Ten years ago, I wrote a blog post where I talked about my focus shifting to queer and trans issues. I was ignorant at the time, and spent the next decade unlearning, and growing. I’ve reached another inflection point in my life where I’m exhausted and am now stepping away from this work.
I wrote that first blog post in my early twenties. I’m in my early thirties now and there’s a cohort of queers a full generation younger than me. They are freshly traumatized with newly acquired vocabulary validating the wrongs they previously couldn’t name. They have an outsider’s perspective which lets them be incensed at injustice in a way that gets lost with better knowing the institutions that produce them. They are more inclusive than we were at their age, although still quite exclusive, and favour immediacy. They aspire for big picture changes.
They need space to go through the experiences we went through and grow. I need space from that type of advocacy and its unbridled anger, all-or-nothing approach, selective dependability, clique based on desirability, and relationship turmoil. The older queers I know have pivoted from system-level change to working at a smaller scale, where their impact is immediately felt, and started doing so in a professional capacity. They are social workers, nurses, union reps, librarians, executive directors, and academics. Their activism is intertwined with their jobs.
I don’t have one of these occupations, nor am I a user of services, and this makes me an outsider. We don’t need more people like me. We need insiders. It takes insiders for things to change in the small measures necessary to transform the social landscape. It takes insiders at Health Canada and Blood Services Canada to end the ban on blood donations from gay men and trans women. It takes insiders in the Ministry of Health to stop denying coverage for reproductive care to pregnant trans men. It takes insiders in LGBT community organizations across Ottawa to stop excluding services to francophone newcomers. It takes insiders at retirement homes and their corporations to make elderly gay people from going back in the closet. It takes insiders in Catholic schools to stop the messaging that queer and trans youth are unwanted. It takes insiders in research positions at universities to ask the right questions to change policy discourse. It takes insiders to make the little changes everywhere. At this point in my life, there’s not really a place for me and I want to use the energy I’ve been investing in others to work on my own growth.
A great many things have happened in the past ten years to be more inclusive of queer and trans people though these gains have been imbalanced towards white, settler, and affluent individuals. Some things, however, remain much the same. Housing needs to be a right, sex work needs to be seen as work, education needs to be affordable, mental health care covered by the province, jobs accessible, and basic income guaranteed. A lot of trans people are still dying in Ottawa and communities across Canada and they don’t always look like the packaged-for-cis-audiences trans narratives on television. Things are not okay. There was a funeral this weekend. But I can’t do this anymore.
I conclude with two observations I’ve made a decade apart about the nature of prejudice to show that it, or perhaps I, haven’t changed that much. Here from a piece I wrote ten years ago about opponents of equality for gay people:
It’s hard to understand those that sit on the other side of the fence. An emotion that could easily be confused for hate fuels these people. They subscribe to inducing great torment, and yet are completely uncaring of this fact. It’s a particularly dangerous human state, one which is passive, and doesn’t involve violence nor rage. After all, these are rational people, behaving in a calm intelligent manner. Yet, in this one aspect of their livelihoods, they are able to commit themselves to such vast societal destruction.
In the end, a lot of prejudice isn’t fueled by hate, but by discomfort, and only with vulnerability can it be addressed meaningfully. Though discomfort is more innocuous-sounding than hate, actions (or lack thereof) rooted in discomfort can be indistinguishable in their cruelty and harm done to those motivated by hate.
You don’t measure vulnerability by the amount of disclosure. You measure it by the amount of courage to show up and be seen when you can’t control the outcome.
Brené Brown, The Call to Courage
The dominant narrative in contemporary Canadian society is that prejudice is a thing of the past. That racism ended with the U.S. civil rights movement, sexism with sexual liberation, and colonialism with confederation. These myths prevail even as the facts disproving them shout in our faces.
This dissonance between perception and reality is of little surprise given that these narratives around prejudice are driven by the political landscape, executive boards, and media – all of which are currently dominated by affluent white men*. Theirs isn’t a malicious role so much as reflective of the smallness of their shared experience. But it takes more than affluent white men increasing awareness to change things; it takes institutions and organizations looking like the people they serve in substantive numbers at the highest echelons. There can be no tangible improvement as long as affluent white men make up the majority of decision makers.
