Parents for Choice in Education: Stop teaching my kids queer & trans people exist

Content Notice: Homo-antagonism and trans-antagonism

Eva Ferguson begins this article in what (I hope) is a barely contained snicker:

A new toolkit for teachers on educating students around gender diversity is being criticized by parent groups who say it doesn’t give families a chance to opt out of conversations they say may not fit their values.

Yes, that’s right, there are “some families” complaining they can’t opt out of fact-based education. If you’re a regular on my blog, you’ll suspect Parents for Choice in Education, a lobby group that gets its jimmies rustled every time more facts worm their way into schools.

Ferguson writes of a guidance document published by the Alberta Teacher’s Association called Toolkit for Safe and Caring Discussions and Sexual and Gender Minorities. It’s exactly what it says on the tin: A series of tips on what a law like Bill 7 or Bill 10 actually means and what substantive changes you can make to your teaching when you need to be accommodating of queer & trans youth. It includes such insidious suggestions as…

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Conservatives scatter in light of crank Rebel Media rally

David Climenhaga has collected the official, on-the-record responses of Canada’s many besieged “Moderates” running for various conservative positions amidst an increasingly reactionary climate:

But even the likes of Rona Ambrose, interim leader of the federal Tories, and Jason Kenney, would-be leader of the provincial PCs – both associated with the Tea-Party-like Reform Party wing of the federal party – were embarrassed enough to try to walk away as quickly as dignity permitted from the PR disaster the rally organized by Ezra Levant and his Rebel Media organization is fast becoming.

“It’s completely inappropriate,” Ms. Ambrose said yesterday. “It’s people acting like idiots.” (This too is hard to argue with.) It’s “ridiculous and offensive,” said Mr. Kenney, who prudently avoided the rally, perhaps because he is acquainted with Mr. Levant.

I’m also cackling in a funny-because-it’s-horrifying-and-I-need-a-way-to-cope fashion after Brian Jean’s limp-wristed response:

He also weakly condemned the racism and homophobia apparent on leaflets and signs held by rally participants, who apparently included many who represent the worst elements of Alberta society: “I wish people who had those desires, to have those chants, or have that signage, would just stay at home,” Mr. Jean explained.

I’m gonna keep saying I told you so until you fucking get it, Jean. Shrink your frickin tent or watch everything you’ve worked for burn to the ground.

The federal Liberals jumped in too:

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The significance of political misogynistic violence on the anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre

27 years ago, a shooter entered a Montreal STEM school lecture hall with a loaded gun and held a class at gunpoint. He ordered the class to divide itself into men and women. They didn’t comply until he shot the ceiling.

Once separated, he turned his gun on the women. 14 women were murdered and another 20 injured before the shooter would turn the gun on himself. We would dub this the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre.

As with all atrocities, promises were made to never forget–certainly many Canadian feminists, myself included, observe the day of mourning. Yet it would seem that many in Alberta’s political landscape have a selective memory indeed, given that mere days ago an entire crowd worked itself into a frenzy to speak of our female Premier, “Lock her up!”

It certainly puts Alberta’s conservative leadership in an awkward position. Their previous big tent success has always worked only with the cooperation of their snarling, reactionary dickhead vote, in which virulent misogynists have had their home for decades. Now they are tasked with keeping this vote whilst condemning violence spun in the same cloth that occurred on this day, 27 years ago.

Of course this isn’t the first time Brian Jean, leader of Alberta’s right-wing Wildrose Party, has had to contain this feral portion of the conservative voting bloc. He has gone on record to condemn them multiple times, yet they don’t seem particularly convinced by his ineffectual bleating. Maybe it’s because he’ll turn around in 3 months to start courting their vote again, but only before issuing another disingenuous apology about how wrong violence against women is. You’re not fooling your drooling bloodhounds, Jean, and neither are you fooling me.

How fundamentally perverse it is that the authoritarian jackboots can make their proclamations that the Premier ought to be jailed, simply because they dislike her, mere days before an occasion which reminds us all of the cost of patriarchal entitlement. If that’s a “joke,” you’ll have to explain it to me.

-Shiv

Rebel Media spokespuppet throws shoes at Legislature

I’m only laughing to numb the pain. Content Notice: Homophobia.

Despite claiming he’s not a lobbyist, Neal Hancock–perhaps better known by his character “Bernard the Roughneck”–sure collects a lot of money from oil lobbyists to talk about oil. The Quebecois theatre student and political science graduate would have you believe he’s the voice of Alberta’s average joe. Because, you know, the hotbed of ill-advised Western separatism is just teeming in abundance with French Canadian drama and political science?

