Canadian Armed Forces – Page 15

Happy Pride Month?

As I’ve said, I’ve never really taken part in pride, and I really don’t identify with it.

I guess part of it has to do with the environment that I grew up in.

Military communities were isolated. And by isolated I mean that the Canadian Armed Forces had control over the types of people that were allowed to live in the military communities on base.

By way of filtering recruits, the Canadian Armed Forces could control the political leanings of those living on the bases. And it should be of no surprise that these military communities were very conservative and right leaning.

The thing is, when you’re living within these communities, especially if your exposure to the outside world is very limited, you come to see the political leanings of these communities as being “normal”.

Yes, Canadian Forces Administrative Order CFAO 19-20 did no apply to children living on base, it only applied to members of the Canadian Armed Forces. But as has been indicated through various studies, members of the Canadian Armed Forces often had a problems with separating their military careers from their home lives.

As the civilian social worker that dealt with my family noted during various home visits to our PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach, Mr. Gill orders his children with simple commands and answers their questions with yes or no replies and the children don’t question these decisions.

Being in the Canadian Armed Forces, Richard was nothing more than a cog in a machine that demanded his servile obedience. His was not a position to question. His was a position to do as he was told. And like many men who are stripped of the authority in their lives, he made up for this lack of authority by exerting his authority on those he could.

When it came to me and my issues from Canadian Forces Base Namao he was not going to question the authority of Captain Terry Totzke. If Captain Totzke said that I was a homosexual, that I was exhibiting signs of homosexuality, who was master corporal Gill to question this?

When I’ve talked to other base brats about how things were on base I get this Pollyannish rose coloured view of what things were like on base. This usually comes from former brats that didn’t have “issues” and therefore weren’t exposed to the underbelly of life in the “company town”.

I have encountered a few former brats that don’t participate in any of the social media groups for base brats. They want nothing to do with acknowledging their past. And I have an inkling that the brats who don’t want anything to do with remembering their pasts as base brats vastly outnumber the number of brats that celebrate their past as base brats.

The number of broken and dysfunctional families that lived on the bases was probably a high percentage, especially when you look at how the recruiting process would naturally filter out more liberal minded recruits. The military communities were rife with homophobia, racism, misogyny, victim blaming, victim shaming.

Another matter that played into the sterility of the military community was the fact that military housing could only be rented to members of the Canadian Armed Forces, and that these members had the ability to decide who could live in these houses and who couldn’t. If a service member wanted his spouse out of “his” PMQ, she was booted off the base by the military police. Same thing for his kids. As long as provincial law allowed for it, the serving member could give his kid the boot. The age that a child can live on their own varies from province to province. In Ontario a 16 year old can move out on their own.

I’m not sure what the rules are any more, but in my day living on the bases, 18 was the absolute oldest a base brat could be. Once you hit 19 you were expected to get off the base. There were exceptions to this rule, care givers could live in military housing so long as it was to look after military dependents, persons with disabilities could live on base past their 19th birthday, and students obtaining a higher education could continue to live on base until their 24th birthday.

As you can imaging, there wasn’t a lot of diversity. Everything was sterile. Everything was the military mindset.

Queer kids just learnt to stay in the closet.

Queer kids learnt that they were defective and a national security threat.

Kids on base learnt that there were no victims, that it always took two to tango.

Kids on base learnt that compassion was a liability.

Living on base there were no “others” like us.

Living on base we only had exposure to adults that passed the requirements of the Canadian Armed Forces recruiting agents.

Our view of the world was shaped by the monochromatic views of the world espoused by these serving soldiers that passed the conformity tests.

You know all of those soldier that have been implicated in hazing rituals over the years? Yeah we grew up amongst those people.

I lived on the base that was the home of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. We grew up amongst the mindset and the racism that lead to the death of Shidane Arone in Somalia.

All those sexual assaults that occurred in the Canadian Armed Forces? Those were committed by men of the Canadian Forces, many of whom were our fathers.

The misogyny and homophobia that were rampant in the Canadian Armed Forces back in the day? The men espousing these views were often our fathers.

I grew up in a community that allowed everyone up the chain of command to escape responsibility for the murder of Shidane Arone and allowed a lowly private, private Kyle Brown, to be made the scape goat for the whole sordid affair.

I grew up in a community that allowed sexually abused children to be blamed for the abuse they suffered at the hand of members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

I grew up in a community where the chain of command could determine who was a victim and who wasn’t a victim.

I grew up in a community that had the legal power to investigate itself and its members for sexual assaults against children.

I grew up in a community in which officers with no legal training and no legal background could summarily dismiss service offence charges that had been brought against their subordinates.

I grew up in a community in which a 3-year-time-bar applied to all service offences, including service offences of a purely civilian nature.

I grew up in a community which claimed criminal code offences related to children as service offences to be dealt with solely through the military justice system.

I grew up in a community served by such a compromised justice system that it was dismantled and restructured due to horrific miscarriages of justice.

