Maëlys McArdle

Category: Life

Every other post.

  • Jumping into the unknown

    Jumping into the unknown

    Today was my last day of work. Another team member’s last day was yesterday. I’m the fourth person to resign over my team lead’s behaviour, though I only found this out after notifying my employer of my departure. There’s now one person on my team other than the lead himself.

    This is a scary move for me. I don’t have another job lined up and there’s the knowledge that working for only eight months at my last place of employment is a black mark on my resume. These considerations gave me pause when I was deciding whether to leave or continue weathering the work environment.

    Ultimately, it was the validation of knowing I wasn’t alone, the awareness that I had gained 30 lbs since starting due to stress, yet another condescending remark from my team lead, and an opportunity to drive across Canada and camp all through this beautiful country that pushed me to exit. I should remark that I worked very hard to try to correct the situation before I left, but the effort proved largely fruitless. I felt I made the right call when certain things happened in my final two weeks.

    I’m going to use this trip to take care of myself, clear my head, and continue the work of rebuilding my self-esteem. Once out West, I’ll stay there for a short while and see my partner and friends.

    After I fly back, I’ll take a month where I’m not looking for work. Instead, I’ll delve into two personal projects. A coding exercise as an excuse to learn new things, and a novel that I’m writing for my own benefit.

    I’m proud of myself. Younger me would have stayed at this job, too risk-averse to jump into the unknown. Too anxious to take the opportunities before me. All to my own detriment. How things have changed.

    See you on the flip side.

  • Of Hate and Monsters

    Of Hate and Monsters

    I waited to cross at the street corner. A sedan pulled up to turn with two men inside. One in his thirties, the other maybe in his fifties. Their windows were open.

    “T’est tu un gars ou une fille?” – Are you a guy or a girl? The driver was leaning over his friend, looking at me. A moment later he shouted “T’est un gars avec un pénis!” – You’re a guy with a penis! He was saying it in the same tone I’d expect a child to use.

    I was surprised at his outburst given my unremarkable appearance – I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. The car drove off. I stood there realizing that this, as so many times before it, would be entirely inconsequential for the perpetrator while being hurtful to me.

    Frustrated, I ran up to their car which was caught in traffic a block away and snapped some photos. The driver, in English, shouted “I hate you!” I wasn’t sure whether the passenger would exit the vehicle in response to this conflict escalation and vacated the area.

    Something like this happens semi-regularly in Ottawa. Last month it was a pedestrian mocking my voice as I talked to a friend and calling me a fag. I took his photo too. On the same day, while grocery shopping, a whole family joined in wondering to each other out loud if I was a man and a woman as they sat on their front lawn. I ignored them.

    The harassment I encounter is all related to how I am not perceived to fit in gender norms. There’s a few types of harassment I see over and over:

    • The perpetrators cannot discern whether I am a man or woman and state so out loud. It is sometimes followed by their pronouncement that I’m a man. Harassers of this type are almost always cisgender men ages 25 to 45, and almost always communicating by raised voices or shouting.
    • The perpetrators gender me as a man and doing something perceived for women. Buying clothes, using washrooms, getting my brows done, etc. Harassers of this type are frequently cisgender women communicating through body language.
    • On rare occasions perpetrators assault me, such as by grabbing my breasts to see if I’m a man or woman.

    There’s another type of harassment that I’ll include here, which is directed at all gender non-conforming individuals rather than me personally through public channels:

    I hear the word “hate” a lot being used when perpetrators like these are discussed. While they are harmful and must be stopped, they are rarely truly motivated by hate. What they actually are is transphobic and that’s not the same.

    Framing opponents as motivated with hate – an intense or passionate dislike towards non-confirming people – is an easy argument to make. There are benefits to arguments like that and I’m not ever going to get in the way of someone using it to stand up for my fundamental rights.

    The opponents I’ve encountered have never actually hated me. The men who shout those things do so to bond with their friends, and don’t think of me at all. My other-ness to them makes me an object, not a person they could relate to. That other-ness is legitimized through comedies that dehumanize trans people and movies that have cis people play trans roles. The men who shout things alone do so because of the rigid gender norms that they continue to be bombarded with. The women who view me as a man in a women’s space do so out of ignorance. The media they consume doesn’t include women like me, and therefore women like me doing things like changing in a change room after working out.

