Category: Human Rights

Following the failure to portray gay people as an existential threat, conservatives have shifted to trans people’s increasing acceptance as the latest wedge issue. Supported by an ecosystem of American conservative television, British tabloids, reactionary content creators, and a long-standing history of homophobia and transphobia domestically, these forces have resulted in the biggest rallies against gender and sexual minorities in Canadian history. These actions are enabled by legacy media and public institutions that overlook the unhinged bigotry of its organizers, the bomb threats and physical intimidation of its adherents, and sanitizes the genocidal views expressed while depicting them as mere opinion.

Polling and political trends suggests that the virulent transphobia being observed will only get worse.

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The International Chess Federation, FIDE, has banned trans women from participating in women’s events in a new policy:

In the event that the gender was changed from a male to a female the player has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women until further FIDE’s decision is made. Such decision should be based on further analysis and shall be taken by the FIDE Council at the earliest possible time, but not longer than within 2 (two) years period.

Trans men meanwhile risk demotion:

If a player holds any of the women titles, but the gender has been changed to a man, the women titles are to be abolished. Those can be renewed if the person changes the gender back to a woman and can prove the ownership of the respective FIDE ID that holds the title. The abolished women title may be transferred into a general title of the same or lower level (e.g., WGM may be transferred into FM, WIM into CM, etc.).

If a player has changed the gender from a man into a woman, all the previous titles remain eligible.

The implication from these two policies is that women are less intelligent than men, and their titles are worth less. There’s an absurdity to this.

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On Friday (June 9th), a mob of transphobes descended on three Ottawa schools in the west end. They believe that educators are corrupting cisgender children into becoming trans; a reformulation of the old “the gays are recruiting children” trope.

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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:

• Bomb threats
• Death threats
• Arson
• Swatting
• Intimidation

This is terrorism.

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This list is not definitive. It started with what was in my own collection, and then I expanded it to cover more titles that I was aware of or had read. Consider it just a snapshot, limited by my own access and bias. It covers up until 2024.

I’m generally uninterested in trans autobiographies beyond the early titles, as they give way to new genres that better contextualize the subsequent eras. To that end I omit Canadian books like Love Lives Here by Rowan Jetté Knox and Pageboy by Elliot Page. For prolific creators, I only included a subset of their catalog – so there’s a lot missing here from Mirha-Soleil Ross, Xanthra MacKay, Kai Cheng Thom, S. Bear Bergman, Ivan Coyote, Nina Arsenault, Sophie Labelle, Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay and Casey Plett. After the trans tipping point, publishers started to pay for more than ghostwritten autobiographies or poetry, and in came a proliferation of trans history books. I omit a bunch; I am biased towards earlier examples or those that bring substantive new information. Same with essays, which is why I omit those like I’m Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya.

Not all works listed are by Canadians, trans people, or affirming. Their inclusion is to provide context for the social climate. I do mention some films, though largely exclude those featuring trans characters that were written, directed and portrayed by cis individuals like Boys Don’t Cry, Transamerica, Dallas Buyers Club, The Danish Girl, etc. Similarly, I omit newer films where trans characters are played by a trans person, but written as non-satirical caricatures, such as Emilia Pérez and Tangerine.

By in “Canada” I mean within the greater geographic boundaries of what is now the state of Canada. Similarly, “trans” reflects a recent and specific construction in a long global history of gender variance, one intertwined with colonialism, and it is loosely applied below.

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