Hate has no home here

I got up early this morning to join the "No Space For Hate" protest at Queen's Park, the counter-protest response to the one-day anti-trans gatherings that are occurring all over the country today. I have a lot of feelings that I'll probably need to sit with for awhile, but a few do come readily to mind.

First off, it feels surreal, as a 61-year old gay man, to still be protesting against these shitty people who hate us so much. This is a sentiment I've heard time and time again from women and POC my age, who likewise wish that folks had learned a bit more over the past half-decade or so.

We're still here, but they've raised a new generation of hate mongers who are as cruel as their parents, in their sentiments.

Likewise, it's amazing to see how well so any of our old protest slogans have been repurposed, and that silence still equals death, just a different kind of death at this point

I was also struck by the naked cynicism of the conservatives who organized this hate jamboree, exploiting every fissure and crack in Canadian society, uniting them in hate and ignorance.

Perched high on a statue in the middle of the park, a very young woman in an abaya and a hijab waved a sign that read "I BELONG TO MY PARENTS." Next to her, a twenty something white man brandished his own sign, "VACCINES ARE POISON." On the ground below them, others screamed obscenities and wielded "FUCK TRUDEAU!" placards, and signs with Bible verses, and even the tedious "GOD MADE ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE."

It was cold comfort that the messages on our side were messages of support for trans kids and trans youth, messages about freedom to me ourselves, and the right to dignity and self-determination of our lives and bodies.

I asked the permission of every single person whose photograph I too, and towards the end of the march, I asked a very young person if I might take a picture of their sign. They hesitated to a moment, then said, in a trembling voice, "Only the sign, OK?"

As a recent queer elder, it broke my heart to see that our youth can still, even in a modern city like Toronto, even in 2023, be that frightened by the possibility of being photographed carrying a very benign, very loving protest sign.

And the most prevalent, lingering feeling was this one: not since our AIDS marches and protests in the 80s and 90s have I felt I was in the presence of people who would be just as happy to send queer people, especially trans people, to camps.

Or to simply have us...disappear.

For gay men and lesbians of my generation, who'd like to wash their hands of the virulent anti-trans movement, I urge them to pay attention: the language being used against trans people is exactly the same language used against us in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and we have only ever been as strong as our most fragile link.

They are determined to keep their hate alive at any cost, and they know they can't do it without telling lies.

All these words—"groomer," "pedo," "after our kids," "recruiters"—were used against gay men and lesbians in the last half of the 20th century. They know we are no threat to "the family," so they need a scare-narrative to sell their bigotry to the ignorant, degenerate, fearful masses who desperately need an "other" against which to wish violence and direct their hate.

And if they ever did away with "the trans problem," as they call it, you already know exactly who they'd come after next. It is truly well past time for us to all come together.

Even if some of us don't think we belong in the same community, the people who hate us absolutely believe that we do. 

This is what "sincerely held religious beliefs" cost Laura Ann Carleton

 

Some months back, I was taken to task for my satirical "Happy Sunday" posts on my Facebook page by someone who felt that I was mocking people's "sincerely held beliefs." I tried to explain that, as a gay man and a queer person, people's "sincerely held beliefs" did not hold the neutrality for me that they held for, say, a cisgender white straight woman like herself, who fit neatly into their prescribed paradigm. 

Those "beliefs" have never fit neatly for LGBTQ people.

On August 18th, a 27-year old man named Travis Ikeguchi murdered Laura Ann Carleton, a mother of nine for daring to fly a Pride flag outside her own store. She wasn't herself LGBTQ, but she was a vocal, loving, and public ally—the kind of friend of our community that so many queer people know and love personally. 

I have been saying this for years now, but this is the natural end-result of the sewage overflow of words like "groomer" and "pedo" and "transing" into the groundwater of public discourse, particularly when liberally disseminate and shared on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

This is what happens when reasonable people stroke their chins sagely and say, "Well, maybe they have a point" when vicious transphobia is lipsticked up as "feminism," or as concern about "women's bathroom safety" or the "danger" of gender affirming care for trans children and teenagers—which in reality always begins with love, and with listening to them, then providing them with a rigorously monitored, psychological/medical framework that will allow them to be themselves, and not to join the long line of dead teenagers who've decided that no life was better than living theirs. 

This is what happens when gay men and lesbians who find transgender people personally unpalatable for their own reasons join in, and affirm the people who hate trans people, apparently completely unaware that the people who hate trans people hate them, too, and appear oblivious to the fact that those people will come for them in time as well.

This is what happens when people vote for politicians who censor reading material, or tell teachers that they can't identify themselves as queer exactly the way straight teachers identify themselves as husbands and wives, or mothers and fathers, in the presence of this classes, and who tacitly push the "LGBTQ = pedophile" narrative, knowing that it will likely go unchecked for the most part. This is what happens when those same politicians and preachers are allowed to demonize drag queens as "adult entertainers," or "predators," when they read children's books to kids in libraries. 

This is what happens when white liberals who can't get their "BLACK TRANS LIVES MATTER!" banners and Pride "covers" up on Facebook fast enough in June go deadly quiet the rest of the year when a world-famous multimillionaire comedian makes horrific jokes about trans women's genitalia, or makes AIDS jokes, or, worse still, they talk about "free speech," or how "funny" the comedian is, or that "we all have to learn to laugh at ourselves" as a way to provide cover for themselves when they're asked why they, as supposed "allies" didn't speak up, and why queer people are always the very last minority in the queue to warrant their actual, tangible support when it counts.

Laura Ann Carleton, by all accounts a beloved member of her community, and an ally's ally, knew all of this, and she flew the Pride flag anyway, to show us that she loved us. And this man, whose Twitter timeline is full of Bible verses and right-wing Christian talking points, shot her in the head for it. 

So the next time a queer person flinches at these things, do one of two things—either listen to them, and support them, or at least try to truly understand them, or stop calling yourself an "ally." Because queer people can't afford the luxury of any more performative social media "allies" who never seem to have our backs in an actual brawl. 

To the lady who found my "Happy Sunday" posts objectionable—this is what I was talking about with regard to people's "sincerely held religious beliefs." I have no trouble at all believing that Travis Ikeguchi was sincere in his beliefs. 

And to the religious people out there who have suddenly become horribly excited by their newfound platform in the discussion of "protecting children"—we see you. You're just the latest incarnation of the same vile homophobic libel we've seen since the 1950s, and before. We defeated you then, and we'll defeat you now. We see you. 

And, more to your specific point, your God sees you, too. If you truly believe in the afterlife, and the eternity of souls, worry about yours.