In the end, a lot of prejudice isn’t fueled by hate, but by discomfort, and only with vulnerability can it be addressed meaningfully. Though discomfort is more innocuous-sounding than hate, actions (or lack thereof) rooted in discomfort can be indistinguishable in their cruelty and harm done to those motivated by hate.
Discrimination is normalized
Before going further it’s worth listing some of the discrimination that is normalized in the current climate. The threshold for acceptability into unacceptability seems to be the point where today’s affluent white men* would immediately benefit from its resolution.
For some examples of marginalization, let’s look at how women are excluded from positions of influence:
In the 42nd parliament (2015-2019), only 26% of MPs are women. Male perspectives define the legislature.
In 2018, 148 women and girls are killed in Canada. 90% of their killers are men. In Toronto, a self-proclaimed incel targets women in a mass murder. Women are harassed by men for simple activities like walking down thesidewalk.
In 2017, the Quebec government implements a ban on face coverings, designed to prevent women from accessing public services and obtaining jobs in the public sector if they are visibly Muslim.
To this day, the Canadian government refuses to treat indigenous peoples as equal partners. In 2007, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is adopted with 144 nations voting in favour. Canada was one of the only four nations to oppose the declaration. In 2018, the private member’s Bill C-262 is introduced by NDP Romeo Saganash to harmonize laws with the declaration. As of the time of this writing, it looks likely to be killed by delay.
This does not have to be our reality. We could be on the path to reconciliation, work to end sexism in a tangible way, and treat all faiths with equal respect. It just takes people in the right positions choosing differently. They do not.
The reasons are twofold: the affluent white men* in decision making positions don’t have to and don’t want to. The don’t have to part is easy enough: they are not personally negatively impacted by this discrimination, the people they are accountable to don’t ask for it, and there’s no legislation to mandate it. As change carries risk of losing eminence, maintaining the status quo is more desirable.
Then there’s why they don’t want to. There is one class of people who don’t believe there are widespread experiences of discrimination. They persevered and were able to make it, and so if others did not have the same outcome, it’s attributed to character. They are not inclined to appreciate the additional barriers specific to separate groups. This class is not the focus of this article.
There is a second class of people who do believe discrimination exists but are unwilling to make the decisions that would challenge it. Members of both classes share the belief that they personally would be worse off were they to push for this change. The former because they don’t want the world this change would bring. The latter because pushing has consequences. Either way, the end result is the same.
It is this second class which believes prejudice exists and is morally wrong but make successive decisions to uphold it that is the focus of this article.
Acknowledging the cost
For affluent white men*, doing the right thing has a cost. Money spent on accessible entrances, washrooms and spaces means less money spent on them. Inclusive hiring practices means more restrictions on how they behave. Respecting indigenous sovereignty means they can’t operate unilaterally. Gender balanced executive boards mean less job openings for them. They give up something.
Even smaller gestures, like friends speaking up when hearing a joke that belittles a group of people, or teachers openly vocalizing for a GSA in a Catholic school that’s opposed them, lose something by doing so. Maybe it’s the esteem in which they’re held. Maybe it’s the work environment. They feel uncomfortable.
Bearing these costs is a very difficult proposition for affluent white men* to accept when doing so is entirely voluntary. It predisposes them to stand back, be silent, and presume others will carry out the change in a kind of bystander effect.
Change requires losing control on outcomes
It’s difficult for affluent white men* in decision making positions to accept a cost when they don’t have to. It’s even harder to accept when they can’t predict what the cost will be. What would their life look like if decision makers in the government stopped perpetrating this slow-motion genocide against indigenous people? What would their life look like if decision makers in companies decided that half of managers should be women? Or more immediately, what would their work environment look like if they spoke up when their colleague made a sexist joke?
For tangible change to happen, these men need to be okay with being vulnerable. As Brené Brown put it in that opening quote, that means doing things knowing the outcome can’t be controlled. It’s scary and a reality that those on the receiving end of discrimination know too well. They have no choice. That vulnerability is foisted upon them every day.
Discrimination will continue for generations because decision makers preserve their sense of safety by keeping to insignificant changes or voicing support only in the company of like-minded individuals. Only when they accept to be uncomfortable and assume the cost of doing what they know is right will they be able to say that they stood up to prejudice.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King, The Trumpet of Conscience
*Specifically affluent, Christian heritage, white, settler, able-bodied, straight, cisgender, men who own a car and a house. Or individuals who fit eight out of ten criteria.
