A Quick Note on the University of Waterloo Hate Crime
Taking the knife attack on a philosophy of gender class at the University of Waterloo on June 28th personally
As many of you already know, there was a hate-motivated knife attack on a professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo on June 28th. James Chow, a graduate student who I know, was in the classroom at the time, and has told his story to Global News. The 11 minute video is worth watching in full.
A Quick Note Series
I’m going to quote one small section of the video, though, as it describes the attack from the perspective of someone in the room, something I think is important for those of us who like to theorize our way through difficult situations. From the transcript, without punctuation or grammatical corrections, as spoken by James to the reporter:
We have been going through one of the course readings and we just finished that and the professor wanted to talk to us about the course project for the term so it was towards the end of the class and a man came in with a backpack he said to the teacher like oh is this such and such psychology class and the professor replied oh no this is you're probably in the wrong class then he said oh what class is this the professor replied like this is a gender class or philosophy of gender class the man then replied and said oh can I stay? the professor then said to him um we need to continue our class could you please leave and while the man was listening to her reply he put down his backpack in front of him at his feet and he pulled out a knife it and it still had like one of those like sheaths or covers on it like a plastic one and the thing that disgusts me the most is that this vile mischievous smile that he had on his face and immediately the professor's face like just turned to like pure fear and also the other classmates were like starting to scream he raised the knife and started chasing the professor she ran down the middle of the classroom so her classroom is like a rectangle but there's only one entrance at the front where the man had entered and she ran to the back of the class at this point it was just pandemonium everyone was screaming and I what I remember was just being near the front row sitting in fear thinking what's going on she my professor was running in the back being chased by this guy and the whole time I don't think he said anything he was just chasing her and I thought In the Heat of the Moment I need to like at least attack him or injure him so I grabbed a chair right was as he cornered the professor in the back of the room and threw a chair at him the and when I threw the chair I remember seeing the professor was like on the ground covering her face and screaming and I threw the chair and then the next thing I know I was running outside with a bunch of the other students and I was screaming to them like get out of the building now because you know like don't be in the building just leave.
Turning now to my reaction, I have to say that this event rattled me more than any other tragic attack that has happened over the past few years. Like I told my therapist, the random TTC attacks over the past few months have barely registered in my brain - I still take the TTC when I am in Toronto and do not feel scared for my safety. However this attack was a bit too close to home. I was on campus that day, sitting in on Dr. Nicholas Ray’s Biomedical Ethics class. We’d been talking about medical futility, and how we make decisions about who gets what kinds of medical treatments, and when. Thorny, interesting, philosophical material. I’d spent an hour in the library after class doing some reading, before heading to my next destination off-campus at about 2:30pm. The attack happened an hour later. At first I was merely alarmed. Then it came out that it has happened on the 4th floor of Hagey Hall, which is in the vicinity of the philosophy department. When I messaged a contact, they said they couldn’t talk about it. That told me all I needed to know - it was a philosophy class that had been attacked.
When my wife sent me some screenshots from Twitter noting for the first time that it was a hate motivated attack against a Philosophy class on Gender Issues, my heart sank.
“Fuck. Fuck Fuck Fuck,” I wrote her back.
My people had been attacked.
As I wrote in the following Facebook post a day later,
Technically speaking, yesterday's attack has nothing to do with me. Nothing at all. And yet I was on campus yesterday, attending a philosophy class in an adjacent building, leaving only an hour before the attack occurred. I got to thinking about one of the very first classes that I sat in on a few years ago, on the topic of abortion. I started thinking about how that class is the kind of class that would have a big red bullseye on it, a target for right wing hate-mongers. And then I started thinking about how I would respond if I was in a classroom that was attacked.
I became overwhelmed.
I was grateful to have had a therapy appointment the day after the attack. I talked through a number of the issues with my therapist, reiterating, of course, that while this incident literally had nothing to do with me, it feels especially gut-wrenching because it was one of my communities that had been attacked and injured. While I have never had a class with Dr. Katy Fulfer, who sustained injuries from the knife attack, I have had many, many classes with her colleagues, and have sat in gender studies/philosophy of sex and love classes. I will see my therapist again this Thursday to review the past week and to continue to sort through my physical, mental and emotional reactions.
I have also made a personal commitment not to let the attacker terrorize the way I think about sex and gender issues. Coming from a very conservative and homophobic environment as a child and into university, I know first hand some of the ways that hateful beliefs can manifest themselves, and it’s never pretty.
One of the ways I am doing this is by reading a newly published book called “What Even is Gender?” Written by two transgender philosophers, the book attempts to break down some of the confusing nomenclature that exists around sex and gender, choosing to dispense with what they see as a problematic ‘gender identity’ model to a more fine-grained and ultimately more useful ‘gender feels’ model. The authors are clear that the book is not intended for folks who are antagonistic to trans people in the first place (so-called ‘Gender Critical Theorists’), that while they may get something out of it, the book is ultimately aimed at people who are interested in pulling apart oppressive gender and sex categories, many of which cause significant consternation for trans people, and figuring out if something could replace it, and if so what.
If you want to see more original, short-form content like this, please let me know by commenting here or by sending me a note at peter (at) peterthurley.ca