Call It What It Is: Anti-trans Bigotry

It began earlier this summer, when conservative New Brunswick premier Blaine Higgs updated Policy 713. His update requires students to obtain permission from their parents for using different names and pronouns in school, if they’re under 16. The change caused an uproar within Higgs’ party, and is being challenged by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. This type of policies attack 2SLGBTQIA+ students, exposing them to dangerous home conditions, where they could be subject to violence or homelessness as a result of bigoted family life. Estimates range that between 25 and 40 per cent of homeless youth are 2SLGBTQIA+ as a result of these dangerous conditions.

But unfortunately, the rabid right-wing genital hawks are the ones with the cultural power in this country, and our chickenshit leaders are all happy to shift the blame from their governments onto the culture wars.

Earlier this month, conservative Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe hitched his wagon to the anti-trans train and had his Education Minister Dustin Duncan announce policy apparently modeled exactly after Higg’s hateful moves. I wrote about the story for rabble, and used appropriate language to describe the policy: anti-trans.

Now Stephen Lecce, the shriveled pissant formulated in a lab at Western University to become a public right-wing failure, has joined the bandwagon. Ontario’s Education Minister said in a press conference: “Parents must be fully involved and fully aware of what’s happening in the life of their children” in regards to parents being informed of name or pronoun changes.

The idea that 2SLGBTQIA+ students could possibly be raised in a home environment hostile to that group, didn’t factor into Lecce’s thoughts handed to him by Doug Ford.

Unfortunately, Lecce, Moe, Higgs or Duncan’s approach is broadly familiar to Canadians. In an Angus Reid poll, 43 per cent of Canadians surveyed said that name and pronoun changes should require parental consent for kids, while only 14 per cent said parents should have no role in the decision. To be clear, this is not indicative of where the correct stance lies. For example, the majority of Americans in 1971 opposed busing students in an attempt to further desegregate schools. These polls do not indicate how correct a position is, simply where the public’s position lies.

These policies and this widespread attitude among Canadians are failures on multiple levels, but none more pertinent to The Catch than the role of the news media.

Cowardice was the main through line in all the reporting about these policies. CBC’s reporting on the Higgs story in June noted “changes to school LGBTQ policy” in the headline. It cited “growing controversy,” and assigned all criticism of this policy to a transgender high school student who spoke about it on Rosemary Barton Live.

It relegated the main concern of these policies effects on trans youth to one child, before undercutting his concerns with a paragraph describing how students can work with “guidance counsellors or school social workers and psychologists to get to a place where they feel comfortable telling them.”

What, exactly, will happen if the parents of these children are raging People’s Party voters, or diehard JK Rowling and Graham Linehan supporters? What good is all the counseling in the world if the children are still battered and thrown out onto the street for being 2SLGBTQIA+? How, exactly, does that help them?

That’s why it’s so important to accurately label these policies. But that has not been done. The word “anti-trans” is not used once in these pieces, or any that I’ve seen (other than my own). Presumably, this is for fear of pissing off the reactionary portions of their audience by describing their vile views accurately.

Even when the NB policy was found to violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Global News reported that fact dutifully, and called the changes “several revisions.” There was no mention of the bigoted motivating factors behind it.

Same as it ever was with Moe' and Duncan’s new policy. CTV said it had “been panned as harmful to LGBTQ students,” assigning that criticism to someone else, rather than its objective cause and effects being to harm trans kids. “Human rights groups” are the ones concerned, criticisms assigned to them, while the reporter refuses to call the policy what it is.

A policy that endangers trans kids is an anti-trans policy. Would a policy that directly harms Indigenous or Black children face the same abdication of responsibility by our news media? Though this was supposed to be a rhetorical question, I fear I already know the answer.

It’s exceedingly difficult to tip-toe around a subject like this and still pretend the reporting is objective, balanced or accurate. The anti-trans rhetoric has reached terrifying levels as of late, with hostile policies in the US targeting marginalized people disturbingly increasing. The difference is that outlets like the CBC have no problem labelling “anti-2SLGBTQ bills” as such when they’re south of the border. When they happen up here? They’re “controversial.” Probably because they take care not to announce their anti-trans intentions with a bullhorn, allowing the plausible deniability that sends terror into reporters’ spines.

What we have at this point is Canadian policy for Twitter Blue subscribers. The shithole now known as X, ran by an anti-trans, racist Boer, is now overwhelmed with blue checks, horny for these policies as they flood the timeline. They froth at the mouth in the replies of every tweet on the topic, begging for more as state actors like Moe tweet folksy nothingisms to cover their incompetence.

Unfortunately, this is the path for Canadian conservatism sooner rather than later. With the Conservative convention on the way, delegates are pushing Poilievre to take up a similar line. These policies have already paved the way for Poilievre to use “parental rights” as a dogwhistle to put trans kids in harm’s way.

At this point, any outlet not calling the anti-trans panic for what it is will have blood on their hands.