    None of these people have a pre-existing hatred towards me. What they feel is created upon seeing me and is either the result of gender non-conforming individuals being omitted or misrepresented.

    As for the Parliamentarians, pundits, and religious figures they are fighting a fictitious monster they’ve conjured out of their ignorance, for which real people like me are paying the price. They do not hate me, they cannot even see me. When they are confronted by people like me face-to-face, and they don’t have a crowd to egg them on, their tune changes. “Oh I don’t mean people like you,” they say. Because I’m not the monster they expected – no one is.

    By calling these people hateful, we are moving further away from being able to address what actually fuels their vitriol, because we too are making monsters and fighting those instead.

  • A Month After Bill C-16

    A Month After Bill C-16

    Warning: This article contains some deeply transphobic images and text.

    Following Bill C-16’s passing, I monitored Twitter and other social media platforms with respect to the bill. Initially, coverage was mostly positive. As the news of the bill’s passage left the current news cycle, the coverage turned sharply negative.

    Some of it was particularly nasty. Below are example of tweets from the past month:

    The situation on other social media platforms frequented by both proponents and opponents of the bill, YouTube and Facebook, wasn’t much different:

    Through the month, the news media landscape remained largely positive. MacLean’s had a great article, as did The Globe & Mail. There were notable exceptions. The Ottawa Sun argued that transgender people didn’t exist:

    Most dangerously, with Bill C-16, [Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] is expanding the legal enclave of “hate speech” by creating special “gender equity” rights for an entirely fictitious group.

    The National Post, which had written article after article opposing the bill before its passing, continued to portray it as an infringement of free speech, granting special rights, and likening it to the oppressive Soviet regime:

    Bill C-16 will give transgendered and non-gendered people the ability to dictate other people’s speech.

    In other words, failure to use a person’s pronoun of choice — “ze,” “zir,” “they” or any one of a multitude of other potential non-words — will land you in hot water with the commission. That, in turn, can lead to orders for correction, apology, Soviet-like “re-education,” fines and, in cases of continued non-compliance, incarceration for contempt of court.

    The CBC portrayed Bill C-16 as detrimental to [cisgender] women while arguing that trans women shouldn’t be permitted to use a women’s spa:

    Bill C-16 has the capacity to actually undermine women’s rights.

    The article was written by Meghan Murphy, who testified in Parliament that trans women were not women but were men who chose “to take on stereotypically feminine traits“.

    Why was the negativity continuing so loudly on social media when the bill was becoming old news everywhere else and the fear-mongering assertions hadn’t come true?

    While this was all going on, Jordan Peterson’s income from the crowd-funding site Patreon continued to increase, and he was now making over $55,000 a month. His fortune was in response to his YouTube videos asserting that Bill C-16 threatened his free speech. In the month since Bill C-16 has passed his monthly donations increased by nearly $10,000. Contrary to his assertions, his free speech hadn’t been impinged, much the same as it hadn’t under Toby’s Act, but generously rewarded.

    Jordan Peterson’s earnings on Patreon over time. His YouTube video lambasting Bill C-16 came out on September 27, 2016. On that day, he was making $1,177 a month. As of July 17, 2017 he made $56,470 a month.

    I mention Peterson because he is at the heart of this opposition. He popularized the argument that would define this opposition of this iteration of the trans rights bill. The last two iterations relied on the bathroom predator myth and targeting trans women and their access to gendered spaces. This one took a fresh angle, suggesting that non-discrimination protections for non-binary individuals threatened free speech. His stance went viral, and he quickly became far more popular than the very bill he was opposing. He became more popular in the United-States than in Canada, resulting in Americans getting riled up about Bill C-16.

    Popularity of Jordan Peterson, as opposed to Bill C-16. The popularity of Bill C-16 declined after it reached royal assent, while that of Jordan Peterson continued to rise. Jordan Peterson’s popularity, despite being rooted in Bill C-16, came to eclipse interest in the bill.
    In the last 30 days, Google searches for Jordan Peterson have come from the United-States.

