Life used to be simpler. especially for 5, 10, 15, and 20-year-olds before 2010 thereabouts. When confronted with a questionnaire or survey, a person was given two choices for gender: Male or Female. Now a local transit survey offers the following choices in addition to male and female: Transgender FTM, Transgender MTF, Two-Spirit, and Prefer Not to Say (which is an obvious safe choice for anyone in these highly-politicized/agenda-ed times daze).
BTW/I’m not sure what a Two-Spirit person is and how come the majority of the world has never likely heard of such before this survey.
And in any case, what do FTM, MTF, and Two-Spirit have to do with riding public transit? Or for that matter gender, period. You either ride the transit to get to places or not, irrespective of your gender, race, religion, and whatever potentially-distracting, politically-divisive categories one might care to throw out to others. It seems to me that the transit authority is unnecessarily making use of transit a political issue on gender lines.
Our country has gone way, way overboard on political correctness–the result being that people live in fear, absurd touchiness, and societal-induced paranoia. One can’t say or do a thing without stepping on somebody else’s toes and getting hauled into a human rights commission hearing in which the complainer automatically gets legal support (!).
Likewise, the mass politicization via myriad agendas with one’s pet agenda automatically being superior to everyone else’s agendas or rights, brooking no denials and serving lawsuits to anyone else who does not acquiesce or salute one person’s or group’s narrow-minded flag.
Our society has lost all sense of perspective, reciprocal fairness, and sanity when it comes to this stuff. A major mass deconstruction of sanity at that.
The prevailing public discourse of the day has been mainly reduced to bitching, complaining, or flaming, and with that has occurred a subsequent loss of civility, abandonment of any kind of common sense, and zero sense of contextual perspective.
Pity the kids who are raised in such an unnecessarily stressful, anxious, confusing, toxic atmosphere and time. I am not sure what of they will learn from such divisive, confusing core values in an age of advanced soulless technology and human slavery to the machine like never before. Where will they get the old, unambiguous, warm messages about ‘brotherhood’ and love that once gave the Western world so much hope, inspiration, and obvious idealism? And whatever happened to “the human race”, oneness, unity, world peace, and the Global village?
In their places, we only have the wrong-headed, crazy substitute of mass politicization of everything on everyone, and the self-righteous tyranny of political correctness used for agenda purposes imposed arbitrarily and relentlessly on the Canadian people. A deeply deconstructive ‘holier-than-thou’ war within. Yes, in Canada, indeed–as the cartoon character Pogo once so famously said–“We have met the enemy and he is us”.