Dear Editor:
Re: Pastor takes on transgender rights, the Record, Feb. 9. I commend Pastor Paul Dirks for initiating the Woman Means Something campaign. Dirks is one of very few Canadians with the courage to speak out publicly against Bill C-16 and his courage has come with a cost, from personal attacks on social media to being slandered by Global B.C. news as a hater.
Dirks speaks for many Canadians who have serious concerns over the far-reaching implications of Bill C-16. The supposed intention behind Bill C-16 is to protect the basic human rights of the transgender community in Canada. Considered in itself, that is a noble intention. All human beings should be treated with dignity and respect.
The concern of people like Dirks and the present writer is the manner in which Bill C-16 proposes to do that. This proposed legislation will enshrine in Canadian law an entirely new definition of gender as whatever one wants to make of it (one’s “sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum”) rather than the millennia-old definition of gender as the God-given biological reality of male and female.
Radical legislation like this merits open and honest dialogue in the public arena – not the shouting-down and personal attacks that increasingly typifies moral discourse in our country. Thanks to the New West Record for giving Dirks a fair opportunity to represent himself.
Gary Zekveld, New Westminster