Of course, no reality-denying quackery is complete without the chronically libelous Rebel Media. In a rally where “the Roughneck” went on record to suggest foreign agents should hack the NDP databases (man, where have I heard that one before), the average joe spokesman decided the best way to make his political statement about the NDP’s carbon tax was to throw his shoes at the Legislature. Seconds later after Hancock’s impassioned (and possibly treasonous) speech, Ezra “Not a Journalist” Levant said without the slightest hint of irony to the frothy-mouthed crowd:

As Hancock wandered away from the podium to retrieve his shoes, Levant reminded the crowd to “obey the law,” adding that “our side does, but the other side does not.”

Yes, because the man found guilty of libel is the sort of reliable law-abiding figure whose even-handed judgement you can trust. Like bringing in an arsonist to lecture you about safety.

Oh look, more libel!

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Labels as relational

Something struck me last week when I was doing my Trans Sex Ed presentation for ASPECC. In order to make sure everyone was on the same page I had to start by making sure the word “transgender” was clear. Ultimately I think this is one area that could turn into an entire presentation itself, because the more I thought about it the more I realized this was a topic that could run deep.

I’ll illustrate with some other identity labels of mine: atheist. I mean, that’s a given on a freethought network, right? But I also live in this progressive little urban bubble where people are largely indifferent to religion. My coworkers, my boss, my previous landlord. Nobody cared. If I had been “outed” as an atheist, I think fuck all would have happened. People would’ve shrugged and moved on. People have shrugged and moved on.

In terms of importance or relevance to me, personally, that makes my relationship with atheism weak at best. I don’t often do posts about the epistemology of the Christian god, mostly because I consider the matter settled, and so do enough people in my life that it’s just not an important question anymore. So I mean, sure, I’m an atheist. And yes, I’ll accept that label because it’s accurate. But no, it isn’t the sort of thing that actually gets the people around me to respond differently, so its relevance is negligible, as long as I do my homework and steer clear of traveling to, say, Iran.

Being trans, on the other hand. Well, every asshole on the internet has a strong opinion. No PhD in gender variance, mind, or even a passing attempt to actually read the research they claim supports their position, but hot-damn does being transgender carry a significant gravity to it, drawing in dickheads and assholes in orbit like some kind of black hole hurdling through a solar system. If were talking about labels in terms of their importance to other people, then hells yes, “transgender” is a heavy and influential label indeed.

So I arrive to a different use of labels altogether, one that doesn’t involve describing my relationship with myself, but one that describes the world’s relationship to me. Framed like that, it contextualizes things like how my personal, morally neutral choices such as my clothing or grooming is suddenly subject to public debate on whether I’m reinforcing feminine stereotypes or just doing the trans thing for attention. Now it makes sense to take up the label transgender, not because I may or may not want to grow my hair long, but because a choice of such minimal relevance to other people’s lives is somehow granted importance through some invasive and kindy creepy entitlement to know every detail about my body. An entitlement that is present because of the world’s relationship with being “transgender.”

If I lived in a post transphobia society, I imagine I would feel about my gender identity the same way I do about my religious identity: Meh. Something to be acknowledged and make a few changes to make things comfy, but not the sort of sordid public spectacle that it is now.

The only reason trans issues ranks so highly is because of the damage these hamfisted attempts at policy writing cause, ensuing upon discovery of our existence. That’s a relationship I don’t want denied, how I’m some kind of walking-talking time-bomb for all the comfortable assumptions people make about gender. I may not particularly care about being trans, personally, but I think you’d have an incomplete picture of what it’s like as a cis person to be a trans person if you didn’t comprehend how much mutually contradictory bullshit we’re put through.

Thus, even if you personally don’t have a strong relationship with your gender identity–which is only natural, because nobody reacts to it–you could accept cisgender as a label for those circumstances and that relationship, the same way I accept the label atheist despite living in a peaceful bubble of religious irrelevance. It’s not any kind of commentary on you. It’s more of a commentary on your circumstances. Less of an identity unto itself and more taking stock on the relational behaviour of those around you. How, for instance, nobody has asked you about your genitals, or what your “real name” is. Or, perhaps the most salient to our current political climate, sex-segregated spaces are a no-brainer for you where they reliably get a trans person to start sweating under the collar.

This sidesteps the entire issue of trying to communicate what you do or do not feel, not that the people dismissing gender dysphoria as “just” feelings are the sorts of good-faith commentators who’d actually listen to my alternative (hey, there’s another relationship to describe between trans people and our environments: We’re “just” feeling a certain way, but you? You’re taken for-granted). I don’t have to share any kind of deeply personal struggle with my body. In fact, I can point out that the curiosity for said struggle perhaps better defines my existence as a trans woman than does the struggle itself!

Food for thought. What do you think?

