A week before starting to write this article, neo-Nazis showed up to harass families attending a storytelling event in Toronto. They were incensed that the story was read by a person wearing outfits associated with a different gender. Among the detractors was the leader of the Canadian Nationalist Party and members of White Lives Matter Toronto.
In the past year, gender diverse people across Canada and those who associate with them at story times like this and other events have faced violence that includes:
This is terrorism.
Nearly every publicized event from the past year featuring a gender non-conforming person has faced intimidation. To my knowledge, every single trans person placed in the public spotlight has been bombarded with hate. Add to that that nearly every trans person I know has experienced mistreatment for being so, shaping where they go and what they do to this day.
The current fixation on drag and trans people is fuelled by a conservative movement that lost the fight against same-sex marriage in the United-States and found a new proxy for their desire to return to the gender roles as they understood it in childhood. Their thought leaders are uncomfortable with a world that accepts autonomy for women, androgynous appearance, gay parents, etc. Instead of growing into accepting the diversity around them, these emotionally underdeveloped authority figures and their followers find it easier to impose a homogeneity that only existed in their depths of their ignorance.
The dog whistles and banners under which the perpetrators identify have changed with the times, but the underlying hostility to gender non-conformity and violence is nothing new. Before pride events paused for the pandemic, they were being attacked by Christian white nationalists:
Most people are quick to denounce Neo-Nazis, but institutions in this country have failed to do the same to those who espouse comparable beliefs absent of swastikas.
Police are disinterested or antagonistic towards intervening against physical intimidation, leaving it up to queer community members to organize protection. This has its limitations, and events are often cancelled due to substantiated fears of violence. Canadian businesses like Shopify defend helping outlets like Libs of TikTok acquire funding, even though they’re an anti-trans hate group linked to bomb threats against children’s hospitals and inspiring a mass shooter. News outlets like the National Post and The Epoch Times monetize hatred from the likes of Barbara Kay. At a time where disinformation around care for trans youth is creating real damage in the form of efforts to legislate them out of existence, libraries are defending amplifying that disinformation.
Liberals and institutions in this country are failing in their duty to acknowledge and counter the wrongs being perpetrated. They are disregarding the violence while favouring a shallow absolutism around platforming hateful rhetoric that accepts this hate but only against minorities whose persecution bears no significant political or financial consequences.
Furthermore, by letting the terrorists act with impunity and defending their conspiracy theories as legitimate discourse, by ignoring how this panic manufactured by conservatives is radicalising people into this terrorism, it sets the stage for worse. In the UK as well as much of the US, following the political success of portraying trans visibility as a threat, conservative governments transitioned their laws and institutions from an exclusionary stance towards trans people to a blatantly exterminationist one. Terrorism became genocide, but only because there was sufficient silence from the very businesses, politicians and organizations that then show up at Pride to curate their image.