Chapter 27: The Second Cancellation and the Calm Before the Storm
It took about a month and a half for the dust to settle. Now, I was on leave from my job at UNBC and my union rep was hard at work getting me back into the classroom. My girlfriend, who had long nurtured a talent for retroactive continuity, came up with a new version of events in which she had never kicked me out of the apartment or broken up with me and began agitating for me to return to our apartment in Prince George.
I had been staying with a long-time friend in Kitsilano, deeply depressed. It appeared that both my academic and political career were over and the most time-consuming activity in my week was dealing with my cancelation, all the private correspondence and social media posts describing me as a homicidal hate-monger, hell-bent on murdering every “trans child” in the world were a lot to get through.
It was around this time that it became nigh-impossible for me to comment on environmental or economic issues on social media from an eco-socialist perspective. While Wokes might tolerate me complaining about mass migration, deficit spending, investor rights or free trade, issues the left had not merely abandoned but done an about-face, they could not tolerate my continued opposition to fracking, fossil fuel subsidies and the like. When I made such interventions, I would be deluged with hysterical tweets and Facebook comments from members of the contemporary progressive left accusing me not merely of being a transphobic monster but, by extension, a white supremacist, ableist, Nazi, racist, whatever epithet was ready to hand.
In the neo-McCarthyism of contemporary “cancel culture,” the greatest threat to one’s safety is guilt-by-association. Ultimately, it was my decision to stand with Judy that had wrought my fate. By the same logic, I risked the safety of any progressive by agreeing with them and offering to help. This is why, I was largely left alone to express unorthodox views but, if I said something that was consistent with progressive orthodoxy, the epithets, the conflation, the anathematization would flare-up.
This was finally driven home to me when I was expelled from the environmental group Friends of Tilbury opposing the province’s plan to build a natural gas export terminal on Tilbury Island in the Fraser River. After just one meeting, I was expelled, not for what I said during the meeting but because it was unacceptable to receive help from one of the province’s veteran environmental activists because he did not believe women have penises.
With my system of social support collapsing in Vancouver as former friends, comrades and coworkers distanced themselves from me, while others became more covert in their interactions with me, I figured I would accept my girlfriend’s invitation to return to our shared domicile and reunite with my cat, whom I also missed.
