designation to male on official ID, to mock the government’s accommodations for transgender people.

Artur Pawlowski

The leader of the ultraconservative Street Church has been flagged for hate speech far and wide for his medieval views on sexuality and gender, such as his opposition to a ban on conversion therapy for homosexuals and protesting a rainbow crosswalk. He also believes transgender people can be redeemed out of it by embracing Jesus. Bigotry seems to run in his family since his son is the leader of a group that organised a transphobic protest.

John Carpay

This Alberta lawyer is notorious for comparing pride flags to svastikas, a comment he since apologised for. Nevertheless, he went on denouncing Gay Straight Alliance clubs in schools. He also described protecting LGBTQ rights as authoritarianism, and in particular opposed a legal challenge to Saskatchewan’s policy of requiring parental authorisation for minors to use of the name and pronouns of their choice at school—in the name of freedom of course. He also embraced Kenneth Zucker’s work on conversion therapy for gender dysphoria in children.

On a side note, he notoriously made headlines for spying on a judge in unrelated litigation, and ended up disbarred for three years.

Drea Humphrey

Oh God, this one makes a living glorifying their likes, and has a very long record of ranting against trans rights in particular. Among other comments, she stands against SOGI, allowing transgender women to compete in sports and beauty pageants, puberty blockers for minors, trans day of visibility (if only for colliding with Easter Sunday in 2024), and drag queen storytime. She also defended Amy Hamm, a BC nurse facing discipline for making transphobic comments. She recently covered an event at which spoke Meghan Murphy, herself under fire for her ostracising views on transgender women.

“Is the pendulum beginning to swing, as far as how taboo it is to call out the all-things radical trans agenda?”

Zuby

This British podcaster received media attention after posting a video on Twitter of himself performing a deadlift, then stating he had broken the British women’s record while he “identified as a woman”; his Twitter account was temporarily suspended for hateful content as a result. He also signed a petition in support of J. K. Rowling after she wrote about her opposition to the “new trans activism”.

By the way, he’s no mere guest, but the host of the conference.

Lauren Chen

While no longer on the speaker list, she was initially meant to be the host for the conference.

She built her brand on turning multiple social issues, including transsexuality, into an outragist media circus, in borderline unintelligible video clips that defy description; for example, by mocking the deadnaming of transgender people, or documenting “transmaxxing” as an escape route for so-called incels. She recently made headlines accusing Biden of “minimizing” Easter Sunday by having it collide with transgender day of visibility in 2024.

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Woah. That was just scratching the surface. I could have made the above ten times as long without getting to the bottom of that cringeworthy cesspool of bigotry and trolling. And if I veered off-topic into all their documented hate speech it would turn into a dissertation.

Yet Clyde Nichols, another speaker at the conference, just responded to an article on CHEK News about the Victoria Pride Society calling out its lineup of transphobes, by calling the whole piece “misinformation” while choking on his own laughs struggling to come up with a tangible counterargument, denying any knowledge of the creeps he’s associating with, and calling for specific examples of transphobia and hate speech. Well, it turns out I had already done his homework, and I’m eager to share this graphic storyboard that dumbs it all down to his meagre cognitive level. Hope you enjoyed it Clyde!

The rest of you, please sign our letter writing campaign if you haven’t already. The Union Club of British Columbia has already repudiated We Unify in the wake of these revelations, denying it a venue for their speaker reception, prior to the conference proper. We need to keep flooding these mailboxes until the Victoria Conference Centre follows suit!