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On a sunny Tuesday morning, Talia Johnson walked down a long corridor to the House of Commons foyer, its polished marble floors buzzing with activity.
It was the third time in her life she had come to Parliament Hill to urge MPs to extend human rights protections to transgender people like her.
But this time was different.
Johnson and about 40 other activists, one as young as 10 years old, stood behind Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, forming a human backdrop to the Liberal government’s announcement that it had introduced Bill C-16 – an act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code.
It was May 17, the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.
“As Canadians, we should feel free and safe to be ourselves,” the minister said. “No one should be refused a job, disadvantaged in the workplace, be unable to access services, or be the target of harassment and violence because of their gender identity or gender expression.”
It was a fantastic feeling, says Johnson, to stand on the national stage with a crowd of like-minded people from across the country. The day also marked the first time the pink and blue trans flag had flown in Parliament.
Yet there was the undeniable sense, among Johnson and the others, that this was a moment long overdue.
“While there is celebration,” she says, “it’s tempered by how long it’s taken to get to this point.”
This was, in fact, the seventh time such a bill has been proposed in Canada, albeit the first by a ruling party.
The symbolism of C-16 cannot be overstated. But it alone may do little to improve the everyday lives of trans people and the challenges many face in accessing health care, finding stable employment and in seeing accurate reflections of their lives in the media.
Laws may bring legal victories, but winning the hearts and minds of people is the ultimate prize.
And much of that journey lies ahead.
Alexandre Baril’s office inside the University of Ottawa’s social sciences tower is just down the hall from the new all-gender washrooms recently opened by the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies.
Baril’s teaching and research focuses on trans and queer issues. He says the introduction of the new law is a “clear message to the Canadian population” that trans people deserve basic human rights and protection against discrimination.
But the law has limits, he says. And blindspots.
Focusing too much on punishing individuals or companies for transphobic acts could gloss over the larger systemic discrimination most trans people encounter on a daily basis, often at the hands of the same government now seeking to extend them certain basic rights.
“Most of the violence that trans communities suffer is from the state and from the law and from the government, and institutions that are run by the state and the government,” Baril says.
“Even if this initiative could improve the lives of some trans people concretely … stopping there and thinking this bill will solve everything is a mistake.”
He also fears legal protection is not accessible to everyone, but depends instead on a person’s class, race, age, level of education and ability.
University of Ottawa Prof. Alexandre Baril says the new law has blindspots as well as limitations.
The government says adding four words — “gender identity or expression” — to federal laws will ensure that all Canadians can identify themselves and express their gender as they wish while being free of discrimination and hate.
There’s an importance to referencing both gender identity and gender expression, as there is a meaningful distinction between the two.
“Identity” is a person’s internal sense of their own gender and may not necessarily be visible to others. “Expression” is how people present themselves and includes behaviour and outward appearance, such as clothes, hair and makeup, mannerisms, name and pronouns.
Advocates say explicitly including “gender expression” in the bill is key because it makes the law more inclusive, including for those who identify as genderqueer, gender fluid or two-spirit.
And yet, some raise valid concerns about the government’s plan — and whether it goes far enough.
“Will Canada stop incarcerating trans women in men’s prisons? Immigration detention centres? Will sex work be decriminalized? Will women’s shelters now have to help trans women? Will non-binary people get identity cards that match their gender? Will doctors refusing to prescribe hormones to trans people be seen as discriminating?” wrote Montreal-based trans advocate Sophia Banks in an opinion piece published by the Citizen this week.
Significant issues clearly remain.
Access to health care
Many trans people avoid hospitals and encounters with health care professionals due to their past experiences of discrimination or fear of it.
The Trans Pulse Project, a landmark Ontario study based on data collected from more than 500 trans people, found that one-quarter of participants reported being belittled or ridiculed by an emergency care provider for being trans, while among those with a family doctor, approximately 40 per cent had experienced discriminatory behaviour at least once, including refusal of care and the use of demeaning language.