So no, in the end I have nothing to be proud of.

Class Action Magnet

You can tell that there is something drastically wrong within the Canadian Armed Forces by the sheer number of Class Action Lawsuits that have been brought against the military over the years.

Contrary to popular belief, class action lawsuits are not a “get-rich-quick” scheme.

As can be seen from the settlement in the LifeLabs class action, the more class members that come forward, the less each member of the class receives.

As I had been a client of LifeLab since the early 2000’s I was eligible for a settlement.

The settlement I received from LifeLabs was a whopping:

Not all class actions pay out this little. It’s just that when a class action has over 100,000 members, the pool gets spread out a little thin.

So, what’s the benefit of a class action?

Members such as myself get to take on entities that I would never stand a chance against.

And so far as organizations that are untouchable, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence rank up there pretty high.

How many class actions has the Canadian Armed Forces faced recently?

In addition to mine:

There’s one for Mental Health:

The CAF have a long and storied history of mistreatment of mental health issues. I should know. I endured mistreatment at the hands of Captain Terry Totzke.

There’s a class action for sexual misconduct:

There’s a class action for racism:

There’s a class action related to the LGBT purge.

This purge mentality affected the kids living in the military communities as well. This is why Captain Totzke was hellbent to make sure that I understood that I was to blame for being sexually abused. My father, being both a full time member of the regular forces and subordinate to the captain would have had to go along with Captain Totzke’s treatment plan for me.

Then there’s also the other issues that kinda got settled on the low-down by ex-gratia payments.

There was the 1974 CFB Valcartier Grenade incident in which an officer of the Canadian Armed Forces was in charge of a group of 12 to 18 year old army cadets and allowed the cadets to play with a live M56 grenade. The grenade went boom. Killed numerous cadets and physically and mentally injured numerous more cadets. The Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence fought compensation of these victims all the way up to 2011 when the Minister of National Defence on advice of the Canadian Forces Ombudsman offered each survivor and the families of the deceased up to $250,000.00 each.

There was also the Agent Orange matter.

Finally, at long last.

Well, it looks as if the Minister of National Defence has finally grown a pair and is stripping the Canadian Armed Forces of its ability to investigate and prosecute sexual offences.

This is great news.

But it should go much further. The CFNIS and the base military police MUST be prohibited from investigating any crime on base in which civilians are the victims. This would officially remove both domestic child abuse and domestic spousal abuse from the purview of the Canadian Forces military police group.

Sadly it’s too late for the kids of CFB Namao to receive justice.

The settlement from the class action will be the only acknowledgement that we will ever receive.

There will be no admissions of guilt.

There will be no prosecution.

There will be no admission that the military justice system outright failed us.

There will be no investigations to see how extensive child sexual abuse was on the bases in Canada and how often these matters were mishandled by the military justice system.

In my matter the police force investigating this matter was guided by all sorts of wishy-washy policies enacted by the various National Defence Acts.

And none of these policies dealt directly with child sexual abuse.

For example in 1998 the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal put order CFPM 2120-4-0 into effect that stated that in the matters of sexual assault that occur on base when both the victim and the abuser are civilians, the matter is to be handed over to the outside civilian authorities having jurisdiction.

One military dependent sexually abusing other military dependents would be a perfect trigger for this order.

That policy was outright ignored by the CFNIS in March of 2011, and it was ignored by the Federal Court of Canada in 2013.

Yes, CFPM 2120-4-0 instructed the military police and the CFNIS that matters involving civilian on civilian crimes and sexual assaults involving civilians be handed off to the outside civilian authorities, but as the CFPM 2120-4-0 wasn’t hard written into the National Defence Act according to the Federal Court, the Provost Marshal in 2011 was free to ignore this directive at will.

The Provost Marshal and the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service can whine and cry and protest all they want.

They fucked up.

Yes, they may have had no choice in the matter, but they fucked up nonetheless.

In 1980 the military police were not allowed by the chain of command to call in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to deal with the babysitter.

Why didn’t the base commander allowed the RCMP to be called in? Remember, the Canadian Forces moved heaven and earth to keep this investigation and prosecution within the military justice system and out of the prying eyes of the Canadian public, even going so far as to move the court martial “in-camera” and sealing the transcripts. The military would have lost all of this power had the babysitter been investigated, arrested, and then prosecuted in the Juvenile Delinquents Court. One peculiarity of the Juvenile Delinquents Act was the fact that the juvie court could find an adult responsible for the delinquency of a minor and issue summary fines and sentences. All of the work that the Canadian Forces undertook in 1980 to keep Captain McRae a secret would have been all for naught if the babysitter went to juvie court.

In 2011 the CFNIS had the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork and the court martial transcripts, both of which heavily implicated the babysitter with the abuse of numerous children on the base. In fact as Fred Cunningham stated in 2011, and as the babysitter’s own father stated to me in 2015, it was the babysitter’s abuse of children that triggered the investigation of Captain Father Angus McRae.

