The public’s support for same-sex marriage in Canada, according to a 2024 Ipsos poll, is at 65%. This is down from 75% three years earlier. Twenty years ago, marriage was the proxy issue for whether gay people had a place in society.
Today, trans people are in the crosshairs and the proxy issues include access to puberty blockers and athletics. In the UK, add to that washroom access. In the US, well, everything.
Aside from banning heartfelt autobiographies and sex ed, Canadian conservatives have largely moved on from manufacturing outrage around their gay constituents, though they’ll still exploit them to lie about trans people, eg. “transing the gay away“.
With the relentless fear-mongering and the media unwittingly laundering that disinformation, it is expected that support for trans rights would erode in Canada. We should not then be surprised that there are parallel declines for gay rights.
Gender non-conformity
The reason conservatives so smoothly substituted gay with trans people in their attacks is because it was the same issue: gender norms.
Their norms, as they understood it to be in the ignorance of childhood. It’s an infantilization they seek to impose on everyone by way of state power.
For all the distinctions between sexual orientation and gender identity, we share a deviation from gender norms. This not only binds us but so many others as well no matter how mundane, like women who wear pants or have short hair.
This common thread makes it so that when one of us is under attack, public perception erodes for all of us. For the few among us who cave to the impulse to throw the least desirable under the bus, the rewarded acceptance is temporary. It only entrenches gender norms that did not spare these misguided deviants before this newfound target, and that will prey on them anew once they cast out the very people that insulated them.
Instead, the world we need to get to is one where there’s no longer a concept of gender non-conformity, because there will be nothing to conform to but our own individuality.
We want liberty, not a homogeneity applied by its denial. Let my one neighbour be a devout Catholic stay-at-home mom, my other be part of an anarchist queer punk polycule, and let us all show up with soup for each other when one of us gets sick.