Content Warning: This article mentions a previous way of thinking that conflates androgynous trans men and cis butch women. It also details transphobic harassment.
My transition started as the cumulation of little changes that eventually became something.
There isn’t a definite start. I didn’t like what puberty did to my genitals, which hit me the summer I turned 14, but it was what it was. I kept having crushes on lesbians in university, but tossed that off to being unlucky. It wasn’t universal – I had had a crush on a straight guy in high school. I remember falling asleep in uni wishing I had been born a girl, but transitioning never occurred to me. I grew up in a home that compared gay relationships to bestiality, with a step-dad that admired John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. As bad as it would have been to be gay, to end up like the large personalities ridiculed on daytime television was inconceivable.
I don’t know when things changed. I didn’t think anything of it when the first person I met during frosh in 2003 told me she had wondered whether she was masculine or a trans guy – settling on masculine. I was 18. In my third or fourth year, I joined a forum for trans men. That was in 2007-2008 and by then I was already openly pansexual and kinky. In 2009, I was dating a trans man.
Come 2010, I was following Tumblr accounts of trans guys and androgynous women unsure if I wanted to be them or be with them. I attended the Trans Day of Remembrance that year with my partner, watching NDP MP Bill Siksay promote bill C-389. My immediate social network was soon almost all trans people. This wasn’t conscious; many were originally friends of friends; many came out as trans after having befriended them. Like has a way of finding like.
In the winter 2011 – 2012, I started to alter the way I looked in the mirror of my bathroom. I bought a RodeoH in the spring of 2012, and come a year later I also had a hollow dildo and my first binder. I tried to make myself look more like the trans guys I saw. I tucked. There was safety and comfort in exploring gender through masculinity, but also a shame around appropriating the experiences of others.
I wrote the following in March 2013:
I’m MAAB, and I’m ambivalent with being read as male and he’d. I don’t hold to it, but since my gender expression is masculine then whatever.
But my sex is different. More specifically, the bottom area. I’m okay with a flat chest, I want the flat chest. But not the bottom. I wish there was a script I could follow to correct that that was supported here.
If I followed the script that is available, I’d be a butch woman who would bind. Not sure that that’s me.
By then I was having conversations with friends about hormone replacement therapy. I decided to give it a shot in May 2013, later explaining:
I knew I needed to quench this disconnect with my body.
At first, that was in the form of seeking bottom surgery. Really I could live on as a guy, I just needed to fix what was down there. If I contemplated hormone replacement therapy, it was just to follow the narrative to access surgery.
Outwardly transitioning wasn’t really an option I thought. I had no hopes that I could live on as stealth and that was really discouraging. I feared rejection. Meanwhile, all the trans women I was aware of seemed to be very feminine, which further made me feel isolated as that wasn’t my path. Genderqueer was more apt but that seemed to only to mean female-assigned-at-birth. I felt like I didn’t really belong anywhere.
I kept thinking more on transitioning, and I realized that no – actually I wanted what the hormones would bring me. Belonging be damned. Bottom surgery started to get less important. I reflected much in this period. I realized that despite all these fears of going at it alone and forever being ostracized in a deeply transphobic society, that it was better than the alternative.
Around this time I saw a YouTube video of butch trans women. I had known a few feminine trans guys, but this was the first time I saw trans women with a masculine gender expression:
This 2011 video featuring butch trans women opened the doors to transition for me. Up until this point, all the trans women I knew were very feminine, which didn’t match how I saw myself.
It was the first time I saw someone like me. The video legitimized in me what I had felt, and what I had been pursuing seemingly on my own. Further helping things was that one of my friends from DEFCON had come out and been instantly named/gendered correctly by our mutual friends – including the one who had a Southern drawl. Her coming out helped make feasible what had seemed impossible then – being accepted as a woman having looked like me and having had cisgender friends like mine.
I made great strides in my self-discovery over the summer of 2013. I started the summer going by they/them pronouns. A friend helped me buy my first bra and skirts; I shaved my arms and later my legs; I went out in public in feminine attire for the first time. Each of these milestones was accompanied by the removal of a psychic burden; and I realised that I had deferred to a masculine and then a non-binary identity because I didn’t think I could be accepted as a butch woman. Only I could. Each of these steps was making me feel better about my body. I wrote later:
Weeks before Pride, that friend and I went to Value Village where I picked up two skirts. I wore that skirt for the first time outside a week before Pride. I was so afraid before then that I would be destroyed by comments from judgy passerbys. I had witnessed such homophobic and transphobic vitriol over the years in Ottawa. But at the same time, I needed to do this for me. So I femmed up and walked outside.