Yes, the existence of the paperwork wouldn’t have proved the babysitter’s guilt, but the fact that he had been investigated by the military police and was found to have been sexually abusing children during the exact same time period that I accused the babysitter of molesting me and my brother would have probably encouraged the crown to request a more in depth investigation.

Remember, it wasn’t that the babysitter had been cleared during the military police investigation, or that the charges had been dismissed against the babysitter , the chain of command on Canadian Forces Base Namao prevented both the base military police and the CFSIU from calling in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to deal with the babysitter.

And yes, when I requested in 2017 that the CFNIS question the former base commander of CFB Namao, retired brigadier general Daniel Edward Munro, as to why he dismissed the majority of charges against Captain McRae and why he wouldn’t allow the RCMP to be brought in to deal with the babysitter, the CFNIS obtained a legal opinion from a legal officer in Ottawa that stated that due to the 3-year-time-bar that existed prior to 1998 no charges could be brought against Daniel Edward Munro so therefore no investigation was to occur.

However the CFNIS failed to pass any of this information on the Albert Crown prosecutor’s office. In fact the CFNIS seemed to have withheld numerous bits of information from the Crown.

This was a tactic that the military police employed in the ’90s during the CFB Gagetown Rape Controversy in which a military spouse was gang raped by numerous soldiers in a barracks on the base. The general consensus was that the military police would give a case to the crown that the military police knew the crown would not prosecute. The military police would then blame the crown for the failure to bring charges.

During the 2012 MPCC investigation of my complaint against the CFNIS, the Provost Marshall willingly withheld the existence of the CFSIU paperwork and the court martial transcripts from the MPCC. In fact the Provost Marshal withheld numerous documents from the MPCC.

Federal Court rules state that an applicant for judicial review cannot enter into evidence any documents that were not before the tribunal in question.

This means that I was unable to enter into evidence anything that the Provost Marshal hadn’t given to the MPCC. Which was a lot. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Provost Marshal withheld from the Military Police Complaints Commission over 80% of the documents from the 2011 investigation.

Even though the 2nd CFNIS investigation was conducted much better as an inspector with the RCMP had set down some ground rules and directions for the CFNIS to follow, in the end the CFNIS basically resubmitted the same brief word for word to the Alberta crown that the CFNIS submitted in 2011. The second time around that CFNIS again failed to notify the crown of the existence of the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork or the 1980 court martial transcripts that indicated that the babysitter was known to have molested numerous children on the base during the same frame of time that I had made my allegations against him.

And I know that the exact same brief was filed because when I filed for judicial review in 2013 I was given a certified copy of the documents before the MPCC. In 2019 when I appealed the findings of the Alberta Victims of Crime decision that no crime had occurred based upon the CFNIS investigation, I was given a certified copy of the documents before the Alberta Victims of Crime. This included the 2018 submission to the Alberta Crown. It was identical to the 2011 submission.

See, the problem with the military police is that they are soldiers first and police officers second.

The investigators with the CFNIS must obey the lawful commands of their superiors. Their superiors must obey the lawful commands of their superiors. And so on, and so on.

This means that investigations conducted by the CFNIS can be exposed to political interference.

Children who were sexually abused on military bases in Canada were of absolutely no concern to the brass at NDHQ. And the brass at NDHQ was certainly not going to allow a bunch of base brats sully the public image of the Canadian Armed Forces.

What would the public think if they discovered that children were not entirely safe while living on allegedly secure defence establishments?

What would the public think if the public were to be told that children who lived on bases in Canada prior to 1998 and who were sexually abused by members of the Canadian Forces could not obtain justice due to the existence of the 3-year-time-bar?

What would the public think if the public were to be told that due to the principles of “double jeopardy” military service personnel who sexually abused children on base prior to 1998, and who had their charges dismissed by their commanding officer, could never be tried again on the same charges by either a civilian or military tribunal. I would like to think that the Canadian public would blow a collective gasket if they were to discover that these commanding officers that had the power to dismiss and charge brought against their subordinate had no legal training, no legal background, and prior to 1997 didn’t even have to consult with a legal officer before dismissing charges.

And what would the public think if they discovered that the likelihood of charges being brought against an abuser in the pre-1998 days had a lot to do with the rank of the victim’s serving parent versus the rank of the abuser and ultimately the rank of the abuser’s commanding officer.

A corporal’s demand that charges be brought against a captain when the captain’s commanding officer is a colonel isn’t going to go too far. Especially not when that commanding officer is the base commander and had the ultimate authority over everyone on that particular defence establishment. This would include the corporal, the corporal’s commanding officer, the base military police, and the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit detachment located on the colonel’s base.

Anyways, enough for now…….

The Justice System in this country is in shambles and is horrifically broken if you’re the victim

The justice system in this country is broken, of that there is absolutely no doubt.

