What Fear Tries to Protect
“No one should lose their child so that someone else can feel more comfortable in their fear.”
What might be coming down the tracks as we look toward the dawning of a new day?
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Lately, as I’ve been immersed in promoting the House of Commons e-Petition I initiated just before Christmas, I’ve found myself returning again and again to the work of Ernest Becker. Some friends might say I’m stuck on him. Maybe I am. But Becker has this unsettling way of naming something we would rather not see: that so much of what passes for morality, certainty, and social order is really an elaborate attempt to manage our fear of death, our fear of fragility, our fear that the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how the world works might not be as solid as we need them to be.
Years ago, when I was studying at the Vancouver School of Theology, the late Sallie McFague, who served as theologian-in-residence, spoke about what it means to live “outside the circle” of what a culture considers normal, safe, or acceptable. She wasn’t talking only about gender or sexuality, but about anyone whose very existence exposes how small and guarded our circles of belonging can be. That image has stayed with me ever since.
We build meaning systems the way people in earthquake zones build houses, hoping they’ll hold. Some of those structures are generous and flexible. Some are rigid, brittle, and defended at all costs. And when a structure is built around a narrow, masculinized idea of control, hierarchy, and certainty, it tends to react very badly to anything or anyone that reveals how constructed and fragile it really is.
I’ve started calling one aspect of this reaction “Trans Envy.” Not because people actually want to be transgender, but because there is something both envious and threatening about the freedom of someone who lives outside the circle of conformity that has been presented as the only safe place to stand. When your entire sense of worth, belonging, and safety is anchored in staying inside that circle, anyone who lives visibly beyond it becomes a walking question mark.
And questions are dangerous when your world is built out of brittle answers.
Add to this our very human aversion to what feels strange, unsettling, or “out of place.” Disgust is not just a physical reflex. It’s a moral and social one. It’s one of the ways we try to keep the world tidy, categorized, and predictable. We tell ourselves we are reacting to something “unnatural,” when in fact we are often reacting to the anxiety that comes from having our categories challenged.
Fear and disgust work together like overzealous security guards. They are supposed to protect us. But they are notoriously bad at telling the difference between real danger and existential discomfort.
“We are often not defending morality. We are defending our anxiety.”
Not an Ideology. A Life.
Today, I found myself thinking again about Amber.
I was reminded of her because her mother’s words surfaced again in my memory, words she wrote after losing her 21-year-old transgender daughter. I had met Amber’s father years earlier. Her mother wrote:
There is no ideology in that. No theory. No culture war. There is just a parent mourning her child.
And the terrible thing is this: I spoke about Amber publicly eight years ago.
In February 2017, I stood at the Peace Arch border between Canada and the United States at a rally protesting the first U.S. travel ban. I told the crowd about Amber, who had died at 21 just one week after a new president was sworn in. She could no longer imagine a future after the newly elected president, Donald J. Trump, declared he would issue executive orders to strip away her access to trans healthcare, and she feared what would come next.
Different day. Same loss. The same wound reopened in memory.
“When people turn trans lives into ‘debate,’ this is what gets erased.”
This is what disappears when trans lives are reduced to abstractions, theories, or “issues.”
A Small, Ordinary Story
Sometimes I think it helps to say this through a very ordinary story. Here is one.
I’ve never been very good at fastening my bra behind my back, so like many women, I fasten it in front and then rotate it around. One day, lost in thought, I did step one, fastened it in front, skipped step two, the rotating part, and went straight to step three, putting my arms through the straps.
Something felt… odd. My body knew before my brain did. I looked down and realized the cups were in the back and the hooks were in the front. Oops.
It’s a silly story. But it’s also a reminder that my life is not an ideological position. It is not a talking point. It is a series of very human, very ordinary moments, some clumsy, some tender, some quietly joyful.
And yet, over and over again, trans lives are turned into symbols so that other people can feel more secure in their certainties, rather than have to face their own insecurities.
What the Science Says (and What It Shouldn’t Have to Say)
There is growing scientific evidence that gender dysphoria has biological components shaped before birth, involving complex interactions of genes, hormones, and brain development. The research is careful, nuanced, and honest about its limits. It does not claim that genetics is the whole story. But it strongly undermines the idea that being transgender is a whim, a trend, or a purely social invention.
Still, this needs to be said clearly:
Our civil rights should not depend on brain scans or gene clusters. No one should have to prove their humanity in a lab.
Why e-Petition 7027 Exists
This petition did not come out of nowhere. It comes out of a very specific and very dangerous moment in Canadian law and politics.
In both Alberta and Saskatchewan, provincial governments have passed laws that directly target transgender and gender-diverse people, especially youth. And in both cases, they have used Section 33 of the Charter, the Notwithstanding Clause, to shield these laws from meaningful court review.
In Alberta, the government passed a package of laws restricting gender-affirming care for youth, limiting inclusion in schools, and barring trans girls from sports, then pre-emptively insulated them from Charter challenges by invoking the Notwithstanding Clause.¹
In Saskatchewan, a law requiring parental consent for students under 16 to use their chosen name or pronouns at school was likewise shielded using the same constitutional override.²
This is not just about policy.
This is about whether Charter rights remain real protections or become optional, depending on who is in power.
The Notwithstanding Clause was meant to be an extraordinary, rare measure. It is increasingly being used as a routine tool to bypass constitutional scrutiny when governments don’t want courts to examine whether their laws violate fundamental rights.³
That is the context in which e-Petition 7027 was launched on December 18.
The petition calls on the federal government to consider using its constitutional authority to disallow or override provincial laws that violate fundamental rights and have been shielded from review using Section 33.⁴
“If governments can suspend rights for political convenience, then no one’s rights are truly secure.”
As of this writing, more than 28,000 Canadians have signed in only three weeks. That number matters, not because it solves everything, but because it says something essential:
Charter rights should protect people, not be suspended when they become inconvenient.
What This Is Truly About
When I spoke at the border in 2017, I said something that still feels true to me: I did not choose where I was born, my skin colour, my first language, my sexual orientation, or to be transgender. Of all those things, the only one I chose was to become Canadian.
And isn’t it tragic how the very things none of us choose are the things most often used to justify exclusion?
Becker would say we are all trying to manage our terror in the face of mortality. The question is not whether we will do that, but how.
We can do it by shrinking the world. Or we can do it by enlarging it. One path leads to more walls, more scapegoats, more funerals.`
The other leads, slowly and imperfectly, to a world where fewer parents have to write the words no parent should ever have to write.
“No one should lose their child so that someone else can feel more comfortable in their fear.”
That is why I will keep speaking. That is why I will keep writing. And yes, that is why I will keep initiating petitions, if that is what it takes.
Endnotes
Amnesty International Canada on Alberta’s use of the Notwithstanding Clause to shield anti-trans legislation:
https://amnesty.ca/press-releases/amnesty-international-canada-condemns-albertas-use-of-notwithstanding-clause-to-prop-up-anti-trans-policies/Saskatchewan “Parents’ Bill of Rights” and use of the Notwithstanding Clause:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents%27_Bill_of_Rights_(Saskatchewan)Policy Options analysis of expanding use of the Notwithstanding Clause:
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/House of Commons e-Petition 7027:
https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7027
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