Blog

This is the transcript of a session I led at my company, a San Fransisco start-up in the solar energy space where I work as senior software engineer, and where I also volunteer on its rainbow ERG. The slides are available here.

Who Am I

My name is Maëlys (she/her), and here I’m a backend dev, but for most of my adult life I’ve also been actively involved in advocacy work on queer & trans issues. This is me in Parliament during Bill C-16, which added gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act:

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

• 2016 – 2019: A rise in violent anti-trans and anti-gay nationalist groups
• 2019 – Present: A wave of anti-trans groups under the pretence of women and gay rights

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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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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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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