Rush To Judgement on Gender Studies Stabbing
Academics lamenting the rise of “hate” don’t hesitate to demonize their preferred targets
So far, we know little about what police have called a “senseless act of hate” at the University of Waterloo last week that left three people—a gender studies instructor and two students in her class—with non-life-threatening stabbing injuries. Charged with aggravated assault is Geovanny Villalba-Aleman, an international student from Quito, Ecuador who recently graduated from Waterloo with a Bachelor of Science Honours degree. Unlike in some other school attacks, it does not seem that the attacker knew his victims; nor did he make any public statement to justify himself before or during the knife assaults.
Yet almost immediately following the event, quite a few academics have commented on the incident as if they possess precise knowledge of the attacker’s motive, state of mind, and precipitating conditions.
In a university gathering on the day following the incident, the President of the University of Waterloo, Vivek Goel, spoke of a “hate-filled attack” that “targeted our people on the basis of a hateful view of gender expression and identity.” The attack was significant and “all the more painful,” he emphasized, because it occurred “at the end of Pride Month” and would be felt disproportionately by “Two Spirit, trans, non-binary, queer, gender non-conforming, and women.”
The President also suggested that the attack was not the expression of a disordered mind or personal anguish on the part of the attacker. Instead, he framed it as one among many attempts by the enemies of freedom to quash liberatory discussion. “There are those who would like to intimidate us. They want us to be afraid. Afraid to learn. Afraid to share. Afraid to speak our truth. But we will not let them deter us from proclaiming loudly our values of inclusion and openness.” Without saying so explicitly, the President seemed to indicate that a student from Ecuador had become part of an organized conspiracy of right-wing Canadian haters who oppose the university’s “truth” on all things female and gender-queer.
Most statements about the attack have followed this line. Twitter came alive with jubilant denunciations of the “Right Wing Culture War” and “endless Conservative rage farming” that allegedly lay behind Villalba-Aleman’s actions. One University of Waterloo professor, angry at the university’s alleged failure to protect students and staff, was confident that the class “was targeted because it analyzes sex and gender” (in truth, gender studies ideology does not so much analyze gender as promote radical constructionist theories). Two other Waterloo professors published a long opinion piece calling the attack an act of “stochastic terrorism.” Such terrorism, they explain, demonizes and targets “women, racialized, disabled, queer, and gender non-conforming people.” By implication, the agents of such terrorism are usually heterosexual white men.
This latter article covers familiar feminist territory, arguing that online rhetoric emboldens hateful individuals to commit violence against those they “demonize” and “dehumanize.” They mention Andrew Tate spreading his misogyny and Marc Lépine murdering fourteen women at Montreal’s L’Ecole Polytechnique because he hated feminists. Dehumanization benefits those men who engage in it, they assert, making it easy for such men to enact violence (why they “benefit” from enacting violence is never made clear, nor how Lépine fits with their claim about online incitement, given that he lived before the internet). When social media and other platforms “do not adequately regulate hate speech or protect the most vulnerable recipients of that hate speech,” such failure allows hateful ideas to “gain validation.”
The general import is that more needs to be done to protect those who articulate “our truth,” in President Goel’s memorable words, and to prevent opponents from attacking “our values.” That such values have nothing to do with genuine “inclusion and openness” is made clear in the exclusive focus on non-feminist-compliant men (the article links to another piece that damns incel “misogyny”); while more privileged haters—especially those who make their comfortable living spreading bile on university campuses, such as Georgetown University’s Christine Fair and Northeastern University’s Suzanna Walters—are not mentioned.
The seeming confidence of statements about the University of Waterloo attack belies the fact that so far, no evidence has been presented that the attacker had been radicalized by online rhetoric or even that he harbored particular views about “gender expression and identity.” The only apparent clue to his motive is the fact that he walked into a gender studies classroom. We’ve seen nothing of his online profile or social media statements.
The rush to judgement is a common feature of school shootings and other mass attacks, in which accuracy matters less than establishing a useful narrative as quickly as possible. Authorities were spectacularly wrong in the case of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, where it was believed for years that the shooter, Omar Mateen, had targeted the gay nightclub in a homophobic assault. Though Mateen had declared in Facebook posts that he was acting on behalf of the Islamic State, many activists and political figures spoke out against the incident, which left 49 dead and 53 wounded, as an anti-gay hate crime. It was only years later, during the trial of the shooter’s wife, that it was revealed Mateen had chosen the nightclub at the last minute because his preferred target, a shopping mall and entertainment center, had been too heavily guarded. He’d had no idea that Pulse was a gay bar when he walked through its doors.
