You Don't Go After Their Kids

A smear against Mark Carney's kid, and the politics of attacking trans people.

The 45th Canadian election hasn’t even begun, and we’ve already hit a low point.

Earlier this week, a fringe far-right media outlet ran a hit job on Sasha Carney, child of Prime Minister Mark Carney. This “EXCLUSIVE” report claims that the 24-year-old Carney is not trans but simply “confused,” that they are being hidden from the public eye, and that the prime minister of Canada is a bad father for allowing them to access gender-affirming care.

This hack job is a new nadir for the right-wing alternative press. It is a violation of the unspoken rule that politicians’ kids are off-limits. And, on top of that, the story is factually wrong — an example of the sloppy faux-journalism employed by these anti-trans bigots in the name of a crusade.

“Mark Carney sent daughter to discredited U.K. Tavistock Transgender Clinic,” reads the headline published earlier this week by Juno News.¹

If you’ve never heard of it, Juno News is a rebranding of right-wing think-tank-slash- media-outlet True North, founded by Candice Malcolm, a right-wing columnist and part-time conspiracy theorist.

While Malcolm introduced the story on her YouTube show, the piece was written by two Juno contributors, Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and Alex Zoltan.

It all turns on a 2020 essay penned by Sasha Carney in Broad Recognition, a Yale University student magazine.

“In the essay,” Dzsurdzsa and Zoltan write, “Sasha talks about her experiences of feeling confused about her gender as a teenager and receiving treatment at the discredited Tavistock gender clinic in London, England.”

Along with Malcolm, the three seem unsure of why, exactly, they’re reporting this story. They claim Sasha Carney is a “public figure,” insist there is “mystique and intrigue” surrounding their absence from Canadian politics to date, and suggest that Carney is being hidden because “Canadians are not on board for this kind of thing.”

More than 15 minutes into their conversation, Malcolm eventually gets to the rub of what they’re alleging: That Mark Carney failed as a father by sending his kid to the Tavistock Clinic.

“Her father is the prime minister of this country and I think that it's completely fair game to ask him what his positions are given what happened with his own daughter.” A minute later, Malcolm drops even that pretence. “She was born a woman — and I think she is still a woman, just a confused one, sadly,” she says. “What a sad story. I can't help but feel bad for this young woman. And I feel a little bit of anger and frustration at her parents for allowing this to happen to her.”

Not only is it grotesque that these three are using their platform to attack a university student, but the entire story is wrong. They couldn’t even do a hit piece properly.

But since we’re here, why don’t we actually read what Sasha Carney has to say? We might even learn something.

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Sasha Carney: “They’re just kids!” one side shrieks, shuddering at the thought of their children being “exploited” by some worldwide political trans agenda. “We all have phases. They’re too young to possibly know!” “On the contrary!” protests the other side. “It is precisely because they’re so young that they must know! This is proof that trans adults are born this way, and know they’re trans from the start!”

You’ll notice that both of these voices are speaking in the third person. There is no time, here, to consult trans children themselves, who only become a tool, a ruler by which to measure “authentic” transness.

I confess I’m not thrilled at the prospect of trawling through someone’s contributions to a university zine — gosh knows I don’t deserve to have my contributions to the campus paper held against me — but Carney’s essay is an incredibly interesting piece.

In it, Carney grapples with the impossible position trans youth find themselves in these days, conscripted into a culture war they never asked to fight.

They are attacked, on one side, by those who see gender-affirming care as something between exploitation and medical experimentation. In this anti-trans crusade — now the official position of the U.S. government — trans youth have no autonomy, no awareness of self, no capacity to resist bad actors; whilst parents who agree with this care can only be rubes or, worse, ideological zealots.

And these trans people are defended, on the other side, by progressives who find purpose in politics by fighting against conservatives and reactionary backlash. These allies, well-intentioned as they are, insist that trans identity is some immutable or static characteristic. They are, the refrain grows, born this way. And, it is implied, they will not change.

But as Carney themself writes, this is an impossibly unfair position to put anyone in — nevermind youth who are struggling to figure out their identity. They are being conscripted into a political war being fought around their conception of self. If that sense of self changes or evolves, they can find themselves suddenly fitting awkwardly in this discourse.

One side insists they’re confused, the other insists they must be sure.

This intense public fixation — driven by politicians and media but often actualized on the ground by parents, friends, strangers — is exactly the thesis of Carney’s essay.

“My teenage years existed in close proximity to this TERF-driven scrutiny, which was fixated on identifying how ‘authentically trans’ people like me really were,” Carney writes. They recount moving to London, when their father took on a job as Governor of the Bank of England.

“A block from my new house was the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust, an imposing grey building which contained the country’s only child and adolescent ‘gender identity clinic.’”

This is the clinic that the Juno crowd says was “discredited” and shut down. The clinic, Dzsurdzsa says, was engulfed in scandal because “children as young as six years old, and under,” were being rushed “into lifechanging, life-altering gender transition treatment.”