I did get inappropriate comments. But I didn’t care – because what I noticed as I walked down the street is that virtually no one so much as gazed in my direction. That lack of attention was in itself so affirming that when someone finally did say something nasty, I just didn’t give a shit.
Pride came, and I wore that skirt again. I felt so real.
Two days later, I announced that my name had changed to Maëlys.
I came out to my mom and step-dad in September 2013, some four months after I had made the call to start hormone replacement therapy and after all these realisations. It didn’t go well; my step-dad informed me that this was delusional and that I was hurting those close to me by transitioning.
After that exchange didn’t end positively, I wrote this letter to him and my mom the following month:
Hi there to the two of you,
I wanted to write this letter so that I could bring some clarity to what was going on with me.
Mom I never gave you much in that regard directly. [Step-dad], I didn’t feel like the communications we did share elucidated much. They were framed in terms of you disagreeing with my decisions without an awareness of what led to them, and that shaped the dialog in a way that was similarly constrained.
My purpose here isn’t necessarily to convince you, but to inform you. For me to able to speak plainly about myself so that you at least have the perspective of the one experiencing this. My hope is that my doing this will strengthen our relationship through understanding.
A good starting point would perhaps be to start with saying that I am transitioning. That I go by the name Maëlys, and that my pronouns are she/her.
There wasn’t really a fixed start to this transition. If you want something more tangible, you could go back to the winter of 2011/2012, which is when I started to make a conscious effort to alter my appearance in the privacy of my bathroom. Round my chin, make it seem like I had a chest, tuck, etc.
Or you could go forward in time to this past spring, which is when I started being assessed for hormone replacement therapy. There was much in between, including months of self-reflection and pondering what living meant to me. I won’t speak much to that here, however.
What I will instead cover is how I feel as I have been transitioning outwardly over this past summer. Every step I’ve taken, from buying a bra, to shaving my legs, to then shaving my arms – has resulted in a progressive shedding of a long-standing source of discontentment around my body. I can actually enjoy my own company now. This is new.
As I had once described to you [step-dad], it’s as if each of these steps is accompanied by a weight being lifted off my shoulders. Only in their absence do I become cognizant of their past presence, with the accompanying relief so great that I could never fathom going back to that miserable self.
Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying wonderful relationships with folk. They know me only as Maëlys and have no problem she-ing me. It’s funny how much the use of one word is powerful. It’s the difference between “Your existence is legitimate” and “I won’t even treat you as you ask to be treated, even if it’s but uttering a single word.” I am grateful for their presence in my life.
Truth be told, I don’t know what my future holds. That’s okay with me. What I do know is that what I’m doing now is right for me.
Much love,
Maëlys
In their response, my parents addressed me by the correct name. Over the next year I would make the name change legal and start hormone replacement therapy. Later on I would amend my gender marker on my birth certificate, driver’s license, etc. The sense that I was appropriating the experiences of “real trans people” would go away and I would accept that I was trans.
This brings us to the present, some six years later: I had surgery on February 6th that removed my penis and testicles and created a vulva. It is the last major milestone of my medical transition.
Jumping into the unknown with hormone replacement therapy remains the single best decision I’ve ever made. I didn’t go in knowing whether it would work for me; just knowing that it was possible that it could. Am I ever glad I did. I am so grateful to those who counseled me and assured me the changes were progressive and reversible. I’m also thankful to those who shared their own stories. It was reassuring to know that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t “always know” and lacked the easily digestible narrative.
Had it not been for the listening ear and calm words of my friends, I wouldn’t have been able to make this important leap. Their support was precious in this very intimidating time of my life.
Evolution in photos
With all that said, I figured that I’d mark my surgery with a photo essay of the past decade.