And sadly, it’s the victims of crime that get the proverbial boot to the balls.

Most, if not all, victim assistance programs are geared towards victims in which a conviction has occurred or where there exists the likelihood that a crime was committed.

But what if the police department that is conducting the investigation is compromised?

What if the system that you are ensnared in is not set up for dealing with civilian victims?

If you’ve followed my blog you’ll see that I’ve been engaged with the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service since March of 2011.

March of 2011 is of course when I decided to deal with the babysitter.

Yes, I had from 1980 to 2011 to deal with the babysitter, that is true, but if you’ve followed along with my blog you’ll realize that from 1980 to 1983 a military social worker was blaming me for allowing myself to be abused and for allowing the babysitter to molest my brother.

In March of 2011 I was finally ready to deal with the babysitter against the wishes of my father.

I made my complaint with the Edmonton Police Service. The EPS passed the matter off to the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service.

As the certified tribunal records illustrate, that investigation was an absolute joke. But that wasn’t surprising at the time as the military police were being dragged through the mud for their inability to investigate sexual assaults involving women in the military.

And if it hadn’t been for a series of questions that Master Corporal Christian Cyr asked me on May 3rd, 2011 I would have never put 2 & 2 together with respect to the babysitter and Captain McRae, the base chaplain. Nor would I have known that the babysitter had sued the Minister of National Defence for the sexual abuse at the hands of Captain McRae.

The investigation concluded on November 4th, 2011 with Petty Officer Steve Morris calling me and telling me that the CFNIS couldn’t find any evidence at all to indicate that the babysitter was capable of what I accused him of.

In December of 2011 I filed a complaint with the Military Police Complaints Commission. The MPCC conducted a ‘review’, but during a review the MPCC relies solely upon documents submitted to it by the Provost Marshal. The MPCC is not allowed to subpoena documents. In fact, during an MPCC review the MPCC cannot administer oaths.

In 2012 I filed my first of many FOI requests to obtain the court martial transcripts of Captain McRae.

In February of 2013 the MPCC gave the CFNIS a solid TWO-THUMBS-UP for a very detailed investigation that spanned 30 years.

However, what the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal failed to hand over to the Military Police Complaints Commission in 2012 was the 1980 CFSIU investigation paperwork and the transcripts from the July 15-18 courts martial of Captain Father Angus McRae. I know about this paperwork because an investigator with the CFNIS would later inform me about the existence of this paperwork and that it corroborated everything that a retired military police officer had told me on November 27th, 2011.

After the MPCC review was over I quickly assessed my options. I tried to obtain a lawyer with federal court experience, specifically experience with dealing with the Military Police Complaints Commission. The clock ticks pretty fast when one wants to file for judicial review. You literally have 90 days from the day the findings of the tribunal are released to file your application.

The lawyers that I was speaking with all wanted retainers in the neighbourhood of $15k to $20k.

But more importantly, most of these lawyers were hung up on why a civilian wanted to have the federal court quash the findings of a military tribunal.

Something doesn’t make sense.

You’re not telling us the truth.

You’re hiding something.

The military never investigates child sexual abuse

The military police never investigate civilian on civilian sexual abuse.

You should get the RCMP to look at this matter

You should get the Edmonton Police Service to investigate this matter.

So, I ended up representing myself in Federal Court.

When I received the certified tribunal records from the MPCC it was very obvious that the CFNIS and the Provost Marshal had excluded a vast amount of documentation and records from the records that were given to the MPCC.

Could I introduce my copies of these documents to the federal court? Nope. Well, I could, but I’d have to put the federal court matter on hold and appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Any lawyers willing to take that on?

Nope, not a single fucking lawyer wanted to look at this. Retainers for this were quoted around $20k

So in the end all of my documentation was excluded and the justice could only take into account documents that were before the MPCC and not documents that were withheld from the MPCC by the Provost Marshal. So the justice found in favour of the MPCC. The DOJ sent me a bill for about $2k for wasting their time.

In 2017, during the second CFNIS investigation into my original complaint against the babysitter, the investigator the with CFNIS let slip the existence of the court martial transcripts and the CFSIU investigation paperwork both of which heavily implicated the babysitter and both of which verified what Cunningham had told me in 2011 and that Cunningham was in a position to know exactly what he was talking about.

I started new FOIs for the CFSIU investigation paperwork and the Court Martial transcripts.

In 2018 the 2nd CFNIS investigation was concluded, so I filed a request for a MPCC review of the 2nd CFNIS investigation. The Provost Marshall objected to this.

Due to the MPCC requesting copies of the court martial transcripts and the CFSIU investigation paperwork, DND could no longer refuse to give me a copy. It took some bad publicity from David Pugliese with the Ottawa Citizen to finally get DND to cough up the documents.