This is, to Juno’s credit, partly true. Without unpacking the entirety of the debate around gender-affirming care in the United Kingdom, it is true that Tavistock’s gender-affirming care clinic — Gender and Identity Development Service (GIDS) — was poorly run, that staff concerns were ignored, and that there were inadequate procedures in place to handle the enormous volume of cases the clinic was taking in. GIDS was shut down last year. (Tavistock, which includes a variety of other areas of practice, remains open.)

But Dzsurdzsa overstates just how blameworthy GIDS truly is. Part of the reason the clinic was investigated and shuttered is because of a lawsuit filed by one of its former patients who spent years transitioning, who argued that the clinic did too little to inform her of the long-term risks of gender-affirming care. The court agreed.

Yet the court also heard from a number of patients who had radically different experiences. They recounted how GIDS suffered from a painfully long waiting list, how the therapeutic consultations could stretch on for years before they were prescribed puberty/hormone blockers. “The treatment of hormone blockers may very well have saved my life,” one former patient wrote to the court.

The GIDS case prompted an extensive study of gender-affirming care in the United Kingdom. While the debate about how best to provide that care is still raging, it’s worth noting that the study included an audit of GIDS’ work. It shows there had been a tiny number² of patients between the ages of 8 and 12 who were prescribed puberty blockers. The audit also shows that a number of those patients stopped taking that medication, without any apparent problems.

While clinics generally prefer not to treat particularly young children, there are always edge cases. And it’s worth underlining that access to puberty blockers corresponds to a decrease in the likelihood of suicidal ideation.

I go through all of this to say: It is so easy to lie about this stuff. It is hard to deal with it seriously. But Candice Malcolm and her ilk do not actually care about getting it right, they care about whipping up fear and anger.

Worse yet, they obsessively censor and ignore what trans people themselves say. Their complaint is not that it’s too easy to receive these treatments — quite the opposite.

As Carney writes:

Carney: I watched as my friend, after a year of weekly appointments trying desperately to get an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria, was denied the diagnosis, and with it any hope of top surgery because they sometimes wore skirts. I watched organisations with names like “Transgender Trend” refer to trans Tavistock patients as “experimental subjects” who didn’t know what was best for them. I watched as my school’s former principal told a national news outlet that trans students like me and many of my close friends were cis women who were only coming out to “cause turbulence” and “adhere to anything a bit radical.” I watched all this happen, and I quietly stopped wearing underwire bras, and wore baggier clothes, and I felt a fierce surge of jealousy every time I walked into the Tavistock for therapy and saw patients turn left, towards the medical spaces [GIDS] I didn’t feel “trans enough” to enter.

Far from an incessant desire to push the “medicalization” of children, as Dzsurdzsa puts it, trans youth frequently find barriers to accessing gender-affirming care. And they face authorities and administrators who have internalized the media narrative that there is a dangerous social contagion at play. That someone is turning the kids trans.

At the same time, Carney argues, some trans activists and influencers have swung too far in the opposite direction: Insisting that only medical procedures can confirm a real trans person. They have committed too aggressively to the idea that trans identity is a diagnosis, instead of an element of one’s identity.

Certainly, gender-affirming care is certainly one way of helping trans people become true to themselves — but it’s not the only way.

Carney: So where does that leave me? Am I a cis woman pretending? A trans man running from my own identity? A nonbinary person finally expressing my ‘true’ authentic self? The truth is, honestly, that most trans children and young adults have experiences not dissimilar to my own. Most lie somewhere in between what trans and cis childhood is “supposed” to look like.

It is, frankly, none of our business where on that spectrum Carney ended up. It is up to the media, politicians, and law-makers to make sure the right procedures, funding, guidelines, and safeguards are in place around medical care — and then to get out of the business of second-guessing the evolving and complicated identities of youth.

I go through Carney’s essay for another reason: While they say they went to Tavistock for therapy, they explicitly say they did not receive medical treatment there.

Nowhere in it does Carney ever say they went to GIDS. While they say they went to Tavistock, they say it was only for therapy. In fact, they explicitly say they didn’t receive gender-affirming care.

Tavistock, the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, is where Carney went. It is not “discredited” nor has it been closed. The Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service, GIDS, has been closed, but Carney writes that they never went to it.

But even if Carney had gone to GIDS, they would have almost certainly received excellent care, it still would have been none of Candice Malcolm’s business, and Juno News would still be unpleasant vultures for obsessing over it.

So not only is this story a ghoulish attempt to attack the child of a politician for their identity, all based on lies and innuendo, but it is wrong. All built on lazy reading and a lack of research.

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There is a generally well-respected rule in politics, which goes like this:

Cover and criticize the politicians, but leave their kids alone.

