I’ve been musing about writing a short horror story grounded in reality.
So often the horror genre makes the object of fear a disfigured man, a man with mental illness, a trans woman, someone living in poverty, someone with an accent, a black or brown person. It echoes the ableism, classism, white supremacy, and exceptionalism of the dominant culture. If it’s not this, then it relies on the made up – ghosts, aliens – or is set in the past.
The agent of horror is never that suburban cishet white person doing the normal things they do in today’s world. It’s a missed opportunity because they can be plenty scary.
One of the nicest things about getting older is seeing queer people in my life shaping their life to their desires. Renting a place and making it cute with plants and art from pals. Camping in the woods or going on hikes. Celebrating milestones with partners and friends. Moving towns and going back to school. There’s a predictability and loving entourage to their lives that was not quite there a decade previous.
This made me think to the queer anger that so many of us have lived through, the onset forming in our teens and twenties. This anger is justified – the result of finally acquiring language that validates years of being made small and suffocating those we love. It is compounded by unrecognized emotional trauma, a lack of housing and financial security, being in toxic relationships, emotionally immature parenting, a constant exposure to injustices, and all the challenges of being in the world that are that much more acute during those years.
National Post writer Christie Blatchford passed away last month, resulting in a flurry of articles praising her career in Canadian mainstream media.
The experience of reading Blatchford’s articles was very different as a trans person. She regularly used her platform to advocate for a world free of those perceived to be gender non-conforming. In her estimation, it was those who advocated for the erasure of the gender diverse who were the true victims.
I mapped out some of the ways that high-profile anti-trans advocates in Canada are related. The chart is a mess because these transphobes are highly interconnected:
In such a ecosystem, it becomes very easy for a previously unknown person with views that are marketable by these anti-trans advocates to be amplified and in turn be made an amplifier. This is what happened with Lindsay Shepherd, whose only involvement was that she was a T/A that was reprimanded by her university administrators for showing without context a transphobic exchange featuring Jordan Peterson, another member of this ecosystem. The National Post wrote 29 articles supporting Lindsay Shepherd from authors like Barbara Kay and her son Jonathan Kay. Now Lindsay Shepherd an author with the National Post, is an author with The Post Millennial (Barbara Kay is a contributor there), is a fellow with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (Barbara Kay is on the boards of directors there), is a writer at Quillette (Jonathan Kay is an editor there). Shepherd promotes other members of this ecosystem like Meghan Murphy in her work. This past fall Jonathan Kay and Meghan Murphy were on a panel together moderated by Lindsay Shepherd named “How Media Bias Shapes the Gender Identity Debate“. The self-amplification is constant.
It is frustrating that a handful of cisgender people are able to have such a disproportionate influence in shaping the dialog around the rights of hundreds of thousands of trans and gender non-conforming individuals. On the outset, they appear to be independent voices representing many more, when in reality, they’re only representing each other.