What did the documents show:

The babysitter’s molestation of children is what triggered the investigation of Captain McRae
The investigation of the babysitter occurred in his family’s PMQ and was conducted by military police officers Mossman and Clark.
Much like what the babysitter’s father told me in June of 2015, the military police had received complaints from numerous parents.
The babysitter had forced anal intercourse with three 10 year old boys behind the recreation centre.
The babysitter was known to have had sex with children much younger
The babysitter was receiving psychological counselling for his attraction to young children.
It was colonel Daniel Edward Munro’s decision as to what charges Captain McRae was charged with, this shows that the summary investigation flaw in the National Defence Act had very real world consequences for child sexual abuse matters.
The court martial transcripts also proved once and for all that the Canadian Armed Forces could and would conduct courts martial for child sexual abuse matters.

The MPCC released the review in October of 2020. And they observed a few things.

The babysitter had more criminal convictions for child sexual abuse than what the CFNIS indicated in their documents to the crown.
The CFNIS relied on the Crown’s reluctance to prosecute on insufficient evidence as their being “no evidence”.
The CFNIS didn’t inform the Crown of the CFSIU paperwork that showed that there was an investigation of the babysitter at the time for sexually abusing children.
When Master Corporal Christian Cyr kept telling me on May 3rd, 2011 that the babysitter was only 12 or 13 at the time of the abuse, he was obviously getting this wrong age from the CFSIU paperwork as that is the only place the error occurs. The babysitter was born in June of 1965 and was 14 in the spring of 1980 and was fully within the jurisdiction of the RCMP and the juvenile delinquents court. But more importantly, the fact that Mcpl Cyr was quoting the wrong age showed that the CFNIS did have these documents from the start of the investigation.

It was only after I received the court martial transcripts and the CFSIU paperwork and the October 2020 MPCC findings that I was able to finally obtain a lawyer willing to take this matter on, and on a contingency basis.

But this isn’t the way that it should be.

No one in this country should have to square off against a tax payer funded agency like the Canadian Armed Force on their own.

No government agency should be allowed to use the short timelines provided by the various tribunals to stickhandle complainants.

I think the most significant reason why lawyers were willing to take on my matter so far as it related to the CFNIS and the MPCC is that these lawyers make a metric fuckton of money representing military members. When these ex-JAG lawyers represent members of the Canadian Forces, their bills are guaranteed to be paid. And paid at very well-off rates. A piss-ant civilian like me? What the fuck can I offer them?

And believe me, when you are going up against the Canadian Armed Forces, the Department of National Defence, and the MIlitary Police Complaints Commission, you need a lawyer not only with federal court experience, you need a lawyer with a very good and detailed understanding of military law and the various iterations of the National Defence Act over the years.

To this day I still get lawyers who are outright adamant that the military could never investigate child sexual abuse and the military courts sure as fuck could not conduct a courts martial for child sexual abuse. This even though I have Captain McRae’s court martial transcripts, and a good dozen decisions from the Court Martial Appeal Court of Canada in which service members were appealing their charges of child sexual abuse.

So when the military law lawyers can’t even get their shit together, what fucking chance do I stand?

None.

Does the justice system work?

Nope, it’s fucking broken.

Victims are left on their own to navigate the systems, systems that quite often do not work.

Victim rights are often an afterthought.

Legal aid for victims? Doesn’t exist.

Pro-bono assistance with federal court matters? Nope, doesn’t exist.

Civilian lawyers set up to assist civilians with navigating the Canadian Forces justice system and the peculiarities of the National Defence Act? Nope, doesn’t exist.

The fact that the babysitter doesn’t even have to apologize and in fact gets to keep playing the role of the sole victim while I’m condemned to the role of the bad guy is what irks me the most.

Car driver willfully runs a red light, causes a collision, and kills a 2 year old on the sidewalk and the judge is practically tripping over themselves to absolve the driver of any fault because the driver didn’t intend to kill the baby even though it was his foot on the accelerator and his hands on the steering wheel. And our fucked up no fault insurance system ensures that the parents are only getting about $20k for the death of their child.

Another car driver runs over and kills a police officer in Toronto and a jury of 12 people with no legal training and no legal back ground decide that a car driver shouldn’t have to be aware of their surroundings and that if someone “fears for their life” it’s okay to run anything over.

I just wish that victims had this much sympathy from the justice system.

Sure, locking up the wrong person is never a desirable outcome, but letting everyone walk because of the most tenuous of plausible arguments is absolutely wrong as well.

We seriously need to revamp the justice system.

No more jury trials. Juries should be replaced with panels of lawyers. Trials should not be left up to the whims of people with no legal understanding who are easily manipulated by the appeal to emotion. Anyone could have run over a bump on the ground……

Courts should be allowed to find guilt or assign guilt, without having to assign a sentence. If incarceration places the bar of evidence so high that the International Space Station is at risk of crashing into it, drop incarceration.

If your hands are on the steering wheel of a car that ends up running over someone, you shouldn’t be able to skip out of court scot-free.