November 2010. I attend the Trans Day of Remembrance. I consider myself cis.August 2011. My private Tumblr blog is very focused on trans issues and I comment that I wish I looked like the trans guys I see.August 2011. Pride. As with everywhere else, I only spot a few young trans folk. It’s mostly just old trans women. At this point, I hadn’t noticed any butch trans women.Winter 2011-2012. I start to do gender play with a RodeOh, strap-on, binders and tucking.October 2012. I return to university for a second degree. This time I attend the Pride Centre, and go to trans events for my own benefit instead of as in solidarity.Winter 2012-2013. I’m having a lot of conversations about transitioning with friends.March 2013. I blog publicly that I’m doing explorations around gender.May 2013. I make the call to get on HRT. It’s with a new program for trans adults at the downtown clinic. I move into its catchment area.August 2013. I’ve socially transitioned among friends. This is at DEFCON, in Las Vegas, at the queer pool party.August 2013. Pride. This is one of my first public outing in girl mode in Ottawa.August 2013. I change my name.September 2013. I come out to my parents. It doesn’t go well.October 2013. I inadvertently attend the Philly Trans March.December 2013. First time in a women’s washroom. I do so outside the GenderQuest meeting at Pink Triangle Services.January 2014. I apply for my legal name change. It is refused on the first go.February 2014. Still waiting to get on HRT. I start to self-administer androgen blockers.April 2014. My name change becomes legal.May 2014. I freeze my sperm at the most hetero-toxic-masculinity clinic ever.July 2014. First estrogen injection. I socially transition at work.January 2015. I do laser hair removal for the first time. It takes three years to get rid of my facial hair.February 2015. Gender change on driver’s license and health card comes through. June 2015. Gender change on birth certificate comes through.June 2015. One year on HRT.August 2015. Pride parade. Protesting the conservatives killing the bill to add gender identity to the Canadian Human Rights Act. My mom is to the left.October 2017. The day I get my library card is also the day that I see my doctor to get my first recommendation letter for surgery. I am referred to another doctor for the second letter.February 2018. I see the second doctor and get a second surgery recommendation. I have my final laser hair removal appointment.July 2018. Four years on estrogen.August 2018. I go attend the trans march. I notice how many more of us attend year on year.February 2019. I undergo surgery.
Societal context
As an aside, things have happened in the world in the short period since I’ve started to transition. I thought it would be useful to give some of that context from an Ottawa lens:
2008
OHIP relists gender affirmation surgery under a Liberal government. The Progressive Conservatives had delisted it in 1998, requiring people in Ontario to pay out of pocket for surgical care.
Susan Stryker’s book, Transgender History, is published. It becomes essential trans lit along with The Whipping Girl, a book by Julia Serano published the previous year.
January Marie Lapuz is a trans woman who emigrated from the Philippines. She is the Social Coordinator of Sher Vancouver and the first transgender person to hold an executive position with the group. She is described as the life of the party. She is also a sex worker. She is murdered in Vancouver.
Orange is the New Black comes out, and with it an explosion of attention on trans lives by cisgender individuals. News media and television become saturated with coverage, though it remains largely reductive and largely focused on white and affluent persons.
The first episode of Rebecca Sugar’s animated television show, Steven Universe, airs.
The zine Brazen containing safer sex information for trans women is published. It compliments the zine Primed which was released for trans men into men in 2007.
Rosa Rebut is a trans woman from Indonesia who enjoyed Edmonton winters. She posted pictures of her frolicking in the snow at the legislature grounds, shopping on trendy 104th Street and joked she was a snow princess looking for her snow prince. She worked at a 7-Eleven as well as an escort. She is murdered in Edmonton.
2015
Morgan M. Page releases the first episode of the trans history podcast One From The Vaults.
Venus Envy, the feminist book and sex shop in Ottawa, is fined after selling a binder to a trans teen. It is the only store selling binders in Ottawa. The fine is waived after community outcry. The store later purges its pornographic video collection to remove age restrictions on entry; this includes feminist films of trans performers engaging in consensual sexual activity.
Sumaya Dalmar is a trans woman of colour who has been the lead actress in a play about the relationship between the Somali ethnicity, religiosity, and its correlation to masculinity. She is a qualified speech therapist. She’s about to start a job with the 519. She’s also a sex worker. She is murdered in Toronto.
Angus Reid polls Canadians for their attitude on trans issues. 25% of Canadian men are uncomfortable with a trans person moving next door. Only half of Ontarians think trans people should be able to use the washroom they’re most comfortable using.
Myrah Whitstone is an indigenous trans woman who studied social work and did advocacy work for an Indigenous mothers group. She is murdered outside Edmonton.
