Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: Who is Seen, Who is Heard, and What Happens When the Truth is Obscured

by Gillian Smith-Clark ​for The 44 North

Editor in Chief

“Tell the Truth” stamped on pavement in white capital letters

This February/March issue of The 44 North is, at its core, about visibility: who is seen, who is heard, and what happens when the truth is obscured: by power, by indifference, or by deliberate misinformation.

Across these pages, you’ll find work that grapples with Black history and resistance, the freedom to read, women’s and girls’ safety, sexual and reproductive health, homelessness, and the quiet, daily ways communities hold one another together when institutions fail them. These themes may appear distinct, but they are bound by a single throughline: access. Access to knowledge, to care, to dignity, and to platforms that refuse to look away.

That tension feels especially sharp right now. In recent weeks, more than 300 journalists were purged from The Washington Post—a decision that lays bare how vulnerable even legacy newsrooms are when journalistic missions collide with corporate ownership. The paper’s slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness—introduced in 2017 and greeted at the time with both praise and pointed skepticism—now reads less like branding and more like an unintended indictment. What does that phrase mean when an iconic publication is hollowed out by fear and corporate priorities, and when media power increasingly determines which stories survive, and which disappear?

This issue is our response to that question.

Independent media matters not because it is perfect, but because it is accountable. Because it asks uncomfortable questions. Because it makes room for more voices—especially young and marginalized voices—that are too often dismissed, underestimated, or filtered through institutions that no longer serve them. At The 44 North, we remain committed to publishing work that is courageous, ethical, and grounded in empathy, including, and more specifically, when doing so is inconvenient.

You’ll see that commitment reflected throughout this issue. Our review of All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews explores grief, agency, and the limits of language when pain resists resolution. In our Artist Spotlight, Feels Zine offers a bold and tender exploration of queer sex and romance, reminding us that intimacy itself can be an act of reclamation. Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Rosa Parks,” featured in Poet’s Corner, anchors Black history not in abstraction, but in lived courage.

Several pieces examine storytelling as both a mirror and an intervention. Our feature on libraries as vital “third spaces,” including Dear TPL: The Passport Project, highlights how access to books and community resources can quite literally expand lives. “Novel Idea: How Fiction Helps Us See Ourselves” reflects on reading as self-recognition and survival. In The Writer’s Room, “ICE Murders: Lives in Slow Motion” uses current-events-based fiction to confront state violence in ways conventional reporting often cannot.

This issue also includes my own essay, “Watching Minneapolis from Canada: When Power Stops Explaining Itself,” which wrestles with proximity, responsibility, and what it means to witness injustice across borders in an era of relentless images and insufficient accountability.

At the heart of this issue is the winning essay from our inaugural essay contest: “The Pathogen of Perception: Quantifying the Multi-Dimensional Cost of Medical Misinformation” by Jason Wang.

Wang’s essay embodies everything we hoped this contest would epitomize: thoughtful analysis, moral seriousness, originality, and something more: a refusal to treat misinformation as a harmless difference of opinion. “Misinformation is not a victimless exchange of ideas,” Wang writes, tracing how falsehoods about vaccines during the global pandemic translated into preventable deaths—often borne not by those who rejected care, but by infants, immunocompromised patients, and those who never consented to the risks imposed upon them.

What makes this essay especially powerful is its insistence that the solution is not censorship, but literacy: scientific, media, and civic. “The answer is not censorship,” Wang argues. “It is teaching people how to think critically about health information the same way we teach them to read or do algebra.”  In a moment defined by fragmentation and distrust, this is a call not for control, but for collective capacity.

What happens to a society when it loses the ability to respond to shared threats? When truth is drowned out by noise, and institutions designed to inform either retreat or collapse?

This issue is our answer: we build capacity by telling the truth carefully. By amplifying young thinkers who understand the stakes because they have lived them. By defending the freedom to read, to question, to imagine, and to care for one another beyond narrow definitions of individual choice.

