Police Confirm Hate Motivated Attack on Gender Studies Class

Police have confirmed that the attack on a Waterloo, Ontario gender studies class seems to have been motivated by bias.

by Evan Urquhart

UPDATE 6/26/23 3pm: A Waterloo Regional Police statement confirmed suspicions about the motive in an attack yesterday on a gender studies class saying “investigators believe this was a hate-motivated incident related to gender expression and gender identity.”

At 4pm yesterday, June 28th, an unknown man entered a philosophy course on gender issues and proceeded to attack the professor and students he found inside with knives. According to Alicia Wang for Imprint, the official student paper for the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, Jinming Li, a student who was in the class, described a man in his 20s who entered and asked what the class was about before removing two knives from his backpack and attacking the professor. Imprint also reports that three people were injured, the professor and two students.

screenshot from Imprint

Speculation about the motive for the violence has centered around the contents of the course. A description of PHIL 202: Gender Issues on the University’s website reads: “This course will examine the construction of gender in the history of philosophy through contemporary discussions. What is gender? How do we “do” gender? How can we “undo” gender—and do we want to?”

Campus discussions of gender have been fodder for alarmism for many years, not just on the far right but in mainstream news outlets as well. However, the far right has moved far beyond kids-these-days grumbling and into dark conspiratorial theories which tie classes like the one attacked by an unidentified assailant to the fall of Western civilization. A growing trend has been to repeatedly conflate philosphical ideas about gender with the small number of young people who seek medical treatment for gender dysphoria with child sexual abuse. This extreme, overheated rhetoric keeps far-right online communities active and engaged with new outrages, and the paranoia and rage has repeatedly erupted into ideologically motivated violence in the U. S., including violence against the LGBTQ+ community.

Against this backdrop, an attack on a college course on gender issues where the attacker seemed curious about the content could hardly fail to raise concerns that right-wing extremist violence was the motivating force. Although official reports have not yet confirmed a motive, Spectrum WR, an organization which “serves, affirms, and supports the well-being of 2SLGBTQ+ people in the Waterloo region, issued a statement on Twitter calling it a targeted attack.

In Canada, stricter gun control and a somewhat lower temperature in the political environment has kept the excesses of far-right violence more in check. However, the close proximity and warm relationship betwee the two countries, as well as media saturation by the U. S., has always meant that the contagion of extremism was not likely to remain contained. If the attack on Wednesday does prove to have been motivated by right-wing ideology it will be one more piece of confirmation that the anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in the exteme right has consequences for innocent people, and the mainstream hyperfocus on minor campus speech controversies both missed and gave cover for a movement of growing violent extremism on the right that was allowed to fester unchecked until inevitable and predictable tragedies, perhaps including this attack in Waterloo, occurred.