Somewhere in there health care practitioners in Ottawa started to adopt informed consent for hormone replacement therapy in greater numbers. Workshops targeting health care professionals on these matters became well attended by those who didn’t specialize in this care. Workplaces and schools started to include gender expression and identity in their non-discrimination policies. Mainstream bookshops went from carrying zero books on trans lives and issues in their LGBT section to those books making up a significant portion of their collection. It became common for schools to have multiple out trans students.
The number of out trans people exploded in the last decade, as seen through these referral numbers of trans teens across Canada.
None of the positive developments would have been possible without the efforts of largely homeless, poor, and/or working class gender non-conforming individuals.
Unfortunately, the good of those developments has not been evenly distributed. Young white affluent gender-conforming trans people and young white middle-class transmasculine folk have overwhelmingly been the beneficiaries of recent societal change and become the face of transness for mainstream culture. The attention on them has diverted resources away from the very people who made this change possible and who need a shift in societal values the most.
It’s not all roses
Ignorance and harassment continues to be a regular facet of my being trans in Ottawa. I’ve written about some of my experiences and those of others before here, here, here, here, and here, so I won’t go too much into it. I have never felt safe in Ottawa, and I am frustrated at the lack of consequence for mainstream organisations that abet this danger for profit (see here, here, here, here, and here).
Some examples of harassment include:
A man in his fifties yells at me in French “Are you a guy or a girl?” before then shouting “You’re a guy with a penis!”A man (not shown) interrupts me while I’m walking with a date and grabs my breasts to see if I’m really a man or a woman.A man calls me a faggot while walking with a friend. I turn around, he asks if I had a problem with that, and I calmly tell him that I do since he had called me a faggot. I take his picture and walk away. I hear him say he’ll punch my face in.Messages I’ve received from men while dating.Unsolicited comments I’ve received from men on social media.
I haven’t been shocked at the intimidation in Ottawa. When I was perceived as a dude in a gay relationship previous to my transition, I was called faggot by men in cars and told that my head and that of my boyfriend should be cut off. My trans friends all have stories, many of them involving physical assault. The nice things they’ve tried to run – picnics for rainbow families and support groups – have been threatened and disrupted by transphobic and homophobic locals.
Ottawa is a conservative town.
Meanwhile I encounter transphobia in the books, tv, movies and newspapers I consume. It’s always like a little punch in the gut:
Closer to my heart, I lost some friends because of my transition. My sister initially refused to use my name and pronouns around her young children, asserting it would confuse them. I heard my step-dad tried to stage an intervention. I was in my twenties when I transitioned; non-acceptance hurt me more then than it would now.
My sister eventually had a talk with her kids about aunt Maëlys. My step-dad came to use the right name and sometimes the right pronouns. Given conversations we have had since, I felt that things would be better for me if my mom and step-dad didn’t know about my surgery until after I recovered. I worried they might try to stop me, or make my recovery about their immediate emotional needs.
It’s been good
When I decided to start hormone replacement therapy, I didn’t know whether it would be for me, and whether I would always be on it if it was. Maybe these feelings around my body would change years later. I didn’t have the story I was expected to have – that I always knew, that it was some strong feeling in me.
I came to be okay with the ambiguity. I resolved that it was better to give a shot at living live five, ten or fifty good years, which is what HRT could potentially enable, than the alternative. If it wasn’t for me, then I’d know and stop. If things changed for me after years, it was no big deal, and I’d address it then.
This was the moment to give it a shot. I had hit rock bottom, and I was mentally prepared to lose my job, my family, and my friends. It’s harder to relate to those consequences now, but this was before awareness of trans people exploded into the mainstream.
The six happiest years of my life followed.
Then came surgery. There was a lot of processing, with some final ambiguity but comfort with all possible outcomes. After the procedure, I had a moment of “holy fuck, I just got my penis cut off.” It lasted maybe a day or two.
The momentary incredulity gave way to contentment. I began to feel absolutely liberated. Anything I could put my mind to I could do as long as there were steps to get there. I had spent my adult life so uncomfortable departing from a known routine. This departure, along with quitting two previous jobs with nothing lined up, signaled a change in me that I had wanted to see.
