From time to time, a young boy’s dreams can come true and he can appear in Frank. But the one and only article I ever submitted to Frank didn’t meet its demonstrably low bar.
And here it is!
Candid CAMH
That albino squirrel was transracial!
Adam’s apples were bobbing through the gasping Toronto journo cohort after Manhattan hacks had to swoop in and document another local scandal.
Reporters had just managed to forget how Gawker scooped them on Rob “Fat Fuck” Ford, who put glass menageries to new uses in Rexdale basements. Then not just New York sluggos but New York magazine did the due diligence into the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s Gender Identity Clinic. At issue was CAMH’s treatment of gender-nonconformant youth, who, in current thinking, were trans all along.
Not so fast, maybe. In a tour-de-force of tough, fair, fully researched inquiry that makes Kevin Donovan look like a Hardy Boy, Jesse “Not Brown” Singal’s piece showed how CAMH had its knives at the ready to plunge into the tweedy back of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, longtime gender-identity gatekeeper at the unloved Queen West loony bin.
Singal’s coverage has the feel of a tough tomboy dyke (“Transman,” shurely‽ – Ed.) shoving a nerd typist’s head into a toilet in an all-gender washroom. Mighty Torstar may look back fondly on its Gardasil coverage after this is all over: Zucker lawyered up via John Adair, Singal shows, and has already delivered libel threats to the Star. Along for that ride is hapless gender warrior Jake Pyne (for it is he), who wrote an unwise (pre‑)op‑ed for the braintrust that brought us Toronto Star Touch. Any hack south of Bloor could surmise that Zucker plans to go full Ezra against CAMH.
Downtown hacks missed this scandal the same way they miss so many of them – through the progressive herd mentality and its attendant taboos. Look no further than the consensus model of coddling transgendered persons, deemed the most oppressed people ever by their patron saint, NDP MPP/ordained preacher Cheri DiNovo.
Some remember how DiNovo’s assistant, Andrea Houston, used to bang out pro-trans screeds for Daily Xtra before getting the gender-neutral frogmarch. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Houston’s boyfriend – Jonathan Goldsbie at Michael Hollett’s moneymaker Now – to investigate anything trans-critical. Downtown journos are too trigger-warning-happy to make trans look bad.
And at the high end, Wedgie Fulford’s cisgendered daughter Sarah just published a huge encomium to the transgender cause in Toronto Life.
To these guys, some of whom are girls, attacking the trans community is like casting doubt on rape complainants. But instead of taking to Twitter to bash Marie Henein, Toronto hacks respond to a real scandal affecting real kids with a blanket of silence.
Speaking of Gawker: After it gave Robbie Ford the full American-style exposé treatment, Globe lifers blew the dust off their reporting on brother Dougie’s commercialization of the drug trade in days of yore. Blood and guts in high school never reached such heights of Toronto politics, and Gawker second-in-command John Cook wasted no time gloating that Toronto media cushions the powerful. Gender may change, but Toronto hacks never will.