Maëlys McArdle

Author: Maëlys McArdle

  • More troll than threat

    More troll than threat

    In the past five years, I’ve documented two new forms of transphobic organizing in Canada:

    This is in addition to the organizing by various Conservative parties and Christian entities who have long tried to eradicate gender and sexual diversity. In recent years the nationalist groups have not been able to physically intimidate queer people in their own spaces as a result of the pandemic and the cessation of in-person events, with some exceptions. So I want to focus instead on this new wave of activism that has co-opted the language of women’s and gay rights for prejudicial ends.

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  • Ottawa’s Covid Party

    Ottawa’s Covid Party

    Lead Up

    FOX News, Tea Party & Trumpism

    A dozen years ago, I went to Washington, D.C. for a Tea Party mass event with my friend Jon and partner Jay. The movement at the centre of this this “Restoring Honor Rally” arose in the wake of Obama’s election; its makeup almost exclusively white people, aggrieved at the social and economic shifts that took place over their lifetime and culminating with the election of this first Black President. They wanted their America back; or at least a pseudo-1950’s straight white protestant vision of it.

    The rally was the brain-child of then-FOX News personality Glenn Beck. Christian persecution myths shared space with military worship and conspiracy theories. At the time that I figured that this movement was going to fizzle out and I wanted to witness this historical curiosity. I was wrong; the Tea Party would metamorphose into Trumpism and its “Make America Great Again” slogan, and lead a dark chapter in American history.

    Despite the dark perceptions the people in attendance at the rally held, as individuals they were pleasant and the vibe festive. That’s been common to the right-wing fringe events I’ve observed over the years: people in isolation are almost always nice to strangers. Even to strangers like me stroking my boyfriend’s leg at a time where homophobia was rampant. It’s what they do when humanity is lost; though communal action or when you’re seen as part of an out group, that things take a dangerous turn.

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  • “The first trans person in Canada”

    While researching the archives of The Ottawa Journal, I found this article from the March 22, 1954 edition of the paper, on Page 30. It denotes “Canada’s first sex change” of Frances Marie Jefferson, age 24.

    I always find any assertion of “first” with the media deeply dubious; first known to the author no doubt. Another article from two days previous refers to her as Josephine Jefferson age 21; I suspect this is erroneous. It might be tempting to apply contemporaneous labels of intersex or trans to her, but you’d really need her own voice to do that and that’s missing.

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  • Comically uninformed books about trans people

    Comically uninformed books about trans people

    Some history

    Up until very recently, gender diverse people were shut out of the publishing world.

    If they wanted to exchange ideas in print, they had to do it in their own newsletters and zines such as in Friedrich Radszuweit’s Das 3. Geschlecht – Die Transvestiten (translation: “The 3rd sex – the transvestites”, 1930-1932) or Rupert Raj’s Gender Review (1978-1986).

    Not that there weren’t books on trans people, but they were either medical texts written by cisgender people such as Magnus Hirschfeld/Max Tilke’s Die Transvestiten (1910), Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966) and Richard Green/John Money’s Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment (1969), or they were autobiographies of trans anti-celebrities such as Lili Elbe’s Fra mand til kvinde (translation: “From man to woman”, 1931), Christine Jorgensen’s A Personal Autobiography (1967), Dianna Boileau’s Behold, I am a woman (1972) and April Ashley’s Odyssey (1982). Publishers weren’t interested in trans voices otherwise; this was a society that regarded queer people as dangerously unfit and outlawed trans women wearing dresses.

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  • The Lure of Thoughtlessness

    Being in my mid-thirties I’ve witnessed a revolution in day-to-day activities.

    The fundamentals look the same: spending time at work, making meals at home, driving places. The details are completely different. Everything in the mid-90s took more time and was less accessible. Work meant waiting in traffic. It could take a month between when taking photos and having a picture in your hands. Depositing money meant driving to the bank, and if it was a cheque, waiting days for it to cash. Paper maps and dictionaries were time-consuming necessities. Letters took a week to arrive. Music was limited to the small collection of CDs you purchased or FM radio. You could only get delivery for pizza and Chinese food; anything was an outing to a restaurant. If you were queer, especially in a smaller town, meeting new people was constrained to who your friends knew, the gay bar, and events.

    It’s a completely different world now, the smart phone being the latest harbinger of change. This has been wonderful, but there are two big caveats. One is with the platforms with suggested content, infinite scrolls, and/or regular notifications: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, even Netflix. They are engineered to capture your attention, with content tailored to you specifically, drawn from millions of user-generated options. When one app closes, there’s another to open. I’m not one to believe that books are inherently a superior form of entertainment, but unlike older forms of distraction, these are easy to unintentionally lose half a day to mindless scrolling.

    We need to have time to engage with intentional activities, or even be occasionally bored, and be wary of being sucked into unintentional distractions. We need to be with our thoughts. Turning away is getting harder and harder as the content increases in personal relevance, thanks to clever engineering and opening these apps becomes a habit while a noticeable void is felt in their absence.

    The other big caveat is with the inability to disconnect as a result of smart phones and remote work. For example, I get work messages at midnight, and if I’m on-call, I need to respond immediately or I risk losing my job. I am not permitted to simply work 9-5; I must be there for work 24/7 but I’m not paid a cent more for it. Even when not on call I get emails at all hours, and meetings can be at any time because the staff is spread across time zones. When people take vacations, they will be contacted while away to do work for some urgent matter or other. So again, this revolution which made remote working possible, saving a daily commute and opening up job opportunities, also prevents the ability to take mental space for oneself. It doesn’t have to be like this.

    We’re so lucky to have so much more free time and new ways to forge connections thanks to this revolution. We need to ensure to take care of our mental well-being by being intentional about how much time we use aimless distraction. We also need right-to-disconnect laws and a culture shift that accounts for this revolution.