A purported “scholar” at the University of Toronto, Ms Kyle Kirkup, wrote the following lie about Stonewall at Torontoist:
On June 28, 1969, the New York Police Department… raided the Stonewall Inn, targeting queer and trans people for having the audacity to gather together…. The riot – led by trans women of colour
This is false, of course. “Trans women” are, first of all, men, and they did not exist in 1969. The attendees of the Stonewall Inn were gay men with a few lesbians and a very few cross-dressers and drag queens. It was illegal to appear in public in opposite-sex attire in 1969 in New York. It’s an established historical fact that those cross-dressers and drag queens – their own self-descriptions – were few in number (perhaps two) and did not “lead” anything. Further, the Stonewall uprising lasted several nights.
But to a queer theorist like Kirkup, and to a downtown-progressive blog like Torontoist, facts are whatever you want them to be when the topic is the most oppressed people the world has ever known – transgenders. This is at least consistent with the intrinsically dishonest worldview of transgenders and their apologists, who hold that biology does not exist, some women have dicks and some men have vaginas (“Get over it!”), and you can just decide to be a woman or man at any time, such decision overriding every right and privilege other people hold.
A series of complaints to Kirkup and Torontoist’s co-editor-in-chief, David Hains, resulted in nothing until I threatened to call them liars. I do so now, because they are. That threat prompted the sole response, from Torontoist’s de facto publisher, Ken Hunt of St. Joseph Media, who wrote (excerpted): “The editors and writer stand behind the story as written and they do not feel that a correction is necessary or appropriate.”
“In other words, they knowingly lied and you support their doing so,” I replied. “I’m sure they would disagree with that interpretation,” Hunt wrote back. “Yes, I do support them.”
To sum up, then: Kyle Kirkup lied about the historical facts about the gay and lesbian uprising at Stonewall. Torontoist’s editor and publisher backed her to the hilt, the latter implying that fact is mere “interpretation.”
Torontoist’s corrections policy is, I see now, a sham. And this city blog, on its ninth life and owned by the for-profit St. Joseph, has the audacity to ask for donations.