Did my babysitter molest my brother and I and at least four other kids that I am aware of? Yes. The odds of probability lean very heavily in that direction. It’s not like I made my complaint against someone with no criminal record. And it’s not like I had access to the courts martial transcripts or the CFSIU investigation paperwork. The babysitter was under investigation for molesting children and the only reason he never went to juvie for what he did is that the base commander refused to allow the RCMP to be called in. So it wasn’t that the babysitter was innocent. Other issues at play allowed the babysitter at the time to escape responsibility. The problem with that is the Canadian Armed Forces chucked us under the fucking train.

Anyways, that’s my rant for now.

Growing up Queer in the Canadian Armed Forces.

There’s nothing that starts up arguments better in the base brat groups on F-book than discussions about what it was like to grow up queer on a military base.

The strongest counter argument that most former base brats can come up with is that it wasn’t easy to be queer in the civilian world so why do I concentrate on the military world.

I didn’t grow up in the civilian world, I grew up in the military world.

I lived on military bases from the month I was born until just after my 16th birthday.

By the time I was 8 years old I knew the following terms:

Homo
Faggot
Queer
Cocksucker
Pansy

I was taught that women were inferior to men and that girls were inferior to boys.

It would be an understatement to say that the military was a very misogynistic and homophobic environment.

The Canadian Armed Forces had a very strict policy against homosexuals and other sexual “deviants” right up until 1994 when they were ordered by the Supreme Court of Canada to ditch the homophobia.

This policy was CFAO 19-20.

And as I’ve said before, yes, the policy didn’t apply to military dependents. But each and every member of the Canadian Forces would have received basic information on this policy as they were expected to rat out fellow members if they suspected those fellow members of being gay, lesbian, or exhibiting any other sexual “abnormality”.

I think this is one of the reasons that Captain Terry Totzke was so hellbent on making me understand that I was a homosexual because I had sex with the babysitter. In Totzke’s mind I must have been a homosexual as there would be no other reason why I’d let a boy twice my age put his penis into my rectum on various occasions. Totzke’s training in the military must have fucked up his common sense beyond all belief.

And as study after study has indicated, military personnel were very prone to bringing their training into the homes on base.

This is one of the reasons why domestic abuse was always a problem in the military community. In the military you do not under any circumstance question or disobey the orders of your superiors. In the military home the male spouse would often view themselves as the commander of the house and everyone in the house was his subordinate bound to obey his each and every command. And there would be hell to pay if commands were not obeyed.

All I can say is that I am very thankful that Richard never caught me crossdressing in my early years on Shearwater or Griesbach. Actually, I’m very thankful that no one else caught me crossdressing.

I cannot imagine, even in today’s world, growing up trans on base, or even just gender non-conforming. Being gender non-conforming on base is dangerous.

For the longest time I had always assumed that my desire to not be male had something to do with the abuse from 1978 until 1980.

No, the abuse was not the source of my desire to not be male.

Yes, in the aftermath of the abuse I really wanted to be a girl. But I had always assumed again that that was due to the abuse as well as the teaching of Captain Totzke and nothing more.

I had always written off my desires to have my own breasts and my own hips like the girls at school was just me being fucked up due to the abuse.

All the abuse from CFB Namao did was set me up for further abuse on CFB Downsview.

It was the military’s attitude towards gender non-conforming people, and the military’s opinion that gender non-conformity was a mental illness that caused me to bury my desires.

Yes, I realize that switching hormones isn’t going to be easy, but at least today’s civilian world is far more accepting than the homophobic and misogynistic environment that I grew up in.

Yes, I do expect to encounter boneheads who think that what I am doing goes against “god’s will”.

Tough.

Yes, I do expect to encounter women that will accuse me of wearing “their” gender as a costume.

Tough.

For the most part my gender identity and my sexual orientation were formed in utero. The brain is literally hard wired for sex. If the human brain, or any other animal brain for that matter wasn’t hard wired for gender identity and sexual orientation, reproduction would have never worked.

Sex is a basic instinct.

There is no such thing as a female brain or a male brain.

But how the brains are wired very much depends on what hormones the fetus is exposed to in utero as well as the levels of those hormones, and the timing of the exposure.

Genes and chromosomes also play heavily into gender identity and sexual orientation.

Humans start developing as females even if they have XY chromosomes. However, once the fetus’s gonads develop into either testicles or ovaries and start secreting either androgen or estrogen the the fetus will either keep developing as a female or the development as a female will halt and the fetus will start developing as a male.

Persons that are born intersex prove that gender is not a simple binary male / female choice. We’ll never know the true prevalence of intersex persons throughout the entirety of human existence, but it would be safe to say that ever since mammals started determining sex via the presence of a second X or Y chromosome that intersex persons have been with us.

