Grievance politics is radicalizing men on a global scale.
And those men aren’t hiding behind memes or pseudonyms anymore — they’re out, emboldened, killing for their cause in broad daylight. Consequently, the safety of women and trans and queer communities are under threat now as never before.
What happened last week at the University of Waterloo was despicable but predictable. Queer communities saw this coming. Women, feminists, and most racialized communities saw this coming.
“Senseless”? Hardly. It was deliberate, and it was calculated.
The hate has always been here, below the surface, gathering steam. But today, it’s boiled over, and suddenly it’s become more socially acceptable to let those white-nationalist, misogynistic, even murderous flags fly. And we have domestic politicians, such as the premiers of New Brunswick and Quebec, passing laws that discriminate against broad swaths of their own populations.
We saw this in the “F*CK TRUDEAU” convoy rage wave that one Pierre Poilievre surfed straight into Stornoway last year. We see this in the lionization of men like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and Andrew Tate — men who’ve made their fortunes on the simple salient messages they manufacture that give so many lost boys and men a sense of community. And permission to hate.
We see this also, perhaps most frighteningly, in toxic-masculinity-laden rabbit holes online, where young men can find easy answers and welcoming brotherhood communities with those who have similar grievances.
What’s clear is that men — white men, in particular — feel threatened today as never before. Many are feeling emasculated and angry. And what they need is someone to blame.
Aimée Morrison, a PhD student who teaches some similar feminist courses and to whom the instructor involved has been delegating media requests since the incident, tells me that, in times of plenty, acts like what we saw last week don’t happen.
“Through most of the 20th century, men were always the default character. The protagonists,” Morrison tells me. Now that is changing — and they’re mad. Really mad. It’s this “politics of grievance,” Morrison says, the building of community by hating the same people, that’s given so many lost boys purpose, ultimately radicalizing them.
“This is not a matter of this being a ‘random’ act,” she says. “People are motivated by hate in structural ways.”
Men’s violence against women can be subtle, hidden. It can also be glaringly obvious and lead to femicide — which remains the leading cause of unnatural death of women globally. It’s what’s killing women and girls every 48 hours here in Canada, according to new research from the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability.
Last week, we saw a man consciously choose to terrorize his own former university. He’d reportedly just graduated from UW’s physics program mere weeks before the attack and worked at a Tim Hortons nearby. He chose to enter the building of another faculty and to search that building until he found a specific kind of classroom. (He has since been charged with four counts of assault with a weapon, three counts of aggravated assault, two counts of possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, and one count of mischief. The charges have not been proven in court.)
Traumatized witnesses have recounted the look in the man’s eyes when he found a feminist teaching a feminist course. It’s been said that the moment the words “gender studies” were spoken aloud, his expression and demeanour changed. He looked happy. He’d found what he’d been looking for. He’d found the right people to attack and the right way to send his message.
Alicia Wang is among the student journalists who initially broke this story for the University of Waterloo’s campus newspaper and (in my humble opinion) wound up delivering some of the best coverage of the incident.
She says some students have been calling for faculties to break down communication silos and for a promise from the school to do a better job of keeping its students safe: “It’s easier to become radicalized if you’re isolated.” Wang tells me that one student she interviewed shortly after the attack demanded better mental-health supports on campus.
But mental illness does not drive many people toward violence. Hate does. Toxic masculinity does.
The hostility toward the queer community has rarely been so aggressive. Queer and trans folks are accustomed to feeling threatened — we saw what happened to Harvey Milk decades ago — but today’s hate has metastasized. It’s beyond control and comprehension, frankly, and well beyond what any domestic government seems capable of managing.
The palpable hate and unwillingness to accept the existence of anyone who doesn’t fit the majority demographic is growing deadlier by the click.
Fae Johnstone is very familiar with this hate. She’s become something of a lightning rod for some of the most relentlessly transphobic harassment campaigns from the far-right. Johnstone is the director of Wisdom2Action and one of the faces of Hershey’s recent trans-inclusive marketing campaign, which resulted in months of bigoted backlash.
“We have decades of data proving that we have a crisis in the country. We’re fighting for our humanity — for the very right to exist,” she says. “This attack absolutely did not come out of nowhere. Queer and trans communities have been sounding the alarm about the violence we face for years.”
Debbie Owusu-Akyeeah is the executive director the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity (full disclosure: we went to school together). She joined Fae Johnstone and others this week at a press conference to call on governments to “do more” to combat homophobia and transphobia.
“What we saw last week, this is just one example of a very violent systemic pushback on progressivism,” Owusu-Akyeeah tells me. “It’s a reminder that education is integral toward building early interventions and toward preventing violent acts like this one.”
More than 3,000 gender-studies scholars, faculties, and practitioners have expressed their solidarity since the Waterloo attack, signing an open statement written by Canada’s national association for this academic field and area of scholarship. I signed it, too. The open statement reads:
“In the wake of this violence, we call on all Canadian universities and colleges, including administration and faculty unions, to collaborate with faculty of gender studies, and those who teach sex, gender, and sexuality courses in other disciplines, to create meaningful and actionable supports to secure the safety and wellbeing of those who are, and those who are perceived to be, 2SLGBTQIA+ on campus, especially Black, Indigenous, racially minoritized, disabled, and neurodivergent folks who face intersectional forms of violence.”
Just two weeks before the stabbing, the National Post produced a video documenting acts of vandalism on rainbow crosswalks, highlighting a recent incident in Waterloo. The video, published during Pride month, argued that “maybe Pride crosswalks are a bad idea” and quickly went viral, with over 3 million views on YouTube alone.
Too many are fanning the flames of hate. MAGA, obviously. Convoy organizers, yes. Each time I hear the leader of the so-called People’s Party use the word “woke” as if it were a weapon, a great big invitation to the entitled white-guy masses, I feel nauseated. Worse still are these kids ready to wage war over their hatred — travelling across the country and state lines to march through city streets and terrorize queer folks or literally gun down civil-rights advocates then go on national television to brag about it.
But it’s so much bigger than that — bigger than any pompous politician shamelessly chasing algorithms by rage farming or sending pile after pile of dishonest fundraising emails to their base.
Hate is everywhere. We can deny it, ignore it, pretend it doesn’t exist. But we do this at our own peril. As last week’s triple stabbing shows, hate is dangerous. Sometimes deadly.
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