    The bigger Jordan Peterson got, the bigger others made him. The media had a big hand to play with this. He was on television. He was testifying in Parliament. He was in newspapers. He was the subject of countless supportive editorials. His arguments that relied on othering non-binary individuals and presenting their equality as a threat to cisgender individuals were repeated over and over.

    I don’t fault Jordan Peterson for his popularity. He has awful views, but so do many people. He’s not the one who propelled himself into stardom; that requires other people to do that. Those others – especially those in the media who should have known better – are just as responsible for the spread of this vitriol.

    If this was an election year, I’d be concerned that this bill would be repealed. As it stands, the effects appear to be a poisoning of social media platforms for trans, non-binary and otherwise gender diverse individuals. I expect that the negative attention for the bill will die down with time as the attention of the libertarian click-tivists is captured by the next issue gone viral.

    I also expect that Jordan Peterson will try to stay prescient, as his significant monthly income on Patreon depends on it. This means he’ll need to release new material, which given the financial success of his campaign against Bill C-16, might mean continuing to portray minorities seeking equality as a threat. Time will tell.

  • Bill C-16 Passes

    Bill C-16 Passes

    Twelve years after it was first introduced to Parliament, the law to add gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act has finally passed. The final vote in the senate was 67 in favour, 11 against, and 3 abstentions.

    The day had started with conservative senators arguing that recognizing the rights of trans people infringed on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and brought up fears of sexual predators. These statements received applause from Conservatives in attendance.

    The inclusion of a new group in the Canadian Human Rights Act and in relevant hate crime sections of the Criminal Code does not improve the condition for those who are discriminated against. I would like to reiterate strongly that our laws, including the Criminal Code, are no place for an awareness campaign to assist in building understanding for those who do not fit into the colloquial “norm.”

    This will allow men to go into women’s change rooms and bathrooms across the country.

    If a person is unwilling, for religious or cultural reasons, to show a man one’s hair, how are we expected to force such a person to share the most private and intimate of spaces with someone who appears, in all physical and biological ways, to be of the opposite sex? I ask, honourable senators: Is it possible that, in passing this bill, we would be discriminating against our Muslim friends, as well as other groups, and their practice and policy of modesty?

    One of those potential consequences, as some witnesses in committee had mentioned, is that Bill C-16 in its current form may compel speech, which goes against a fundamental right that we uphold in Canada.

     

    Senator Plett’s motion to add one sentence “For greater certainty” — and if I may read the full sentence:

    For greater certainty, nothing in this Act requires the use of a particular word or expression that corresponds to the gender identity or expression of any person.

    …which was defeated, would have added language to this bill that would have given assurances of protecting free speech.

    To the “compelled speech” argument, a brilliant retort came from senator Lillian Eva Dyck:

    Even here, in the chamber, we do not have unlimited freedom of speech. […]

     

    As an example, recently when Senator Plett felt or perceived that Senator McPhedran had called him a bigot, he raised a point of privilege and the Speaker ruled in his favour.  […] Senator McPhedran said it was not her intention to offend Senator Plett. So there was a ruling made on the balance between what was said, what was intended and what was perceived. That’s what freedom of speech is all about, and that’s also what harassment is all about. If Senator McPhedran had continued to speak along those lines, then she could have been found guilty of harassment, but she did not do that.

     

    How does this relate to Bill C-16 and pronouns? I’ve already outlined that. If I or any other person were to call a trans woman by the pronoun “he,” that trans woman may well be offended. If that trans woman spoke to me and said to me, “Please, I would rather be called ‘she’ than ‘he’,” and I ignored that and continued to call that trans woman “he,” that would be discrimination. She could take this case to a human rights tribunal, and in all likelihood I would be found guilty of harassing her because I called her by the wrong pronoun and had done it willingly and as a way to discredit her, humiliate her or make her feel less than what she was really worth.

    The Minister of Justice Jody Wilson-Raybould, who had introduced Bill C-16, came by to sit down in the Senate gallery while we were observing the proceedings. Following these speeches against and in favour the bill came to a vote.

