Kerry

 In September 2022, a teacher at a public high school in Ontario Canada began wearing an obvious blonde wig, eyeglasses that are typically associated with elderly women, brightly colored spandex clothing, and, most notably, comically oversized Z-cup prosthetic breasts.  In the few interviews found online, this teacher stated that the breasts were real and simply the result of a genetic condition, and that this teacher also was intersex, having XX chromosomes but male primary and secondary sex characteristics.  Because the local school board had recently adopted policies that allowed transgender teachers to dress as their lived gender, this teacher was allowed to continue wearing the wig and prosthetics to work.  These gender affirming policies, it seemed, had a glaring fault that was much too dangerous to leave unmitigated.  How could such a person be allowed around the children?  Surely the powerless and debaucherous Ontario school board's inaction was a sign of these woke times in which we find ourselves.   

Let's go back a little bit further in time to 1986.  A clinical psychologist at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Ontario, Canada named Ray Blanchard conducted a study on transsexual women to measure levels and sources of arousal.  Blanchard is credited with creating the concept of autogynephilia.  According to Blanchard, transsexual women who are sexually attracted to women, have their gender identity rooted in a sexual desire to possess female genitalia.  He stated, "Autogynephilic transsexuals were men who were also sexually attracted to women, but whose paraphilic sexual interest made them want to go farther and permanently change their bodies to become the objects of their attraction."  The implication in his work is that transsexual women are sexual deviants who are willing to undergo hormone therapy, sexual reassignment surgery, and social transitioning purely to satiate a sexual desire resulting from mental illness.  Blanchard's ideas have increased in popularity in recent years among the gender critical movement and other right-wing groups.  

Finally, if you will allow me one more jump through time, I have one last item to add to this discussion.  In 2023, The Daily Wire, a mixed media corporation that sells anti-transgender rhetoric via podcasts, YouTube channels, and now feature length movies, released the film, Lady Ballers.  The plot of Lady Ballers is this.  A down-on-his-luck former high school basketball coach convinces his former players to dress in drag to pretend to be transgender women in order to compete in a women's basketball league which will grant them an indeterminate form of fame, which a scheming journalist promises to help them translate into an indeterminate financial success.  The men win every game, often by physically beating up the opposing women's teams, until they face another team of fake trans women made up of large black men.  The Lady Ballers realize the error of their ways (which, again, is supposed to represent trans women's attempts to compete in women's sports).  At the end of the third act, one of the Lady Ballers expresses genuine emotional distress, which is understood to be gender dysphoria, to the coach, at which point he is punched in the testicles by the coach to make the statement to the audience that genitals are the immutable, defining measure of a person's identity.  The movie's intention is to make the argument that transgender women are just men in dresses who are trying to exploit women's spaces for some personal gain.  The movie features cameos from the world of right-wing personalities including Canadian pretend psychologist and misogynist Jordan Peterson in a post-credits scene.  

So, other than the odd Canadian link (seriously, is Canada doing ok?), these three stories have a really sinister commonality.  They all represent efforts to create a fictional mythology of transgender women.  Most people simply do not have any exposure to transgender women and have no concept of who they are or why they would present themselves and be accepted as anything other than the gender they were assigned at birth.  If people like those in charge at the Daily Wire can get ahead of the rest of mainstream media in presenting a narrative of who trans women are, then that narrative will persist and become part of cultural understanding.  

In the first story I presented, the teacher, as it turns out, is a right-wing provocateur named Kerry Lemieux.  He had been using the name Kayla Lemieux when dressed in his costume.  He is not and has never been a transgender woman.  By all appearances, this was a publicity stunt he devised as a form of protest against what he saw as wokeness gone wild in the school system.  He quit his job at Oakville Trafalger High School when photos were published online showing Kerry walking in public, enjoying his life, out of costume.  He has taken a teaching job in another school district under his actual, lived persona of Kerry Lemieux, presumably as a condition of maintaining that employment.  

Ray Blanchard, that psychologist who wants everyone to know that transgender women are really just filthy perverts, is actually a eugenics researcher that focuses on male penis size and how it reacts to various stimuli.  He is an American citizen who moved to Canada in his early 20s with several colleagues during the height of the Vietnam war.  Feel free to draw your own conclusions about that fact, although he has stated that he would have been exempt from the draft regardless due to exemptions for being the lone surviving child of a service member killed in World War II, and also for being gay.  He's currently making the rounds on far right Youtube channels and podcasts to advertise his books while making hilariously ribald jokes about "trannies," which we all know is the accepted clinical term for trans women and Blanchard therefore feels entitled to use it at will.  

As for Lady Ballers, there's not much left to say about it.  The fine people at the Daily Wire spent seven million dollars to make a movie that explicitly mocks and ridicules a minority group relentlessly for two hours.  The creators have been very clear that their intentions in making the movie were exactly this.  They spent seven million dollars, with no box office or DVD sales to recoup the cost, to make fun of trans women.  The sheer cruelty involved in that endeavor makes me sad.  

All of these people just make me really sad.