If we take the Post’s motto at its word and accept that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” it is worth remembering that darkness thrives in silence and isolation. It recedes when we insist on seeing the world as it is, clearly—and when we choose, together, to keep the lights on.

— Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor in Chief, The 44 North Media

Alberta’s Ban on Trans Women Athletes: On Where The Threat Actually Lives

by Mikaela Brewer for The 44 North

Senior Editor

Mikaela Brewer (left) playing college basketball

"It’s not trans women who are the threat—it’s a surveillance-based, misogynist patriarchy. It’s never been about who’s playing the sport—it’s about which men have policing and decision-making power across women’s sports. It’s not about fairness at all. It’s about maintaining a culture of control under the guise of fairness."

As a white, cisgender woman, I had biological advantages playing basketball. But no one threatened my right or ability to exist because of it. I was a bit of a nuisance on the basketball court—in the best way. I’m ~5’10” (probably closer to 6’0” in basketball shoes), but my wingspan is over 6’2,” and I could borrow my 6’4” teammates’ jeans. On defence, I deflected many passes that the other team’s point guard didn’t think I could reach or get to in time. But I did. With such long arms and legs—a “biological advantage”—why didn’t I have to prove my gender to play for Stanford University or Team Canada? Because what’s happening to trans women in sports right now isn’t about biological advantage. It’s about policing women’s bodies. And it always has been.

For our July/August 2024 issue at The 44 North, I wrote a short story titled Hope Tracks, a fictional narrative about two high school students, siblings Lena and Sam, as they prepare for track season. One morning, before their first run of the upcoming school year, the two confront one another in their family kitchen—one sibling is a trans woman, and the other’s curiosity isn’t neutral. The story explores mental health, community, activism, friendships, misinformation, family, high school, and racism. I’d love for you to read it, especially now as trans people—particularly women and non-binary athletes—are violently and invasively attacked and investigated. It’s a vehement myth that this isn’t happening in Canada. It very much is.

Via CBC News: Alberta’s new ban on trans women athletes (12+) will not only require schools, universities and sports clubs to exclude and bar trans women and girls from competing, but report and investigate—via the athlete’s sex on their birth records—eligibility complaints to the government, including the results of the challenge. This ban impacts nearly 90 sports organizations in Alberta. It requires an athlete’s parent or guardian to “confirm in writing that the athlete qualifies under the law to play in a female league.” Boards will be encouraged and empowered to impose “reasonable sanctions” against any “bad faith” challenges launched.

Alberta’s United Conservative Party government says the ban seeks to safeguard the “integrity of female athletic competitions by ensuring women and girls have the opportunity to compete in "biological female-only divisions.”” Further, Linda Blade, a coach and former president of Athletics Alberta, said the ban is “not anti trans, it's not anti-anything. It's pro-women.” Please read more here: Birth records will be key in Alberta's new ban on female trans athletes, regulations show (CBC News), Alberta’s transgender ban in sports exempts visiting out-of-province athletes (Global News), Liberal government 'monitoring' Alberta law banning trans athletes from female sports (National Post). 

These regulations are immeasurably harmful and violent. And they’re not at all “pro women.” In Hope Tracks, Lena shares a quote from Schuyler Bailar, the first trans D1 NCAA men’s athlete: 

“People often forget that in order to exclude trans women, you must police all bodies in the women’s category. Any girl or woman can be accused of being transgender. At what point is a girl “too good,” “too masculine,” or “too tall,” or “too strong,” or “too fast” to be accused of being trans? The attempt to exclude trans women is the legal enforcement of the policing of all women’s bodies. And this disproportionately affects those of colour, especially Black women and girls who already suffer anti-Blackness and misogyny (misogynoir) and are often portrayed as not woman enough due to white supremacy. Ask yourself: Who is ‘woman enough?’ The inclusion of trans girls in girls’ sports does not threaten girls’ sports. Instead, the exclusion of trans girls leads to the destruction of girls’ sport through the enforcement of misogynistic and racist standards of girls’ bodies.”

