Category: Life

June is Pride month, and both federal conservative leaders in Canada and the US have used this as an opportunity to claim support for LGBT/LGBTQ people.

The spokesman for Conservative leader Andrew Scheer stated this week:

“Canada’s Conservatives have a proud history of fighting for the rights and protection of all Canadians, including those in the LGBTQ community, at home and abroad. There are many ways to support these communities, and it is vital that the rights all Canadians are protected regardless of race, gender or sexual preference,” said Scheer spokesman Daniel Schow.

Likewise, US President Trump’s official Twitter account had the following message this week:

As we celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation, let us also stand in solidarity with the many LGBT people who live in dozens of countries worldwide that punish, imprison, or even execute individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation. My Administration has launched a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality and invite all nations to join us in this effort!

Both assert they support these communities, yet their actions speak differently. For the Conservatives in Canada:

• 2005: Almost all Conservatives vote against legalizing same-sex marriage. This includes Scheer.
• 2010: Almost all Conservatrives vote against adding gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act with Bill C-389. This include Scheer.
• 2011: Almost all Conservatives vote against adding gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act with Bill C-389. Scheer does not vote.
• 2012: Almost all Conservatives vote against adding gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act with Bill C-279. Scheer does not vote.
• 2013: Almost all Conservatives vote against adding gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act with Bill C-279. Scheer does not vote.
• 2015: Conservatives in the Senate successfully kill Bill C-279.
• 2016: Conservatives including Scheer vote against adding gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act with Bill C-16.
• 2017: Bill C-16 passes despite Conservative attempts to kill it. Scheer is silent on whether he’d repeal the law and suggests advocates for these rights are intolerant.

Meanwhile, Trump has his own dismal record:

• 2017: Removes guidance protecting trans students under Title IX.
• 2017: Justice Department abandons its lawsuit against North Carolina’s anti-trans law.
• 2017: Trump announces on Twitter he’ll ban all trans people from serving in the military.
• 2017: Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are instructed not to use the word “transgender”.
• 2018: Department of Health and Human Service propose a rule to encourage medical providers to deny service on the grounds of religious freedom. This is coded language for denying service to women, gay, and trans individuals.
• 2018: Bureau of Prisons roll back protections for trans inmates.
• 2018: Department of Labor releases a new directive no longer requiring federal contractors to comply with nondiscrimination laws on the grounds of religious freedom. This is coded language for denying service to women, gay, and trans individuals.
• 2019: Department of Health allows adoption and foster agencies in South Carolina to discriminate against LGBT caregivers.
• 2019: Ban on trans service members goes into effect.
• 2019: Trump announces opposition to Equality Act, which would add protections for LGBTQ Americans and others.
• 2019: Department of Health and Human Services proposes a rule that would remove all recognition of all nondiscrimination laws intended to protect trans individuals.

So what’s going on here? The hint can be found in the message on Trump’s official Twitter account focusing on abroad. The same is true of Scheer, with his spokesperson explaining:

Schow pointed out more-recent examples of Scheer’s advocacy for members of the community. In June 2017 Scheer moved a motion in the House of Commons that, among other things, condemned the actions of Vladimir Putin’s Russian government against LGBTQ individuals.

The Canadian and US government use human rights as a tool against countries that undermine their foreign policy objectives. This is why the Canadian and US governments vocally criticize Iran on the basis of human rights, but are quiet on more repressive Saudi Arabia. Since gay rights is fashionable, they’re using that. There’s a word for this: homonationalism.

These conservative leaders do not recognize their role in encouraging prejudice in their home countries. For them discrimination is a thing of the distant past, or that happens in isolated incidents, or that occurs abroad, or in the case of transphobia – is seen as just. Scheer had an opportunity to confront his party’s opposition to these rights. It would have been a moment of humility and introspection, acknowledging how good people ended up advocating to hurt so many. Such a party would be less likely to advocate against the rights of minorities in the future.

Scheer has chosen not to take these hard steps, and instead misrepresent recent history as one in which the Conservative party supported the rights of sexual and gender diverse people. Now he’s using the same individuals he publicly maligned for years as a tool to promote his foreign policy. An entirely expected, but nonetheless unfortunate, development.

Addendum

The day I wrote this article, Trump went on the airwaves and defended his purge of transgender service members with multiple falsehoods around drugs and surgeries. The next day, it surfaced that the Trump administration was prohibiting pride flag to fly on embassy flagpoles in a reversal of the previous administration’s policy:

The denial to the U.S. Embassy in Berlin is particularly jarring because the ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, is spearheading an administration push to end the criminalization of homosexuality in roughly 70 countries that still outlaw it, as NBC News first reported in February. Grenell, the most senior openly gay person in Trump’s administration, has secured support for that campaign from both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

The purported support of LGBT rights abroad is not genuine for neither Trump nor Scheer.

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.

These are not bad people, yet they do bad things.

And here about discrimination writ large that I wrote last week:

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.