Category: Human Rights

Discussions on rights, including on orientation, identity, and employment (eg. sex work).

  • Some good news

    Some good news

    Trans and non-binary people are the latest targets for those struggling with the visibility of the world’s beautiful diversity. Seeking a return to the homogeneity that only lived in the precipices of their ignorance, they’ve singled out gender diverse individuals as the wedge issue that will bring them back.

    I’ve been documenting transphobia for a decade, and one thing that’s notable in that time is the shift from implicit exclusion and ad-hoc incidents to mainstream organized movements demanding explicit exclusion. Yet also evident in that time is the extent to which trans and non-binary individuals have blossomed. Here’s some positive changes of the past ten years.

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  • A wave of anti-trans orgs

    A wave of anti-trans orgs

    Since 2019, organizations devoted to opposing rights for trans people have emerged across the world sharing these characteristics:

    • Their name includes the words ‘female’, ‘women’, ‘gender’, ‘sex’ or ‘gay’
    • …but they disregard all issues faced by these groups
    • …their messaging is instead entirely devoted to curtailing the acceptance of trans and non-binary people
    • …they offer no services or assistance to those they purport to represent
    • …they oppose legislation that would benefit their alleged base, such as the LGB Alliance opposing a conversion therapy ban
    • …they promote sexist/homophobic evangelicals and white nationalists that share an intolerance of gender diversity

    Their activism is not about lifting women or gay people up, it’s about putting trans and non-binary people down and doing so in a way that also victimizes the very people they’re claiming to protect.

    LGB Alliance celebrating the death of a bill that would have banned forcing people to undergo treatments to make them straight/cis.
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  • The Iceberg

    The Iceberg

    Once upon a time, I wrote about how I had habituated to the tiny decisions I made throughout the day as a gender non-conforming person to ensure my safety. I labeled what I endured as casual violence. Later on, I described how institutions like the Vancouver Public Library platforming anti-trans rhetoric contributed to making things less safe for me and I invoked the pyramid of hate to try to explain why.

    With the news of the Ottawa Public Library deciding not to remove from its catalog Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters, a book pressing parents to reject their gender non-conforming children, I thought I’d offer up a different way to explain how outcomes like this are harmful.

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  • Trans rights posters vandalized

    Trans rights posters vandalized

    A few weeks ago anti-trans messages were put up around downtown. In response, local queer activists and the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women put up posters affirming that trans rights are indeed human rights.

    These were repeatedly vandalized by residents of Ottawa over a number of days. I thought I’d do a gallery of the various ways these posters were defaced.

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  • The anti-trans unicorn

    The anti-trans unicorn

    There’s a small group of people live off of harming trans people.

    It can be lucrative. Jordan Peterson was making at least $55,000 a month for writing things like “[non-binary pronouns] are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.” Abigail Shrier got the #15 best selling book on Amazon for her book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters“.

    I call the Petersons and Shriers of the world anti-trans unicorns.

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