You know, Canada used to produce real feminists.

Women who actually fought for women. Women who risked their reputations, their safety, and sometimes even their freedom to win basic rights that seem obvious today.

One of the most prominent examples of that fight happened right here in Canada with a group known as the “Famous Five.”

In the 1920s, Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Henrietta Edwards, Louise McKinney and Irene Parlby took on the Canadian government over a simple but outrageous question: Were women legally considered “persons”?

Yes. That was the actual legal question.

At the time, women could not sit in the Senate because the law only allowed “qualified persons.” And according to the courts, that word did not include women.

So, the Famous Five challenged the system.

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They fought their case all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Britain and in 1929 they won the historic Persons Case, which affirmed that women were indeed persons under the law.

It was a foundational victory for women’s political rights in Canada. Their legacy is supposed to be about defending women as a distinct class with their own rights and interests. Which makes what just happened in Ottawa so astonishing.

Because the Famous Five Foundation — the organization that claims to carry on the legacy of those women — has decided to honour a biological man.

Not just any man.

A man who has openly advocated for silencing women who defend women-only spaces. His name is Fae Johnstone, a prominent activist in Canada’s trans lobby.

Through organizations like Queer Momentum and Wisdom2Action, groups that together receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in public and institutional funding, he has built a professional advocacy career pushing gender ideology into Canadian institutions and fighting against parents' rights.

That advocacy often comes with a very clear message to women: fall in line or be shut up — or worse. 

Women who question whether female-only spaces, sports, shelters or prisons should remain female-only are routinely labelled hateful, bigoted or dangerous by activists in this movement and by Johnstone more specifically. 

In other words, women who try to defend the very rights that the Famous Five fought to establish are treated like enemies.

And yet, somehow, the Famous Five Foundation in Ottawa decided this was the person worthy of recognition as part of International Women's Day. 

Think about the absurdity of that for a moment.

The women who fought to have women recognized as persons are now being invoked to celebrate a man who believes womanhood is simply a matter of personal identification.

A movement that once fought to define women as a legal and biological reality is now apparently comfortable honouring someone who insists those boundaries don’t exist at all.

And this isn’t the first time institutions have tried to sell Canadians this idea.

Johnstone was previously the keynote speaker at the YWCA Regina’s Women of Distinction Awards, another event meant to celebrate women’s achievements — but apparently now open to men who identify as women.

At some point, we have to ask the obvious question: If awards for women keep going to men, what exactly is left that belongs to women?

It’s institutional cowardice dressed up as progress. Real feminism used to mean defending women, even when it was unpopular. Even when powerful people didn’t like it.

The Famous Five challenged the establishment because women were being erased from the definition of “persons.” Today, their legacy is being used to applaud the erasure of women from their own spaces.

If Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung could see what their foundation is doing now, they would probably ask a very simple question: After everything we fought for… how did it come to this?

Because the truth is, the people running these institutions today are not continuing the legacy of the Famous Five. They’re dismantling it.