The city of Victoria has been a fierce battleground over the rights of transgender people in recent years. Our municipal council issued a Declaration of Ongoing Solidarity with Gender-Diverse Residents of Victoria in November 2023, in the aftermath of the tentative 1 Million March 4 Children which was routed amid overwhelming opposition.
The municipality’s declaration didn’t amount to much. Less than a year later I led a campaign with 1 Million Voices For Inclusion, a transgender advocacy group, to cancel We Unify’s Reclaiming Canada conference and its speaker lineup of notorious transphobes, to be held at the Victoria Conference Centre; the city declined to cancel its contract with the organization, citing freedom of expression.
Well, the battle continues. A community member recently tipped me about the candidacy of Wendy Bowkett for Victoria’s municipal council. Her campaign website says nothing of her prejudice against transgender people, of course. But her Twitter feed is littered with offensive transphobic posts betraying her views, like the following examples which speak for themselves:
She’s also a follower of Charles Bodi, a notorious troll so toxic that controversial MLA Elenore Sturko, of all people, had to publicly repudiate him after backlash to a picture she took with him at the Throne speech in 2024.
Bowkett is a proud Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) and a follower of J.K. Rowling, of course the famous creator of the Harry Potter franchise but also an outspoken opponent of transgender rights.
And for some reason Bowkett is fiercely fixated on transgender athletes disrupting gender equality in sports, an issue which in contrast ranks rock bottom on my list of priorities.
Bowkett is only one of many local election candidates running to subvert government entities across the country into rolling back initiatives guaranteeing the rights of transgender people. One well-documented initiative, led by Benita Pedersen, attempted to ‘conservatize’ Alberta’s municipal councils and school boards with a covert agenda. Others are less subtle, like former school trustee Barry Neufeld who was recently ordered by the BC Human Rights Tribunal to compensate victims of homophobic and transphobic speech to the order of 750,000$.
And yet Councillor Stephen Hammond, who either knows little or cares little of Bowkett’s opposition to the declaration he voted for in 2024, endorsed her candidacy in a post on Facebook. Just saying.
The way electors vote in October will decide much more than core issues candidates run on; it will determine the fate of the rights most people take for granted but detractors seek to undermine from within. Too much is at stake to support intolerant candidates who won’t even come clean with their views and actual goals—or those who show poor judgement by association.
By the way Wendy: Don’t bother deleting your tweets, I archived them all. Although if you want to delete your Twitter account altogether that’s fine with me!