In other cases, authorities have been unwilling to make any comments about motives. Following the attack in March on a Nashville Christian school, in which a 28-year-old woman, Audrey Hale, who had recently begun identifying as a trans man, opened fire on teachers and students, killing six people including three children, there has been marked reluctance to categorize the attack as a hate crime, much less to inveigh against hateful extremists amongst trans rights activists, or to target specific forums or chat groups where trans activists share anger and resentment. The narrative on that attack seemed to be that if it was about hate, it was right-wing Christian hate that was too much in evidence. This narrative also expressed obligatory concern about an uptick of violence against LGBTQ+ as a consequence of such alleged Christian hate.
Absolutely no one worries about the consequences of blaming incels or men’s advocates after an attack like that at the University of Waterloo.
But let’s accept, provisionally, that the story so far is not inaccurate: a man from Quito, Ecuador aimed a blow against gender studies, which he had read about online and found morally repellant. If so, he acted criminally on a concern that many peaceful Canadians share. From the beginning, gender studies courses have advertised their ideological and activist nature without disguise and have openly expressed contempt for persons afflicted with “toxic masculinity.” They are not academic studies in any traditional sense. They disseminate theories to be embraced rather than rigorously tested. They encourage resentment against traditional social structures, promote anti-family “resistance,” and advocate for abortion, gender transitioning, masculinity as dehumanizing, and the idea of the transgender child. They lie to young people about the biological basis of gender. They humiliate men as part of an allegedly redemptive program. There is legitimate reason to believe that radical gender ideology contributes to dysphoria and alienation, as the marked rise in transgenderism amongst young people may indicate.
The fact that the university no longer even pretends to stand for dispassionate inquiry is evident in President Goel’s partisan championing of “our truth” and “our values.” To pretend, as many will now do, that anyone who disagrees with gender radicalism is a dangerous hater will not likely promote social harmony in Canada, and may exacerbate rather than diminish the likelihood of future attacks.
In all the talk about the alleged motives and causes of the attack, not one person eager to tout inclusion has said anything about the attacker as a human being at a university that makes no secret of winners and losers in the empathy sweepstakes. Did anything happen in the years that Geovanny Villalba-Aleman spent at Waterloo that might have contributed to his violence? Had he come into contact with gender studies teachers or students; had he felt that his values and worldview were under attack? Did he ever seek out counseling services? Did anyone notice or care that he was withdrawn and socially awkward, as is now being reported? Is there not some self-reflection due on the part of a university that takes in a young man from another country and turns out a violent criminal? Was culture shock an issue, and does the university care that students coming from outside the west, from places with more conservative social values, may be discomfited to encounter our culture’s sexual hedonism, anti-family stridency, and promotion of gender fluidity?
Whatever is discovered about Geovanny Villalba-Aleman—and it’s likely, especially if he pleads guilty, that the truth will never be known—we can be confident that his action will be used as a platform to push feminist, queer, and trans ideologies and to continue to persecute the few voices left on campus that criticize gender ideology. Students who find such ideologies disturbing or untruthful will have it made clear to them that voicing their concern is tantamount to promoting violence. The fact that violence has many precipitating factors and that feminism has, for decades, explicitly advocated hate will continue to be ignored. Though many voices are now being raised denouncing Villalba-Aleman’s attack, their own rhetoric shows that they are quite happy to demonize and dehumanize in their turn.
Love this. Bravo Janice. I am genuinely concerned about the casual manner in which certain cohorts use the word 'hate'. I have written to my local school board the OCDSB to encourage them to refrain from conflating disagreement with hate in their public statements. They have done this already, and its pretty ominous when a state institution does so. Hopefully they will resist doing this in the future.
I'm deeply saddened to learn of this incident. It takes me back to the years I spent as a university professor hoping to reform gender studies programs and bring them into alignment with the academy's goals and purposes. At that time, many would use self-serving, casuistic reasoning to claim that incidents such as this evidence the need for gender studies ("it promotes tolerance and understanding!"); I would counter that these incidents may, in many instances, more correctly be interpreted as a byproduct of pernicious paradigms of gender that these programs were promoting throughout the academy and in policy-making spheres. I asserted that we had an ethical obligation to ensure that we were fostering actual academic inquiry, relying on sound methodologies, and not building political platforms to advance potentially toxic agendas. You can easily imagine how my efforts were received. As Dr. Fiamengo points out, gender studies ideology has little to do with promoting reasonable academic debate on gender and much to do with promoting radical constructionist theories; their primary objective is to control the semiotics of victimhood to use for their own purposes, and they have been remarkably successful in that respect. During those years, I sobbed on a nearly daily basis at the futility of the struggle and the thought of the harm that these programs were inflicting on men and boys. I know nothing of the motives for this attack, but I don't think anyone should be surprised when disenfranchised young men who feel hopeless, having been failed by institutions that denigrate them, break down under the weight of a cultural narrative that has no regard for their truths.