Category: Trans Rights

On September 22nd, I’ll be participating in a panel called Safe(r) cities for trans folks. From the description:

Trans, gender diverse and 2SLGBTQ+ communities are subjected to experience significant violence in Ottawa and across Canada. Despite progress on 2SLGBTQ+ rights, the everyday realities of many in our communities are largely unchanged.

What role can our municipalities play in helping to prevent, challenge and address anti-trans violence?

Certainly I have my fair share of stories of harassment in Ottawa. As do all of my gender diverse acquaintances.

There is no simple remedy. However, here are some ideas to marginally improve conditions.

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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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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.

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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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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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