On September 20, 2024, a meeting of the Mount Royal Faculty Association (MRFA) was held. One of the items on the agenda was updating members on the Frances Widdowson case. The MRFA did not allow Widdowson to attend the meeting to defend herself (she was escorted out of the room), resulting in her being attacked by MRU faculty members Scott Murray and Mary-Lee Mulholland – the chairs of the Department of Humanities and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology respectively (see the document below).
One of the more bizarre accusations was made by Murray. He claimed that Widdowson had made up the phrase the “Gang of 17” to describe some of the faculty members who she claims had mobbed her because she allegedly wanted to draw parallels between them and the “Gang of Four” in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Widdowson was falsely accused because she was not the one who coined the phrase “Gang of 17”, as Murray claimed. Instead, it was Michael Ford, the lawyer for MRU, who referred to this group thusly. He referred to this twice on June 12, 2023, and this phrase was then repeated by Elizabeth Evans, the previous Provost and Vice-President, Academic, on June 14, 2023.
The animosity of Mulholland and Murray towards Widdowson is related to their support for trans activism. As Widdowson asked questions about trans activism when she was a professor at MRU, she became a target of those who thought it should not be questioned. In addition, Murray’s partner is D.A. Dirks, who is a non-binary identifying trans activist who wants to be called by “they/them” pronouns. In Dirks’ classes, Dirks lauds the validity of WPATH’s standards of care. A video and transcript of one of these classes is posted below.
WPATH was recently exposed by the journalist Mia Hughes in the WPATH Files. Widdowson and Hughes will be sitting down for an interview on March 27, 2025 to discuss the most significant claims that Dirks is teaching to MRU students. They will also link this to Widdowson’s case, and how the climate that existed at universities like MRU shows why it is difficult to oppose the claims of trans activists.
Murray, Mulholland and Dirks’ support for trans activism has meant that they have been an opponent of Widdowson’s since she extended an invitation to Meghan Murphy to participate in the Rational Space Network’s Critical Thinking Series event “Does Trans Activism Negatively Impact Women’s Rights?” with the trans activist Julie Rei Goldstein.
As a result of this event, Widdowson began to receive comments on her course evaluations in 2019 that students did “not feel comfortable” in her class because of her “reputation regarding social issues”. Widdowson’s attempts to alert authorities to this problem was then used by MRU to justify her firing because students had complained in this way.
This event then appeared to be one of the reasons why D.A. Dirks was invited to Arts Faculty Council by the Dean of Arts, Jennifer Pettit, to give a presentation on why trans people thought they were not being respected at MRU. Dirks invited Nathan Lawley, a trans identifying student, to co-present. In this presentation, Lawley asserted that, to respect trans people, faculty members should not “post transphobic events”.
No questions were allowed to be asked during the presentation. On May 15, 2023 at Widdowson’s arbitration hearing, Widdowson learned from her Chair at this time, Duane Bratt, that this was done intentionally to stop Widdowson from asking questions.
Widdowson wanted to ask Dean Pettit what was considered to be a “transphobic event”, and whether the event with Murphy and Goldstein was believed to be “disrespectful”, but she was prevented from posing the question.
Widdowson recorded the presentation and shared it with a number of people who typically attended Arts Faculty Council but were absent. She also shared the recording with other faculty who were not members of the Faculty of Arts to raise the alarm about the strange activist character of the presentations. Because the presentations were recorded and shared, they were criticized by the publication The New Telegraph. (Widdowson did not know Alexander Dhaliwal and did not share the recording with him).
A few weeks later, on January 24, 2020, Mary-Lee Mulholland made the following motion and it was seconded by Scott Murray.
Jennifer Pettit, the Dean of Arts, also made the following comment at the January 24, 2020 meeting.
To respond to these sentiments, Widdowson put foward another motion in Arts Faculty Council on September 18, 2020.
In October 2020, an email was sent out announcing that Dirks would be presenting a session “evaluating, discussing, and developing strategies to address white supremacy culture in the MRFA”.
On October 13, 2020 Jonathan Kay became aware of the email and Tweeted about it. These Tweets were responded to by “Dr. Tony” and satirically by Frances Widdowson using her satirical character francXs mcgrath.
Because of Kay’s Tweets, Dirks’ white supremacy culture workshop was covered by The Post Millenial on October 16, 2020.
On October 23, 2020, D.A. Dirks facilitated the session on “white supremacy culture”, and notes of it were provided to the membership.
This led Widdowson, on November 2, 2020, to try to get information on how much the union paid Dirks to host the workshop.
On November 5, 2020, D.A. Dirks filed a harassment complaint against Widdowson.
Widdowson was then investigated by Jennifer Hawkins – a lawyer paid for by MRU. The documents pertaining to this investigation can be accessed here. Because of her one Tweet satirizing a cartoon in one of Dirks’ pronouns workshops about “misgendering fatigue”, as well as satirizing the LGBTQ initialism as TGBQ2SLMNLOP, Widdowson was found to have violated three MRU policies and two laws (the Alberta Occupational Health and Safety Act and the Alberta Human Rights Act).
On May 14, 2021, Scott Murray gave a presentation where he commented on what he called “phantom threats to academic freedom”. Murray implied that Meghan Murphy’s arguments in the “Does Trans Activism Negatively Impact Women’s Rights?” event were “homphobic and transphobic”.
In July 2021, both Mulholland and Murray were involved in the retweeting of posts that delegitimized Widdowson’s presence at MRU.
On December 23, 2021, two days after Widdowson was fired, the political scientist Bruce Gilley posted the following Tweet.
This led Murray to send the following email to Gilley
Bruce Gilley responded by writing the following in his article “Disrobing the Aboriginal Stalinists on a Canadian Campus” on December 29, 2021.
A year and a half later, on May 16, 2023, Mary-Lee Mulholland testified in Widdowson’s arbitration hearing. Mulholland’s allegations against Widdowson were universally refuted. Most significantly, this included Mulholland’s account of the March 5, 2021 Arts Faculty Council meeting. A documentary of this meeting is available here.
Also significantly, Mulholland made false allegations that were refuted about an MRFA meeting on May 8, 2020. Widdowson had a recording of this meeting and had developed a transcript of it.
Below is Widdowson’s transcript of the questions Widdowson asked at this MRFA meeting:
Finally, Mulholland made an accusation that Widdowson had disrupted an event that she had helped to organize called the “Others Within” on February 10, 2017.
Mulholland’s claim was shown to be false because Widdowson had organized another event that same day featuring David Newhouse, and would not have been able to attend
In conclusion, it must be recognized that, on September 20, 2024, an eyewitness stated that Scott Murray had claimed that D.A. Dirks had been deeply hurt and harmed by one Tweet where Widdowson satirized a cartoon about misgendering fatigue and the LGBTQ initialism. Although Widdowson asserted in the arbitration that she would not, if she had to do things over again, have referred to an “MRU colleague”, the one Tweet should not have been found to be “harassment”. In fact, if Widdowson had been investigated by Steve Eichler, the lawyer hired by MRU to investigate the “Gang of 17”, Widdowson would not have received this finding according to his standards.
Members of the Mount Royal Faculty Association need to know about this as Mulholland and Murray were given an open forum to attack Widdowson without Widdowson being able to defend herself. It is such an atmosphere that encourages self-censorship in universities and prevents professors from discussing the harmful aspects of trans activism that Mia Hughes and Frances Widdowson will be examining on March 27, 2025.