    The Speaker asked those in favour to yell “Yea”. So yelled numerous senators. Then he asked those against to yell “Nay”. The nay yells appeared to be louder. My heart stopped. “The yays have it”, declared the Speaker. Two senators stood up to trigger a roll call. The Speaker announced a half hour intermission.

    At 3:54 pm, the senate was far fuller than it had been throughout the proceedings. Each senator in favour stood up to have their vote recorded, then the senators opposed, and those abstaining, followed suit. The final vote was 67 in favour, 11 against. Plett was unsurprisingly among the eleven. The gallery cheered and stood up, to the security guard’s dismay, who was trying to get us to be quiet. The senate applauded, looking up at us as they did so.

    Afterwards, we headed to Senator Grant Mitchell’s office, the senator who had sponsored the bill. The Minister of Justice joined us. There was a brief chat, then they left, and we took the following photo.

    Some of us, myself included, headed to Dunn’s to celebrate, while other advocates headed to Nate’s. News outlets pickled up the story within hours with mostly positive coverage. The response was much more significant than it had been throughout the bill’s life cycle following its introduction. The National Post and the CBC published stories opposing the passage of the bill.

    I don’t feel particularly joyful at the news of the bill’s passage. There are benefits to C-16 that will permeate across the country. For instance, when someone in an HR department copies the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination for their own internal policy, it could now include gender identity and expression. Trans employees will benefit from that. When pollsters look to define populations, they might pull from the prohibited grounds list, and trans people will now be counted. Specific hate crime statistics will also be collected now that gender identity or expression is part of the Criminal Code. Individuals challenging institutional discrimination will have another argument to call upon. There’s lots of freebies that comes from the passage of this law, without it ever being used in a human rights case.

    This bill would of had a much greater impact had it passed when it was introduced twelve years ago. Perhaps my lack of celebratory feelings is related to thinking of all the people who were harmed while Parliament let these intervening bills die through action and inaction. The bill, though a positive step, has less impact now.

    Perhaps my muted response comes from knowing that this law alone won’t alone protect transgender, non-binary and otherwise gender variant individuals. It isn’t laws like this which significantly changes statistics in short order, like these ones I picked for trans youth:

    This is unsurprising given the attitudes of cisgender Canadians:

    These numbers are a sobering reminder that legislation represent a small component of a much larger effort. I do want to acknowledge that there’s a lot of positive changes lately though, and I’m pleased.

    I also want to recognize former NDP MP Bill Siksay, who first introduced this legislation as a private members bill in 2005, and current NDP MP Randall Garrison who took over the task of introducing it’s successors after Bill Siksay retired from politics. I am likewise thankful to Grant Mitchell the sponsor of the bill in the Senate and Amanda Ryan, Susan Gapka and the many others who tirelessly lobbied for this. This is a victory. This law was needed, and their work has made a difference.

  • Bill C-16 in the Senate

    Bill C-16 in the Senate

    This past month, the National Post published an article in opposition to Bill C-16, the legislation that would add gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act. It is the eighth such article by the newspaper opposing the anti-discrimination bill for trans, non-binary, and gender diverse individuals in the past year.

    In this piece, the newspaper articulated the view that the anti-bullying “Day of Pink” is harmful and that the inclusion of gender identity and expression in the law that prohibits advocating for genocide would curtail freedom of speech. The paper did so despite acknowledging the high bar to charge someone for advocating genocide, recognizing that it “involves an intent to destroy or kill an identifiable group and requires the consent of the provincial attorney-general.” They stated:

    With the criminal code, it means the section against hate propaganda — this is the one under which advocating genocide falls — is similarly enlarged to include the tiny percentage of people who don’t have the same gender identity as their biological sex.

     

    That means, presumably, that if someone like Eric Brazau were to fixate on the gender-fluid and say negative things about them, he too could be charged with advocating genocide.

     

    No wonder Peterson raised the alarm.

     

    Defy the stultifying parameters around public discussion that exist in this suffocating country at your peril.

    Such arguments blending free speech with violent overtones have not only been promulgated by the national newspaper but also in Parliament.

