Leave Sasha Carney Alone
Incorrigible Conservative Cannibals Harming the Fight Against Gender Affirmation Radicalism with their Dehumanisation of the PM’s Kid
Canadian Conservative Engagement Farming Crusaders achieved a new low when they announced that Sasha Carney wrote an essay about her 2013 adolescent experience with gender discordance five years ago in a low circulation university publication. Sasha, 24 year old daughter of the new PM Mark Carney1, one of 4 daughters that Carney and his wife Diana Fox have together, identifies as non binary and attended the then esteemed Tavistock Clinic when her dad was Governor of the Bank of England.
Candace Malcolm “broke” the story and Chris Elston and other anti gender affirmation activists immediately and with zeal jumped all over this juicy tidbit. Tin foil hats came out and the hard core cultists drooled at the opportunity presented them. Suddenly Sasha Carney became the symbol of everything they disliked about gender self ID and gender affirmating care because she dared to write an essay at the age of 19 about being 12 or 13 and dealing with gender discordance in a peer culture dominated by a social contagion of gender discordance. When Sasha wrote this stuff her dad was not holding public office and had no plans to do so, it’s a private citizen writing about herself.
When more seasoned mainstream journalists cautioned against exploiting the young Carney for political theatre, the Gender Critical Crusaders pushed back, insisting on their right to undress Sasha Carney publicly, as a way to hold Carney accountable for his apparent bias toward radical gender policy making. She’s an adult and a journalist and she wrote a public piece therefore we are entitled to target her personally and expose her childhood medical history, it’s our right — so the argument goes. On Xwitter I read musings about what public restroom the young Carney uses, about her body, criticism of her fashion choices. On IG I saw disparaging comments under her photo on the Yalebroads account, which has since shut off comments on that post.
It’s weird a group of activists who have historically railed against a movement that exploits vulnerable young people and uses them against their parents deigned to exploit Sasha Carney for her identity and use her against her father. But she’s an adult not a child. She’s 24, she wrote that essay at age 19, barely out of adolescence. So, nah. But she’s a public figure. She’s a private citizen who’s the daughter of a bloke who just stepped into public office. Her older sister Cleo is the public figure. So, again, nah. Her identity represents a parental failure on Carney’s behalf. We watched a Canadian dad get arrested for trying to stop his daughter’s transition. Parents have no power to stop the transition process, they’re accused of abuse and face threats apprehension if they resist the process. So, again, nah. Tavistock Clinic was a radical scandalous place. Actually in 2013 Tavistock had a first class reputation as a well respected institution. The scandal didn’t emerge until around 2017 or so. Parents sent their children to Tavistock in good faith. So, again, nah. Sasha’s identity represents Carney’s inability to make unbiased decisions about policy decisions regarding gender ideology. He owes it to us to talk about his personal thoughts about Sasha’s non binary identity. Um, nah. That deserves no further response other than fcuk nah. Generally this line of thinking fails and it backfires badly. It’s an asshole move. Nothing good comes from this stuff.
What if we moved past the childhood medical history memoir and decided to read the ideas Carney writes, with a view to analysis? In her 2022 essay, Formed This Way, Sasha writes,
There is no true Archimedean standpoint where we can live outside gender as we speak about it: cis or trans, we are, like Heidegger's subject, always already thrown-into-the-world as gendered beings. To rephrase Christakis, I think there is a large element of social contagion with respect to gender-not specific to trans people, but with respect to the territory of gender.
Sasha describes the political discourse on gender politics thusly: left wing champions gayness and transness as a born in the wrong body phenomenon whereas the right wing champions the social contagion phenomenon of transness and gayness. She parrots the very tired and long disproven by valid and reliable science suicide prophylaxis rationale for gender affirming care. Apparently Sasha doesn’t buy the argument that you [can] be free to be in your own body without alteration. Apparently her identity is not something formed through living in the world, but rather something in which [she] had no choice.
Indeed the young Carney makes a valid argument — we have no G-d’s eye vantage point from which we can view ourselves and humans generally outside of the lens of gender. Indeed the Dasein take on subjectivity advanced by Heidegger makes sense, Descartes was wrong, we cannot conceive of ourselves and our world in a cognitively detached manner. Our physical bodies do not exist as mere contingencies that serve our cognating. Dasein means being there in German. It means a being inseparable from physicality, throwness into existence, as opposed to cogito ergo sum, which refers to being because we think.
Dasein is the whole human being, and makes no distinction between body and mind. Heidegger rejected any purely psychological realm. — Michael Inwood
It seems to me quite Cartesian to impose a cognitive conception of being onto the physical body. It flies in the face of a Dasein way of seeing oneself, in which being involves throwness into physicality, a fusion of abstraction and emoting about one’s form. Thoughts and feelings emanate from the physical. There’s no separation between cognition, which is perceptual sense, and emotion, which is felt sense, it’s simply the way we are born.
To suggest a state of being in which bodily alignment fails describes a life process governed by Cartesian dualism, something that’s science has long disproved. It’s as simple as that. The notion that we can alter the physical to serve the mental and emotional simply reeks of delusion. Bodily misalignment describes a discordance within the body. How can a discordance possibly be natural and authentic and life saving?
Centre-left human rights discourses embraced the tendency to theorise gayness and transness alike as unchanging, essential, and instilled in the body since birth, writes Sasha. First of all, why does the left wing discourse link wanting to be the opposite sex with sexual attraction for people in the same reproductive class? Does the left wing mean to equate being gay with being in the wrong body? This seems homophobic to me. Ultimately gender affirmation leads to the situation where a straight male who identifies as a woman can call himself a lesbian, which then leads to the expectation that gay female people must accept males as potential suitors — an anathema to gayness. It forces inauthenticity onto some people for the purpose of validating the authenticity of some other people. It’s untenable.
Heidegger developed his conception of Dasein in opposition to Descartes’ conception of duality, he didn’t believe in the body as a contingency of the mind. Yet if we want to prove transness as innate we would need to appeal to the Cartesian conception of the body as enslaved by the mind.
So, I disagree with the young Carney and I didn’t need to engage in personal attacks and trot out any dehumanising tropes and I didn’t need wage any psychological warfare against her father, the PM, in order to challenge these ideas about transness.
Because it’s possible to disagree with someone without hurting their feelings.
So, Gender Critical Crusaders please find your ethics and leave Sasha Carney alone.
Instead of being sealed off within a specially designed compartment within a human being the functions that have been misdescribed as “mental” now become the defining characteristics of human existence … the individual was not merely a mind that was capable only of representing the world to itself and whose linkage with a body was merely a contingent one. — Dasein, entry in Britannica
Carney became PM when the Liberal Party of Canada chose him as party leader after Trudeau resigned and stepped down. He doesn’t have a seat in the House of Commons and has no political experience. It’s believed he was the handpicked successor to Trudeau. It seems that PRC, known to have a heavy presence in Canadian politics, approves of Carney’s selection as LPC leader and PM.