One type of intersex are persons with XY chromosomes that are born presenting as female. XY is supposed to be male, right? Well unlike what the bible thumpers would love for you to believe, due to Androgen Insensitivity intersex persons are often born with testicles in their abdomen, a vagina, but no uterus, all external genitalia presenting as female. These people are usually not detected to be intersex until they become teens and fail to go through puberty.

Their testicles are in their abdomen because due to the androgen insensitivity they failed to descend towards the scrotum. Basically the gonads stayed where they would have been had they developed into ovaries.

They have a vagina and external female genitals as both male and female fetuses have these until the gonads become testicles and the female tissues are repurposed for their male counterpart.

Males have mammary glands and nipples because they form before the gonads develop into ovaries or testicles.

How and when the brain starts adapting its wiring is anyone’s guess. Researchers know what the various areas of the brain do, but the exact wiring patterns that form and how they determine the characteristics of the fetus are still quite a few years away from truly being understood.

Trans people and queer people and gender non-conforming people have existed all throughout human history no matter how hard the Abrahamic religions have tried to erase them. To say that human beings are either genetically male or female, identify as male or female, and are only attracted to the opposite sex is quite laughable.

Class action update

There was some exchange of information between my lawyer and I this last week.

The DOJ seems to be willing to allow this matter to proceed as a class action.

There was some disagreement on the definition of what constituted a “class member” so hopefully my lawyer is able to have this definition properly defined.

Once my lawyer and the DOJ reach agreement on what constitutes a class member, then the court still has to accept. This shouldn’t be a problem though.

Beyond that I can’t give much more information as it’s all in the hands of the lawyers.

The adventure begins.

So, tomorrow I go in and get my blood withdrawn for my baseline.

Who knew that playing with hormones could be so interesting.

If everything goes as planned then I should start hormone therapy in a couple of weeks.

Still really don’t know what to expect, but it should be interesting.

On a different note, I can only wonder what I should have been doing with my life all of this time.

I honestly don’t like technical work. It’s something that I can do, but it’s not something that I really like.

But I do have the ability to read. And my ability to reason is very good.

Not bad for a grade 8 dropout, eh?

I just finished the upgrade project for the mixing boxes in the operating rooms. The old mixing boxes were obsolete, parts were unavailable, and the controls for them were unreliable and obsolete.

So, I went ahead and sourced out some brand new Price mixing boxes with integrated PIC controls.

The project got delayed a few months, but it was finally completed two weeks ago.

I’ve never worked with BACnet before earlier this year when I installed my first BACnet system to monitor a bunch or room temperatures in one for the buildings to economize the use of steam.

Since installing my first BACnet network back around March, I’ve expanded this to seven BACnet networks. The interesting thing about using the MSA BACnet routers is that I can log into the equipment no matter where I am in the world.

This screen shows the BACnet devices on the Operating Room network, network #11302. These are all of the brand new mixing boxes that were installed to replace the obsolete mixing boxes that were causing problems.

And the below shots show some of the information available from the mixing boxes.

I can do this work, but it’s not something that brings me any type of happiness or joy. In fact this brings me some discomfort.

See, there are a lot of guys at work that think that I’m an asshole and that I’m not teaching them this stuff because I want to make them look bad.

I never went to trade school, I never went to technical college, I never went to fucking anywhere to learn this stuff. No one taught me this shit. I just fucking read. Read and use some fucking logic.

I didn’t want to end up a power engineer. But power engineering was the only thing available to a person like me to keep me from a life of welfare wage jobs and intermittent homelessness.

I honestly have no fucking idea of what I wanted to do with my life. I was never supposed to have been alive at this point.

And with a non-stop chorus of my father and Captain Totzke screaming and yelling in my head, along with my never ending battles with major depression and severe anxiety, I don’t think that any options would have ever really been open for me.

I can only wonder what could have been my potential.

Saturday April 6th, 2024

On Monday I’m back to work.

It’s been a fun 15 days away from work.

Still have 20 days left of vacation time.

I think the first 7 days I barely got out of bed.

Dreamland is such a pleasant place to visit, so much nicer than reality.

The rest of the time I was getting out of bed super, super late.

Tuesday I’ve got an appointment with my nurse practitioner. I’ll have a pretty interesting decision to make.

He’s kinda apprehensive. He wants to know if I’ve ever had any involvement in the trans community before. I told him that I had been involved with some groups in the mid ’00s, but the fact that I’m a socially isolated loner meant that I didn’t stick around them for too long.

Beside, I don’t want to transition into a woman. I want to transition into neither. Not male. Not female.

Sex has been an unmitigated disaster for me.

To officially be neither, but to have bits of both intrigues me.

My NP has warned me that I’m pretty old and my masculine features are pretty hard set. I told him that I’m fine with that, that I’m not looking to be female. I just don’t want anything associated with male.

He cautioned me that people might not be too accepting.

I’m covered in tattoos from head to toe.

I have a lot of facial piercings.

I wear dresses and heels.

I work with trades that are normally dominated by “Real Manly Men….. Grrrrrr(tm)(c)”

At work I put up with people who won’t give me the time of day due to the way I am.