    Senator Don Plett, perhaps the most vocal opponent of Bill C-16, invited Gad Saad to serve as a witness on the Senate committee for the legislation. The Concordia professor had no professional or personal experience with trans or non-binary individuals but regularly made disparaging remarks about them on Twitter and in his YouTube show, The Saad Truth. In the private event organized for him on Parliament Hill afterwards, Gad Saad suggested that including “gender identity” and “gender expression” in the Canadian Human Rights Act was not merely an impediment to free speech, but would lead to the “death of the West.” As he stated in Parliament earlier the same day, the “slippery slope of totalitarian lunacy awaits us.”

    Gad Saad’s Event

    On Twitter, the Concordia professor continued to ridicule trans and non-binary people advocating for their rights.

    He wasn’t the only witness to blend freedom of speech arguments with suggestions of calamity. University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, also invited by Plett, said in his testimony that these rights would infringe freedom of speech and were a “vanguard issue” in an “ideological war” with a “neo-Marxist base“. That these protections would lead to “re-education committees“. That trans advocates were “unforgivable and reprehensible“. That the request for these rights showed “how deeply a culture of victimization has sunk into our society“. Like Gad Saad, Peterson regularly admonished trans and non-binary people on Twitter and YouTube.

    Terms like “genocide”, “war”, “murderous ideology”, “re-education”, “death of the West” were being used by Peterson and Saad when discussing the inclusion of “gender expression” and “gender identity” to federal anti-discrimination protections.

    Peterson and Saad’s arguments in Parliament largely targeted the rights of non-binary individuals. They were joined by witnesses who took aim at transgender women. Here the rhetoric shifted from language around totalitarianism and atrocities to rape.

    Paul Dirks, the pastor behind the “Woman Means Something” campaign, explained that trans women were predators and a threat to women:

    But there is one piece of evidence that’s important in this, and that is that there exists amongst trans women certain criminal patterns that do not exist at all amongst women.

    In the Okanagan in B.C. recently, in 2017, women were being kicked out of women’s shelters because they objected to having a [trans woman] in their space where they are unclothed. We have all sorts of examples where these predators are getting in.

    Dirks stated on his website that being inclusive of trans women was an “erasure of women’s identity and idealogical rape“. Members from the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter asserted that transgender women did not exist but rather were men who took on sexist stereotypes and that “gender expression” included rape. Members from Pour les droits de femmes du Québec stated that transgender women had no place in women’s washrooms, change rooms, sports, prisons, and shelters under implied threats of sexual assault:

    With regard to prisons, everyone remembers Colonel Russell Williams, who was found guilty on 92 charges, including murdering two women and numerous sexual assaults. Colonel Williams liked to take pictures of himself in his victims’ underwear after committing his crimes. Why might he not decide that he would be better off in a women’s prison?

    The witnesses had deep misconceptions about trans women and non-binary people yet were treated as authorities on the matter in Parliament and given extensive time to air their views. Those misconceptions were then further distributed through outlets such as the CBC. Opponents largely had neither professional nor personal experience with trans people, which is why they spoke to hypotheticals in asserting their opposition whereas proponents spoke to the present and measurable discrimination that trans and gender variant individuals encounter.

    As I write this, it’s the day after Peterson’s testimony and Bill C-16 just passed the senate committee. This is the furthest this legislation has gone in the 12 years since former NPD MP Bill Siksay introduced the first such bill and in the 7 years I’ve been following its various incarnations. Every previous iteration – Bill C-392 (2005), Bill C-326/C-494 (2006), Bill C-389 (2009), Bill C-276/C-279 (2011) – was killed. C-16 is now likely to become law by the end of June. A conclusion to this legislative process will hopefully mark the end of these committees, and thus of inviting transphobic bigots from across Canada to spread their harmful misconceptions through Parliament and the media coverage that ensues.

    Opponents have used rhetoric around rape, murder, war and genocide when describing their fears of what would happen in a world where trans women such as myself could change after working out at the gym. This isn’t a fringe view: it’s advertised in Parliament and in our national newspapers.That so many influential people equate the simple things I do with such violence is scary. I ground myself in the knowledge that things are the safest they’ve ever been.