Programming note: Please join Mark later today for a brand new Tale for Our Time.
~This week my old newspaper The National Post is full of columns about "the death of the Canadian dream", if not the murder of said Canadian dream.
Oh, I don't know. Say what you will about Canada, but it's the first country in the world to decree that its citizenry are entitled to both a penis and a vagina - and taxpayer-funded at that:
An Ontario resident has successfully secured public funding for a specialized gender-affirming surgery argued to be "experimental" by the provincial health insurer following a years-long legal battle.
The prospective patient, identified only as K.S. in documents filed with the provincial Health Services Appeal and Review Board (HSARB), was seeking coverage under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) for a penile-preserving vaginoplasty, a procedure in which a vaginal cavity is surgically created while keeping the penis intact.
Since 2023, K.S. has been engaged in a series of appeals to the review board following an initial denial by OHIP to cover the surgery. On April 10, a final appeal launched by OHIP was dismissed by the Divisional Court of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
You can read the full Superior Court decision by Madam Justice Breese Davies here:
Dr. Krakowsky testified that vaginoplasties without penectomy is considered experimental in Ontario because there is no peer-reviewed literature on when would be appropriate and no long-term data on the psychological or physical outcomes of such procedures. OHIP argues it would be absurd to conclude that the Legislature intended to include an experimental procedure in the list of insured services.
I do not agree with OHIP's position.
So, if you're one of many Canadians, of whatever "gender", waiting months for a specialist to attend to your prostate, it might be quicker just to get a "vaginal cavity" punched in the middle of your perineum and see whether that does the trick.
This particular procedure is not performed at any Canadian hospital, so, as noted in Madam Justice Davies's ruling, the province will be paying for KS to head to Texas. Anywhere in Texas in particular? Why, yes: the Crane Center in Austin. That rang a vague bell with me. Oh, yeah ...from last week's Daily Mail:
EXCLUSIVE: Texas gender clinic dubbed 'Frankenstein's lab' performs hundreds of experimental surgeries each year - including giving patients a penis AND vagina and 'Barbie-dolling' clients by removing both
Don't mess with Texas! Well, except with their genitals:
The center's director, Dr Curtis Crane, has previously bragged he couldn't 'think of a surgical request that I haven't been able to fulfil.'
I'm sure. And, when Texan entrepreneurial energy meets Ontario socialist entitlement, it's a bonanza. Under Justin Trudeau's proposed "anti-hate" legislation, Canadian "human rights" will not encompass freedom of speech, even in your own home, but you can get a bonus vagina and put a sock in it.
~One step forward, three steps back. On the very same day as the Ontario court decision, an official report in the UK found that there was no "good evidence" supporting the benefits of "gender-transitioning" for those under twenty-five:
NHS to review all transgender treatment
Evidence for letting children change gender built on shaky foundations, says Cass report
Fleet Street greeted Dr Cass's findings as a grand popping of the trans bubble. The Ontario Superior Court ruling seems to me far more telling about where our society's headed - basically a genitally-congested Island of Dr Moreau. Can Canada afford to double its private parts? Or is there a simpler solution?
I've quoted before my old friends Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and a song they wrote back in the Seventies about de-gendered 'Simplified Language', culminating in the replacement of 'penis' and 'vagina' with the unisex 'penina':
Oh, nothing could be finer
Than to play with my penina
If you will show me yours-a
Then I will show you mine-a...The sooner the government issues us all with peninas the better.
I'm fighting very hard the urge to give up on end-stage western civilization. As I've noted many times, whatever you think about Chairman Xi, Tsar Putin or the mullahs, they know what a woman is. Two decades ago, I found it easier to deplore all the cultural relativism vis-à-vis Islam: Hey, at least we're not mutilating the genitals of middle-schoolers.
But now we are.
~In less than two months, Steyn vs Ofcom comes to the King's Bench Division of the English High Court. Ofcom is the UK media censor, and their commissars ruled against me for my coverage of the Covid vaccines. My coverage of the vax was, in a nutshell, that it was either:
a) extremely dangerous; or
b) for those that it didn't cripple or kill, objectively useless.
I'll stand by that. Since Commissar Grade and Commissar Dawes began investigating me, the AstraZeneca - Boris Johnson's "great British success story" - has been withdrawn from the market, and the take-up rate of Pfizer and Moderna plummets with every "booster", the ninth or tenth or whatever quarterly jabba-jabba we're up to by now.
The vaccine victims we interviewed week in, week out on The Mark Steyn Show are very real to me, and they deserve to know the truth about what was done to them in order to "protect" them for something that was never any threat. And by "truth" I don't mean the modified limited hangout currently going on. Doctors Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, for example, have been trying to come up with a real number for those crippled or killed by Pfizer. And, in the course of their investigations, they noticed certain inconsistencies between the data released by the NHS Business Services Authority and by the MHRA. The latter is the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, and the former is the body that pays out compensation to those damaged by their medical treatment in the National Health Service. Doctors Jefferson and Heneghan found at least six vaccine-derived "adverse events" (including anaphylaxis, seizures and thrombocytopenia) for which the BSA is awarding compensation, yet which the MHRA does not mention as side-effects.
As I have noted before, the information being sought by Doctors Jefferson, Heneghan and others is not obscure or arcane. Government agencies around the west know it; they just don't want to share it with us. Dame Jenny Harries refuses to provide data on side-effects per dose because it is "commercially sensitive": she is a public servant; she works for the Crown or, according to taste, the British people; but she's mainly concerned to stay on the right side of Big Pharma. So Jefferson & Heneghan are forced to do what they call "fag packet" calculations:
Once we have the estimate of vaccines used and the incidence of adverse events according to the MHRA, we can calculate the total number expected to be affected in the population.
So, if Bell's Palsy occurs in 1/1000 people or exposures, that's 120,000 cases.
Whoa, hold up there. According to the US National Institutes of Health:
The annual incidence is 15 to 20 per 100,000, with 40,000 new cases yearly.
That's in America: 40,000 new cases per annum. Assuming the same prevalence in the UK, that would be 8,000 new cases per annum. So an extra 120,000 from three years of the jabba-jabba would be a six-fold increase. Just in Bell's palsy - and in a nation where a sixth of the population is on the NHS waiting list.
Most of the hollow men and women infesting the government benches in the House of Commons will not be there this time next year. They might at least go down honorably and join Andrew Bridgen in demanding the release of this very basic information.
~In the House of Commons in Ottawa, Quebec's pseudo-separatists made common cause with some pseudo-republicans and attempted to amend the constitution - the 1867 British North America Act - to remove the obligation of members to swear allegiance to the Sovereign. The amendment was defeated, at which point, to the bemusement of the Speaker, the winners broke into Canada's Royal Anthem:
I enjoy a chorus of "God Save the King" as much as the next chap, but I confess I see no reason why the Almighty should trouble Himself to save the King's non-binary Dominion.
~I thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly couple of months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And, as I said above, I look forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court on June 11th.
