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Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd is undoubtedly a better human being than I am — and at 22, probably a more mature one — and may well accept the raft of apologies now coming her way, but I would tell them all to blow the mea culpas out their various bums.

Shepherd is the 22-year-old graduate student at the school who was recently subjected to a struggle-session-like interrogation by three administrators, declared to be “transphobic” and then sanctioned for having shown a class a short video snippet, from TVO’s The Agenda, which featured the controversial University of Toronto psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson talking about the faddish new un-pronouns such as “zie” and “zher.”

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Shepherd’s supervising professor, Nathan Rambukkana, even told Shepherd that by showing the video clip neutrally, without the now-requisite denunciation of Peterson, it was basically akin to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler …”

Photo by Wilfrid Laurier University

Rambukkana was joined by Herbert Pimlott, her program co-ordinator and a fellow, and this is clear from the recording, monumentally pleased with his own work and his own fine self, and Adria Joel, acting manager of the “Gendered Violence Prevention and Support” program, who had little to say but, I assume, was there to look injured on behalf of those who might have been or might ever be injured by gendered violence.

Rambukkana was the lead bully but, as someone who covers the criminal courts, where they are used to parsing out responsibility, the other two could have been found guilty of the same assault on Shepherd, just as parties to a murder can be convicted though they may not have pulled the trigger.

To her enormous credit, Shepherd didn’t cave.

She stood up for herself and, far more important, stood up for free speech; she dismissed the notion that students could be harmed by mere exposure to an idea, however controversial, and while she teared up once or twice, she didn’t back down.