Further, Violet Stanza’s video excellently and thoughtfully notes that research on “biological advantage,” often applied to sports, comes from the military. Via military data, after two years on HRT, trans women raced the mile similarly to cis women, and after four years, matched max sit-ups in a minute. 

Importantly, Stanza asked another question that haunts me: will we only accept trans women in sports if they’re not competitive—if they’re ‘bad?’ Is this what we should be telling trans women—and because this fight isn’t about who is more ‘pro-women’—all women? That they should only ever aspire to mediocrity so as not to be ‘transvestigated?’ 

There will always be biological advantages in sports—height, weight, wingspan, shoulder width, etc. And truthfully, the real threat is embedded in the anti-trans rhetoric and catch phrase: “Keep men out of women’s sports.” It’s not trans women who are the threat—it’s a surveillance-based, misogynist patriarchy. It’s never been about who’s playing the sport—it’s about which men have policing and decision-making power across women’s sports. It’s not about fairness at all. It’s about maintaining a culture of control under the guise of fairness.

So let me answer Schuyler’s question: when did I feel afraid or threatened? It was when my sexuality was pried into, my food intake monitored, or my body fat and weight weaponized. It was when I was reminded of my ‘selfish’ choice to clash being an athlete with being an ‘acceptable’ woman, ‘jeopardizing’ motherhood. It’s each of these wrapping around our throats, choking what women can do and who women can be into such a thin straw that it becomes a feeding tube. We may have forgotten it’s there because we can’t taste it, thinking we’re safe and protected. We’re not. And especially for those of us who are current or former athletes, we have to speak up.

On Charlie Kirk: You Can't Pick and Choose Your Martyr

By Abbigale Kernya for The 44 North

Managing Editor

Charlie Kirk speaking into a microphone

"What began as a goal to further the reach of conservative ideology on college campuses evolved into a right-wing pipeline that grounded itself in exploiting marginalized communities and inciting violence against anyone who dared to call out the deplorable white supremacist behaviour."

On September 10th, 2025, American Conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk was fatally shot at Utah Valley University on the first stop of his “Prove Me Wrong” campus tour. Kirk, who made his career founding Turning Point USA and debating college students on campus about controversial topics like abortion, same-sex marriage, transgender existence, and the right to bear arms, has left behind a legacy that continues to polarize and divide. 

Kirk’s final words that afternoon perhaps speak most of all to his work, where he riled up the MAGA crowd in attendance—fearmongering about transgender gang violence—moments before he was fatally shot by a rifle 200 yards away. The suspect charged is 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, whose motives remain unknown at the time of writing, despite republican claims his actions were a blatant attack from the left. 

It is without question that no matter Kirk’s controversial and bigoted stance, nobody ‘deserves’ to die by gun violence. This remains true, even after Kirk plainly stated in 2023 that he supported civilian casualties to protect and uphold the Second Amendment right to bear arms. The outcry following his assassination is as polarizing as it is frightening. Far right MAGA leaders are calling on violence towards the left (or, their “political opponents”) and conspiracy theories are headlining mainstream media, stating that this shooting was somehow a result of transgender violence—the same “violence” Kirk conspiratized seconds before the fatal shot. 

And yet, on the same day Kirk was shot and killed on campus, an elementary school in Illinois was attacked by a lone gunman, marking the 146th American school shooting in 2025, as Kirk became the same “civilian casualty” he supported.

Kirk’s platform was built on oppression and harm to anyone who wasn’t a straight, white, Christian, middle-class American cis-male. It can be hard to feel empathy for someone who would not give you the same courtesy. Empathy, which, in Kirk’s own words, was seen as a made-up emotion.

Right-wing extremism has been rising steadily in America, bleeding the harmful rhetoric mainstreamed by people like Kirk into nearly every crevice of the West. When the news broke that Kirk had succumbed to his fatal shot, the response heard everywhere from the internet to sports venues was shocking, to say the least. 

