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A graduate student, Lindsay Shepherd, at Wilfrid Laurier University, played a piddling three-minute clip in a class from an Agenda discussion on the hypnotically engaging subject of personal pronouns. As a consequence, she ended up on the sharp end of the “transphobic” stick, and had her teaching put under immediate supervision by the higher beadles of WLU.

Shepherd was summoned to the high office of the Adria Joel, acting manager of the “Gendered Violence Prevention and Support” program, in the company of program coordinator Herbert Pimlott, and her professor of communications, Nathan Rambukkana. They were perturbed.

It was the clip from The Agenda that did her in.

It was not The Agenda per se that summoned the tigers from the high grass

Shepherd’s class was Canadian Communication in Context. Is The Agenda Canadian Communication? Is the beaver on the Canadian nickel? So, she was on safe ground there. It wasn’t The Agenda per se that summoned the tigers from the high grass.

The difficulty seems to be that the clip from The Agenda was from a debate between University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson and Nicholas Matte, of U of T’s Sexual Diversities Studies program, formidable antagonists both. The topic (civilizations have tottered on matters less inflammatory): the personal pronouns.

Shepherd had shown the class a fragment of that debate. The crisis emerged from the consideration that the fragment chosen included both of the antagonists. If she had just shown the gentleman arguing for the inflation of pronoun usage, Matte, I hazard she would have been safe. Perhaps even up for a teaching award. Poor Shepherd’s flaw was that she showed a segment from the exchange, serenely moderated as always by Steve Paikin, which also featured the person who Matte was debating, the aforesaid Peterson.