I continue to be the happiest I’ve ever been. There’s a lot more to why that’s the case than my transition – such as going to therapy and reprioritizing who gets to be in my life and to what extent – but transition is a significant part of it.
I walked around my place, unsure what to do. My contract had ended unexpectedly right before Christmas. It was about the worst time to look for work, and I had surgery in two months further complicating the job search.
I immediately went to Halifax. Never been. Always wanted to go. A friend met me there and I had a great time. Once back, I was a bit at a loss.
I had a “no buy” policy to save money; so pretty much all outings were out. My extended friend network didn’t really do stuff together anymore as we aged; instead favoring the intimacy of their home and partners. My closest friends were at work and school. Winter had come and I only had a bus pass to get around. I got into a routine: yoga on YouTube, good coffee, job search, walking to the library / around, reading, video games.
I was bored out of my mind. I yearned to be around people. Where can you hang out without expectations of paying in downtown Ottawa during winter? It’s really just the library.
I ended up getting a job, at least for now, but I still dream of common spaces. Big venues in the center of the city, with a large library, free concerts, poetry shows, communal gardens, free chili/tea, work spaces, maker spaces, and green spaces to lay down for picnics, with plenty of natural light. Where everyone, from affluent urban parents with young children, to the elderly, to those with significant visible mental health issues, to those who experience great levels of poverty, are all able to feel safe and enjoy and use the space equally.
This week the Vancouver Public Library is at the center of outcry over its hosting of Meghan Murphy’s event. She is perhaps the highest profile transphobe in Canada along with Jordan Peterson. The VPL said in its statement following the negative attention:
VPL is not endorsing, or hosting this event; it is a rental of our public space. VPL has zero tolerance for discrimination and does not agree with the views of the Feminist Current. However, commitment to free speech and intellectual freedom are fundamental values of public libraries and are bedrock values for democratic society. As such, we will not refuse to rent to an individual or organization simply because they are discussing controversial topics or views, even those we find offensive. We seek to be a welcoming place for all, and actively find ways to support the trans, gender variant and two-spirit communities.
Media relations director Althea Blackburn-Evans said Peterson “has the right to express his views,” but that faculty members “also have responsibilities to create a learning environment at the University of Toronto that’s free from discrimination.
“The university’s mandate is to foster discussion and debate around topics that can often be very controversial,” Blackburn-Evans said.
In both cases these venues portrayed themselves as neutral and against discrimination. On this I wish to be clear:
Debates are not neutral.
Hosting speakers is not a neutral gesture.
We know this, because had the speaker been a Neo-Nazi, the VPL and U of T wouldn’t have given them a platform. It isn’t a violation of free speech to decline to give a platform to bigotry, but it is a choice.
It is inconsistent to insist they oppose discrimination while playing a key part in promulgating beliefs that a particular segment of society should be denied fundamental rights. It is no coincidence that the people making such statements on behalf of these institutions are not those targeted by this vitriol.
Part of what is going on here, I believe, is this myth that debates are neutral. That speech does not contribute to discrimination. That we live in a society of unfettered free speech. That the right side wins in the battle of ideas. That discrimination is a thing of the past, or a thing that takes place over there, or a case of individuals acting badly.
It ignores that for groups that are marginalized, the side to win these debates in the beginning is the side that argues to further ostracize them. The view of those with power, be it on women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights, sex worker rights, indigenous rights, always starts off opposed. Eventually, but certainly not always as we see with indigenous rights an sex workers, there is a shift. During that transition, a lot of people continue to be opposed to rights. So when you inject a platform for people to argue to support this marginalization during this period of transition, it carries heft. People listen. This doesn’t take place in a void and so people act on what they hear. Those acts are legal – most discrimination is. And it can do a lot of damage.
Jordan Peterson rose to fame specifically on the basis of his transphobic views amplified by Canadian and American media. So it happens now that I sit down at a restaurant, and I overhear the man at the table next to me share with great enthusiasm to the person across from him Jordan Peterson’s view on gender. That man, and those like him, are embolden through this validation to treat people like me worse. These views are validated and legitimized through their association with institutions like the University of Toronto and the Vancouver Public Library. They thought it was okay, so it’s okay for me too, right?
To the cis people heading these institutions, it’s harmless free speech. It’s harmless to them that’s for sure. But to me, it’s adding to the bottom tier of the discrimination pyramid, lowering the bar for the harsher acts that follow.