Some family doctors feel trans care is outside their scope of practice, even if the person is seeking treatment for something completely unrelated.
Meanwhile, trans people experience alarmingly high levels of depression and suicide. According to the Trans Pulse study, the distress many feel is not because they are trans, but rather due to the discrimination and violence they face.
Medical transition
In Ontario, the province is taking steps to make it easier for trans people to get a medical referral for gender confirmation surgery, which refers to the surgical alteration of anatomy to affirm one’s gender identity. But even after people get a referral, they still often face a years-long wait and must travel to Montreal or the United States to get the procedures performed.
There is only one clinic in Canada that provides the procedures to those covered by provincial health insurance plans, such as OHIP. A May 2 blaze at the Montreal clinic caused about $700,000 in damage, but surgeries have reportedly continued on schedule. A statement on the clinic’s website says steps have been taken to “temporarily transfer its activities in order to avoid surgery cancellations and delays for its clients.”
Ontario was also the first province to drop a requirement that trans people undergo surgery in order to change their sex designation on a birth certificate and other government identification. That was in 2012.
Requiring people to surgically modify their genitals and remove reproductive organs was tantamount to forced sterilization, Baril says. When he transitioned eight years ago, he had to undergo surgery in order to change his civil status to male. At the time, the Quebec government also required him to ask a second doctor to perform a physical exam of his genitals and submit documentation to the government.
While other provinces, including Quebec, have since followed Ontario’s lead and dropped this requirement, surgery is still necessary in Saskatchewan in order to change sex designation.
Many people don’t want to undergo surgery, Baril says. It is but one of the many routes of transition. People may not be able to afford it, can’t get the time off work or have other health concerns. They might not want to modify their bodies or may seek to retain their reproductive organs in order to have children one day.
Employment and housing
The Trans Pulse study reported a median income for trans people of $15,000 a year, even though almost half have a post-secondary or graduate degree.
Thirteen per cent of survey participants said they have been fired for being trans, while another 15 per cent suspected they were fired because they are trans.
Johnson is keenly aware of these stats.
Since beginning her transition journey in early 2009, she has not lived above the poverty line. She says she doesn’t get called for interviews and has had difficulty finding steady work.
She’s now back in school, taking courses to improve her chances of getting into grad school. She also works one day a week as a counsellor and would like to become a psychotherapist.
Johnson, 43, keeps her living expenses down by living with a roommate.
A few years back, she was asked to move out of a basement apartment with a shared entrance because she was transitioning. Someone didn’t want her living there “because there are children in the neighbourhood.”
“I was peeved,” she says. But she didn’t have the money or the energy to seek an apology or redress because she was too focused on her other needs.
In terms of housing, Trans Pulse found that all of the trans youth with supportive parents reported having adequate housing, while less than half — 45 per cent — of those with unsupportive parents enjoyed the same.
Exclusion
There are often subtle ways trans people, particularly trans women, are shunned, ignored or excluded. They can range from not feeling welcome in a social setting to not seeing your identity reflected to the same degree other minorities are.
Baril says universities have embraced the importance of hiring people from specific communities and indigenous people, as well as those with disabilities, yet there are few trans scholars like him, despite growing numbers of trans students attending college and university.
Meanwhile, the people who get funding to research trans issues, he says, are often not trans themselves.
These examples may not be active discrimination, but Baril says people in positions of power don’t appear to think the situation is important enough to address.
Being excluded chips away at a person’s self-esteem and confidence, says Amanda Ryan, a trans woman who belongs to Ottawa’s Gender Mosaic, the country’s oldest transgender social and support group.
“That’s tough to take,” she says. “You can’t prove it as discrimination, it will never hold up in court, but you know people are doing that to you.”
The 2016 census provided only two boxes for gender: male or female. That posed a huge problem for genderqueer or non-binary people, that is, those for whom gender identities are neither exclusively male or female, as well as intersex and two-spirit people.