This is not to say that Kirk deserved what he got—nobody, no matter which side of the political line they stand on, deserves to be murdered in broad daylight. Nobody deserves to witness bloodshed, and in breaking down the hypocrisies of republican outcry, it is not a pro-firearm message. Rather, it’s one that aims to draw light toward the mass mourning of a white supremacist podcaster who made a career demonizing marginalized communities under the guise of “free speech” and the right to have your own opinion.

The irony of this whole situation is hidden under the calls for violence and continued “us vs. them” rhetoric, steeped in racist comparisons between Kirk and the murder of George Floyd, to further blame the left for his assassination. However, the argument that one must feel sorry for Kirk is somewhat missing the mark in this conversation. Especially given that Kirk himself advocated for public executions, saying they should be televised to children and sponsored by major corporations like Coca-Cola. It comes as somewhat ironic, then, that the conversation around his death is spiralling into that of a memorialized martyr who died for his own opinion, not one that aims to look at the broader picture of the violence he made a career out of. 

Kirk’s advocacy for the right to one’s own “opinion” is a trapdoor that invites unsuspecting viewers through the guise of free speech into the chasm of extremist ideology. As a reminder, an opinion is whether or not you like summer over winter, or what TV show deserved an Emmy Award, or how you like your eggs cooked. An opinion is not whether or not you believe the Jim Crow laws were a good thing for the Black community, or that women aren’t capable of holding equal careers to men, or that transgender people are dangerous, bloodthirsty criminals. Charlie Kirk did not die for his opinion. He held no ‘opinions’ that were not factually incorrect or spewed in the pursuit of a divided country, fueled by hatred and fear. 

His “Prove me Wrong” tour would be the final act in his legacy of rage-baiting college students into falling for the ultra-right-wing pipeline, spinning every disadvantage young people face into a calling card for bigotry and white-supremacy. It is extremely telling how school shootings and the rise of hate speech in North America have become so normalized that they’ve become desensitized to mainstream media. On the afternoon of Charlie Kirk’s shooting, when a man armed with a semi-automatic weapon opened fire in an elementary school in Illinois, the narrative instead became focused on protecting the legacy of someone who didn’t believe in equal rights based on “freedom of expression” rather than the epidemic of gun violence that is plaguing America.

The truth is, if people were truly outraged that this horrific act of gun violence cost Kirk his life, a conversation of change would spark. Instead, conversations around further demonizing left-leaning voters and the trans community have infiltrated online forums. Additionally, we’ve seen countless examples where anyone speaking out against the hypocrisy of Kirk’s shooting is facing harassment and, in increasingly frequent cases, being fired from their employment after speaking against Charlie Kirk's “opinions.”

How have we strayed so far from the plot that merely bringing attention to the hypocrisy and somewhat ironic nature of September 12th is an act of war against the right-wing? To say that you don’t support what happened to Charlie Kirk, but Charlie Kirk (by his own words) supported what happened to him, has become controversial—as if his platform was built around not only protecting the Second Amendment, but also advocating for looser gun restrictions. 

How can one mourn Charlie Kirk and ignore the victims of his rhetoric?

What began as a goal to further the reach of conservative ideology on college campuses evolved into a right-wing pipeline that grounded itself in exploiting marginalized communities and inciting violence against anyone who dared to call out the deplorable white supremacist behaviour. 

To truly mourn Charlie Kirk must mean you mourn all victims of gun violence. 

To mourn him as a father, as a husband, is to also mourn the innocent families ripped apart by ICE raids.

To mourn him as a political activist for free speech is to also mourn the journalists murdered in Gaza who died documenting a genocide. 

To mourn Charlie Kirk is to mourn victims of violence perpetuated with hands cradling guns and microphones. 

To mourn him is to mourn trans people and childbearing folks who have died due to lack of access to gender affirming care and abortion resources.

You cannot pick and choose your martyr.