Having breasts and less muscle mass isn’t going to be much of a game changer for me.

And really, I’ve seen guys with bigger breasts than I intend to have. They usually call those “Molson Man Tiddies”…… but I digress.

The NP says that there is a risk of blood clot and stroke with taking oral or intramuscular Estrogen at my stage in life. Fine, dermal patch it will be.

The lawyers are still working away on the class action, nothing to report on that front.

I am beginning to accept that the DOJ and the DND will succeed in their endeavour to hide this mess from the public.

Sometimes I wonder if things would have been better off and if I listened to Richard’s warning to me about sticking my nose into this shit. Sure, knowing the truth about Canadian Forces Base Namao is one thing. But knowing the truth really hasn’t changed anything. Pedophiles and child molesters who had successful careers in the Canadian Armed Forces prior to 1998 and who got away with their crimes due to the 3-year-time-bar flaw and the summary investigation flaw get to enjoy their retirement knowing that they can’t ever be touched by military or civilian tribunals. And the victims of these perverts get laughed at by the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence because neither of these agencies can be compelled by any civilian authority to admit that these flaws impacted children living on the bases.

Until next time……..

DNA

So, I bit the bullet last week and I ordered an Ancestry DNA test.

I’ve always been kinda curious about my lineage.

According to my father, I’m my Uncle Al’s son.

But then again, according to Richard I’m Bill Parker’s son.

So, it’ll be interesting to see what comes back.

There are pictures of my brother and I as kids.

He has the same skin tone and brown eyes like my grandmother.

Me?

I look like my mother, and so does my brother.

But he also looks like he has First Nations blood.

Me, not so much.

My father was a horndog that would literally fuck anything that moved.

I’ll be interested to see if I get any hits for half-brothers and half-sisters that I didn’t know about.

He was with the Royal Canadian Navy for 6 years before he remustered into the airforce after the unification of the Canadian Forces in 1968.

But even when he was with the airforce he was often away on training exercises.

So there’s no telling how many panties he dropped.

And the thing with being in the Canadian Forces back then is when he said that he was going away on training exercises, did he really go away on training exercises?

Or were his “weekend training exercises” just panty raids.

But other than discovering how far and wide my old man distributed his tadpoles, I’m really curious about the maternal side of my family.

As I’ve said previously, I more or less know about the paternal side of my family. My paternal grandmother raised my brother and I for about 6 years of our lives as kids.

I did meet my paternal grandfather, albeit only for a few weeks over the 1982 xmas holidays.

I met both of my paternal uncles, uncle Doug and uncle Norman.

I met two of my paternal grandmother’s brothers, Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Johnny.

I even met my paternal grandmother’s sister, Aunt Karen.

So far as the maternal side of my family, I only vaguely remember uncle Al. I never would see uncle Al again after my father was posted from CFB Shearwater to CFB Summerside.

It will be interesting to see what comes up.

Resting Bitch Face………

I’ve come to the realization that I suffer from a bad case of “Resting Bitch Face”.

Here’s an album of my “Resting Bitch Face” in Canada, America, and Iceland…..

What causes Resting Bitch Face?

Probably a life time of being dead on the inside.

It’s hard at work because I gotta fake a smile all the time otherwise people seem to think that I’m going to snap.

It’s not that I hate or despise perky people. I just don’t feel the need to run around all day with an insane grin on my face.

In my house there was no need to smile.

The best thing around grandma, Richard, or Sue was to just adopt a blank face.

And growing up keeping a blank face also work at school as it kept the other kids and the teachers from knowing that anything was wrong at home.

When I went to the Westfield program in Edmonton from June 1982 to March 1983 we had to talk about our “feelings”. We also had to do “temperature check” every morning before classes so that we could express our feelings and emotions.

This did not go over well with me. I hated it. I hated talking about feelings.

Richard, Grandma, and the events of CFB Namao had killed off just about every emotion that I ever had.

Even to this day the worst thing that you could do is ask me to express emotions, or talk about my feelings, of talk about personal things.

“You don’t like to talk about personal things?”

Get the fuck outta here!

What the fuck is this blog then?

This blog is therapy and a testament.

Besides, I talk about what I want to talk about when I want to talk about it.

But Bobbie, you gotta talk about your feelings if you want to get better……..

Nope.

That’s not how this works.

You don’t get to ignore the past and then wash your hands of my dysfunction by further blaming me for being me.

Don’t forget, a lot of my dysfunction didn’t come from bad personal choice. Almost all of my dysfunction can be traced back directly to bad decisions made by members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

You didn’t honestly think that what I endured wasn’t going to have an effect on me, did you?

And blaming me for the dysfunction wasn’t going to cure me.

I think that this may be one of the reasons that I embraced an eccentric manner of dressing, what I lack on the inside I cover up with nice colours, patterns, and designs on the outside.