i did try to call the court office on friday, and the person i want to contact was not in the office. they claim the package did not arrive, which is...it should have. it might be on her desk, waiting for her to come back.

i want to clarify a few points if they weren't clear.

i pointed out that this is the kind of case the mras warned us about, but this case is not about women's rights, and i don't feel i'm being attacked by a consortium of fake third-wave "feminists", although it may be the case that some dumb people that call themselves feminists may have fallen for the line of argumentation (something the court has yet to fall for, and i don't expect it will fall for, in the end). i have not been accused of any kind of sexual misconduct. rather, it is agreed by everybody that i have never met this woman, and it is clear from the emails that i didn't even know she was a woman (i thought she was a man named ryan.) until she filed charges.

that's not what what i was charged with. i was charged with "repeated communication" which, in context, is repeated application for housing. they put me in jail for applying for an apartment over and over again. the charges do not claim any sort of sexual behaviour or motive on my behalf at all; nobody has accused me of any sort of sexual harassment, and it is clear that none took place, that i was strictly interested in the apartment. that sounds absurd, and it is - that's why i'm launching a human rights complaint, and trying to get the arrest declared to be illegal, for preparation of an eventual constitutional rights challenge and an expensive lawsuit. but, those are the actual facts in the case. 

- i have never met this woman.
- i do not know what she looks like. still. i've never even seen a picture of her.

- all communication was with a ryan myon that later claimed he was the property owner, caroline chevalier. this ryan did not identify himself as female at any point in the application process. i am not certain that this is actually true. there may be a dude named ryan myon out there that was the actual person i was communicating with. that will come out in the human rights case.

so, if i don't think i was being attacked by a feminist cabal, what do i think was happening?

and, i think the answer is clear enough - i informed the property owner that she was discriminating against me and i would be taking legal action, and she had me arrested as retaliation for it. the police then used a transphobic pretext to build a case that was immediately thrown out as complete bullshit, and the oiprd repeated it in their factum last week (to their great discredit). but, it's not what the appeal is about, it's not what the charges were about and it really has essentially nothing to do with the situation.

the precautionary component of the case is that this is what happens when you buy into conservative narratives about the inherent honesty of the weaker sex. i'm not sure that i can prove that she explicitly lied to the police, but the premise that i might go to her house was invented completely out of thin air (i couldn't pick this person out of a lineup - and i literally thought it was a dude named ryan), for the apparent purposes of preventing me from suing her.

when you eliminate the need for evidence-based reasoning, you open up the system to these kinds of abuses. and, we can't allow ourselves to go down the rabbit hole like that - we have to insist on the primacy of evidence, regardless of the genders involved in the conflict.