I meant to post this yesterday, but literally didn't know what day it was.

December 6th, 1989, was a profoundly sad day for our community, here in Québec, when an anti-feminist man entered the engineering school of Polytechnique in Montreal with a firearm with the intention of killing as many "feminists" as he could.

The shooter entered a classroom at the end of a corridor, ordered all the men out and then shot the girls. He then went out and kept shooting women on sight before killing himself. That man murdered fourteen women, in cold blood, and why ? Basically because he was angry that men were "denied" places in engineering schools since those places were being taken by more competent girls, who in his opinion should have gone back to the kitchen to be housewives like his beloved mother was.

I was born in that same city a year later, and I can testify to the profound trauma that was left on our community by that femicide, and attest to the fact that it has made many women feminists.

I am sharing this because of how close it still is to my heart, but also because the thirtieth anniversary last year was a peaking moment for me.

Indeed, the Women's Federation of Quebec had a man as president (he claims to be a lesbian and has breast implants) for a couple of years. Last year, after making disgusting comments about how he wanted feminism (and the federation) to be less oriented towards the needs of women and more towards the needs of everyone who "identifies as a woman", he attempted to plan a series of events to sensibilize the public to the realities of TIMs during the commemoration week of the femicide... And even though I myself was still somewhat of a TRA at that time, I got called transphobic and a terf for saying that the events of Poly had nothing to do with TIMs.

The event was also co-opted by Morgane Oger, who attempted to appropriate our trauma by claiming that he, "as a woman" in an engineering school at the time, had been terrified that he might be next... Even though he didn't begin to appropriate womanhood until over twenty years later unless I'm mistaken and noone, least of all an angry MRA, would ever have mistaken him for a woman in 1989 (and probably wouldn't now either).

Those fourteen women were not murdered because they identified as women. The one survivor from the classroom even stated to the shooter that she wasn't a feminist. This shooter did not care about their gender identity or expression. This shooter wanted them dead because they were females who refused to be subordinates. Period.

And we must remember that, and that men have no business appropriating our literal murders.

(And right as I was finishing this post a literal TIF walked in and cheerfully said hi. Damn timing lol...)