We can’t ignore the case of Jessica Yaniv
Is it really an assault on human rights if a woman says, ‘I don’t want to wax your genital area’?
Brendan O'Neill
July 22, 2019
In Canada right now, a group of female workers, at least one of whom is a migrant, are coming under attack. One has already lost her job. The others fear losing their jobs too. And yet the leftish types who’d normally yell and tweet their backing for such marginalized workers haven’t raised a peep of concern. The Guardian is schtum. The Twitterati hasn’t stirred. The BBC looks the other way.
Why? Because the person confronting these women and putting their livelihoods into jeopardy is transgender. And as we know, criticizing trans people is tantamount to blasphemy in the woke era.
This is the case of Jessica Yaniv, born Jonathan Yaniv, who has filed 16 complaints with the human rights tribunal in British Columbia against female beauticians who refused to provide her/ him with an intimate wax. These are waxers who only tend to women. Whose expertise is in the waxing of women’s intimate areas. And whose preference is to wax women, not men. So when a person who has a penis and testicles, as Yaniv does, comes along and says ‘wax me’, they understandably said no.
Well, it would have been understandable in any other time in human history. But in our increasingly weird era of genderfluidity and trans agitation, where you can become a woman simply by declaring yourself a woman, these female workers’ refusal to wax Yaniv isn’t understandable at all, apparently. It’s transphobic. It’s hateful. It’s an assault on human rights, no less. That, at least, is what Yaniv is arguing.
Let’s put this into perspective: women are having action taken against them because they refused to touch a penis and testicles. So warped has the language of rights become, in particular transgender rights, that a born male can take action against women because they refused to wax him.
It is perverse. In a normal world, it would be the fundamental right of all women not to have to go anywhere near a penis, unless of course they wanted to. But in our woke world of casual sex-switching and identitarian entitlement, we have the deranged situation where a born male can claim to be the humiliated victim because a group of women wouldn’t let him come into their home, take off his clothes, and air his genitals for a waxing.
Yes, some of the women who have been targeted by Yaniv work from home. One, Marcia De Silva, has had to close down her home-based personal business as a result of the stress of the Yaniv case. A legal representative of the women said some have been made ‘depressed, anxious [and] sleepless’ by the human-rights action.These are women who were simply trying to make a living from providing services to other women, and yet now they find themselves whispered about as phobic and hateful.
This strange case raises so many questions. Is there a human right to have your balls waxed? Is it really an assault on human rights if a woman says, ‘I don’t want to wax your genital area’? Surely the discrimination is against the women themselves, who are being dragged into a public human-rights procedure simply for asserting their basic right not to have strange men — biological men! — in their homes
But perhaps the most pressing question raised by this case — a question so few woke warriors and identitarian leftists want to address — is this: just because someone says they are a woman, does that make them a woman?
This lies at the heart of this case. Even some pro-trans people will no doubt argue that Yaniv’s case is frivolous and that most transgender people don’t go around demanding waxes from people who don’t want to wax them.
That is true. But while Yaniv’s human-rights action might be eccentric, it also entirely follows the logic, the central logic, of the transgender ideology. Which is that you can be any sex you want. You can self-ID however you like. Feel like a woman? Then you’re a woman. And anyone who says you aren’t is a bigoted, disgusting spouter of hate.
This is at the core of the trans ideology. And it explains why so few media outlets are commenting on the British Columbia case — because they instinctively know it represents the warped but logical endpoint of that ideology.
Jessica Yaniv is a woman, right? And anyone who says Jessica Yaniv is not a woman is bigot, yes? It therefore follows that female beauticians must wax Jessica Yaniv in the same way they would wax other women, even though Yaniv has a penis rather than a vagina.
We can’t ignore this case. It raises fundamental issues about women’s rights, about how transgenderism threatens women’s rights, about the reality of sex, and about reason itself.
It boils down to this: is Jessica Yaniv a woman? Really? I say no, he isn’t. He’s a man. And therefore he has no right to access services or spaces that are reserved for women.
This article was originally published on The Spectator‘s UK website.
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