-Shiv

Almost freeee

Last week I was commissioned to write an article about Bill C-16, and I submitted the rough draft on Thursday. Hopefully I’ll have a Real News™ article to cross-post later this week! More details once it’s confirmed that my rough draft isn’t so awful that the entire venture is tossed. If it is, I’ll see if I can find a Real News™ home for it elsewhere before just throwing it up here.

At the same time I was doing my homework for that article I also had to cobble together my half-finished examination of Alberta’s dog-awful sex ed curriculum, because I was asked by ASPECC to give a trans sex ed presentation. It went really well and I even got some great feedback, which excites me because it’ll be clearer and better moving forward. It’s already looking like I might have to do surgery and split it into two presentations.

And now, for the first time in about three weeks, I’ll have no homework. Freedom! But only as long as I unplug for a couple days, because reading the news will get my writing muscles twitchy again.

-Shiv

Snark of the Month: November

November was, of course, a very difficult month to find snark in. Nonetheless, I am proud of you for pulling through, lovely readers.

November’s Winner: chigau (ever-elliptical)

Premier Rachel Notley is accused of some pretty ridiculous shit, simply by virtue of being the woman who upset a 90+ year conservative streak in Alberta. The Beaverton made a parody scoop with faux interviews of people blaming her for all kinds of silly things to take the piss out of this. chigau said of the ridiculous accusations hurled at Premier Notley:

So this is where Rebecca Watson is these days.

I laughed in a “haha too real” kind of way.

November’s Runner-up: Dunc

I signal boosted We Hunted the Mammoth’s observation that Milo Yiannopoulos posted a glowing review of a documentary that he appeared in, with a smarmy post titled “I thought it was about ethics in amateurish documentary journalism.” Dunc replied,

I’m sure we’ll be hearing the deeply shocked ethicists of GamerGate pointing out how unacceptable this is any minute now…

Any minute.

November was kind of a serious business month for reasons that are probably obvious, but snark can be a form of self care. Sometimes it’s the only way we can let off a little steam. So that’s my excuse. Put cracks in the crushing depression through snark. It’s for your own health.

-Shiv

All the little power games

Content notice: Trans-antagonism.

It was in December 2015 when Alberta passed Bill 7, a law that added gender identity and expression to the protected classes under the provincial criminal code. For the most part the law passed with little more than the usual humming and hawing from radio talk show hosts. Perhaps it was the weather that discouraged protesting, but it wasn’t until summer 2016, around the same time that Bill C-16 was finally proposed (a similar law, but federally), that I witnessed in person the sorts of power games that cisgender opponents to trans rights would engage in.

Trans Equality Society of Alberta (TESA) organized a rally to express support for the legislation. Scheduled after the rally was the reactionary response. But the rally in favour of trans rights, upon its conclusion, asked if any of its members would stay to counter-protest the anti-rights rally.

So we did.

Physical violence was thankfully avoided, but that doesn’t mean the cisgender anti-trans rights protesters didn’t have their little power games to put us on the back foot.

If you’re trans and you catch the attention of the a particularly unhinged trans-antagonist, your doxxing doesn’t stop merely at the location of your legal identity–they always, always dig up your prior name (aka birth name or dead name) and insist on using it to refer to you, or at the very least implying you’re suspect by publishing it alongside your legal name. And if you’re a public figure, it’s usually not difficult to locate your previous name because all legal name changes might be published where you live.

So now, in order to meet the demands of the anti-rights camp and have a, quote unquote, “civil” conversation, you have to engage whilst being called the wrong name, the wrong pronoun, and the wrong titles.

I kid you not–the woman leading the trans counter-protest was referred to as “Sir” the entire time. Their twisted idea of respect was itself a cheap tactic, a kidney shot. So we either proceed to ignore this behaviour in order to talk about the logistics of trans rights and how literally zero cis men have been excused from criminal behaviour because they were cross dressing when they did it; or, instead of refuting these myths and misconceptions, we spend the entire time trying to get our opponents to stop fucking calling us by a name that isn’t ours.

The excuses for this tactic are flimsy. Trans-antagonists don’t go around calling every Bill William, or every Dan Daniel, or every Ted Theodore or every Jan Janice or every Sam Samantha or every Liz Elizabeth. We already have a culture that permits cis people to change their names, their given names and their family names and their titles, for any reason. There is no reason other than prejudice I can think of to deny the legitimacy of trans people using the exact same machinery that everyone else has for decades.

So the anti-rights protesters set up the expectation that trans folk ought to act “civil” during a discussion in which our opponents engage in cheap shots and dirty tactics that we either have to ignore or change the topic to redress, while defaming us as predators and rapists.

Right.

-Shiv