The rule has been broken before, of course. One of its most obscene violators, Rush Limbaugh, did it for sport. “Did you know there’s a White House dog?” Limbaugh asked the audience on his short-lived and much-hated daytime talk show. On the screen flashed a picture of Chelsea Clinton, the president’s 13-year-old daughter. Viewers were so furious that Limbaugh uncharacteristically tried to climb down, insisting it was all a mistake — some rogue technician did it.

As with all good political norms, violations carried consequences. When a Republican congressional aide wrote on Facebook that the Obama daughters ought to “show a little class” because they were standing at attention during the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon, she resigned in shame.

In Canada, where families of leaders tended to eschew the limelight, the norm was even more rigid. One of the strangest exceptions came in 2006, shortly after Prime Minister Stephen Harper formed government. Harper was a bit of a mystery for a lot of journalists in Canada, and the press covered him in those days like he had recently arrived from a distant planet.

On a snow day, a photographer followed Harper as he walked his two young children to school. As Ben, his son, turned to leave, the prime minister extended his hand for a handshake.

It was an awkward moment, caused by the young Harper’s nervousness around the cameras. But the photo prompted howls from Harper’s many critics: This man does not really love his son.

I’m not sure the press even understood at the time that they had violated this sacrosanct rule. But Harper sure did. "The notion that he might be a distant or uncaring father hurt him," a former advisor told

Paul Wells

for his book The Longer I’m Prime Minister. "It's the only thing I ever saw that did."

We lay off the kids because they didn’t ask for this. Even moreso that the spouses of leaders, the offspring have virtually no power to avoid the circus which surrounds politics. Some opt to jump into politics — like Ivanka and Barron Trump have — but most don’t. Even at a time when most norms and standards of politics have been cast aside, and when polarization has made our politics more toxic and unpleasant than ever, this one rule has held mostly firm.

But places like Juno News revel in breaking these rules. They, similarly, violate just about every standard of fairness, objectivity, and journalism ethics.

Consider the two figures who actually penned this story.

Dzsurdzsa has toiled for years in the Canadian alt media scene. Early in his career he had been contributor to Free Bird Media, a now-defunct media platform which happily conducted friendly interviews with people like Paul Fromm — one of Canada’s most prolific neo-Nazis. Once that fact surfaced, he was fired from his job as a copy-editor at The Post Millennial, another right-wing alt-media site. Now he’s landed on his feet at Juno.

Zoltan appears to have gotten his start during the Freedom Convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa. His particular fixation has been in trying to exonerate the ‘Coutts Four’ — the men accused of hoarding weapons and developing a plan to murder RCMP officers during a cross-border blockade in 2022. (The men were ultimately convicted on an array of weapons and mischief charges, while one was convicted of building a pipe bomb.)

These two men are explicitly partisan and are open about the fact that they are using the trappings of journalism as a means to take on liberals, progressives, the left, trans people, the media — whoever happens to be in their sights.

The first sentence of Juno News’ mission statement reads: “The legacy media is lying to you.” In reality, though, Juno News is lying to you. Not just about the topics it covers, but about its very existence. The outlet is not news. (Nor is it pertaining to the smash 2007 romcom featuring Elliot Page and Michael Cera.)

Juno is an activist outlet made up of ideologues who settle on a story first, then make the facts fit.

The legacy media which they hate so much has ignored them thus far, including on this story. And that’s probably wise: Reporters do not want to add fuel to the fire, and risk drawing attention to this undeserved smear job.

Even the Conservative Party, which has fomented opposition to transgender youth based on lies and innuendo, has stayed away from this. While leader Pierre Poilievre and his team have welcomed questions from Juno News at their press conferences while ostracizing and marginalizing actual journalists, I think their refusal to touch this story is a sign that they still have standards.

But this story — which is cruel on its face, a violation of the rules we have set to make our politics a less miserable affair, and because it is categorically wrong — should hang like an albatross around Juno News’ neck.

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That’s it for this Chaos Campaign dispatch.

A big shout-out to

Paul McLeod

, who put the gears to the Juno News crew on Twitter and who provided some feedback on this piece.

As you’re no doubt aware, Canada is likely to see an election call as early as this weekend. So now is the perfect time to upgrade to a paid Bug-eyed and Shameless subscription, which will give you access to the regular campaign dispatches.

Last week, I published a deep-dive into Mark Carney’s somewhat-vague policies, and joined Paul Wells for a chat about the prime minister’s first (and, perhaps, last) cabinet.

If you’re in Toronto this evening, come to the Hot Docs cinema to hear me (and several people smarter than me) chat about about the upcoming election.

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Until next time!

1. Sasha Carney is non-binary and goes by they/them pronouns. But because Juno News obsessively misgenders and dead-names them, it would be impossible to quote them accurately and completely while also correcting their language. It’s not ideal, so I apologize in advance.

2. The audit insists on expressing these numbers via bar graph, so I can’t give a firm answer on numbers. But we’re talking about fewer than 10.