Statistics Canada encouraged people to select the gender they most identify with or leave the question blank and include an explanation in the comments section.
Baril and Ryan agree it was a missed opportunity. “It would not have been complicated to add more boxes,” Baril says.
Media Representation
There’s no question trans people are more visible now than they were a decade ago. It was only a year ago that a glamorous Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair and a year before that Orange is the New Black star Laverne Cox prompted Time magazine to suggest America was at a “transgender tipping point.”
The media is paying attention. The problem, says Baril, is what the media gaze focuses on. Media focus on trans people who pass or correspond to certain beauty standards, while little attention is paid to the structural discrimination and violence many others face.
There’s an objectification and sexualization of trans bodies, combined with a narrative he says is narrowly focused on stories of transition, physical transformation and family drama.
“We don’t want to see genderqueer, we don’t want to see people who don’t fit the binary, we don’t want to see people who are suffering,” Baril says. “We want to see the success story of the transition.”
The media’s focus on trans people prompted Rainbow Health Ontario earlier this year to publish suggested guidelines for reporters to help them choose appropriate language and questions for trans people.
The learning curve
If trans people are making inroads, it’s often happening far from the glare of media, in homes, neighbourhoods and schools, where greater awareness has helped many parents come to terms with their child’s gender diversity.
Not long after the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario launched its diversity clinic in 2012, doctors realized the need was greater than they had anticipated.
There were 17 referrals to the clinic that year, which provides children with a combination of talk therapy and hormone treatments. By 2015, that number had grown to 93. CHEO anticipates it will receive more than 120 referrals this year.
Children now wait two months to see the clinic’s social worker and as long as six months to see Dr. Stephen Feder, the clinic’s co-director.
By then, Feder says, many children are further along in their personal transition and awareness than they might have been just a few short years ago. Parents also arrive with more knowledge and acceptance, wanting what’s best for the child.
But it’s quite likely there are other children out there whose parents may be unsupportive or refuse to accept what the child is trying to express, Feder says.
“We don’t see the kids we don’t see.”
Family Services Ottawa launched a support group for parents of gender-creative and trans children in 2014 (“gender creative” describes children who identify and express their gender in ways that are different from what others may expect and are also sometimes referred to as gender nonconforming, gender variant, gender independent and, in the case of aboriginal children, two-spirit).
About two dozen families attend the group’s monthly meetings, some travelling as long as three hours to attend. New parents show up all the time.
And like CHEO, many come with more awareness of what their children need and where the gaps in services are, says Beck Hood, a trainer and public educator from the organization’s Around the Rainbow program.
Getting to know trans people personally, hearing their stories and experiences, and forging human connections helps break down barriers, says Johnson, who has facilitated workshops for church groups and grad students.
“In terms of changing attitudes, a lot has to do with making connections on a personal level and educating that way, rather than just purely flooding with information,” she says.
Imperfect as it may be, Bill C-16 is just a first step, says Ryan. “The Canadian government now recognizes us as an entity. We are something and that will be important to a lot of us.”
“Having the law in place gives you something you can point to and say to somebody, ‘You can’t do that to me,'” she says.
But education and visibility are the way forward.
“By simply talking about ourselves, we make ourselves more and more a part of general society,” Ryan says.
“It’s all about education. The more people learn about us, the more we become just another part of society. We are just people after all.”
A POLITICAL TIMELINE
The bid for transgender equality has repeatedly been undercut by electoral politics and the sometimes cruel timing of Parliament’s rise and fall.
Exactly 11 years before Wilson-Raybould introduced C-16, Bill Siksay, a lanky New Democrat MP from Burnaby, B.C., rose in the same chamber to propose a largely similar update to federal laws.
It had been an NDP campaign promise in 2004 and a personal commitment Siksay made to his predecessor, former NDP MP Svend Robinson, whose bill in 2003 extended hate-crimes protection to gays and lesbians.
Siksay’s bill was never debated and died when an election was called later that year. A second attempt met the same fate in the subsequent Parliament.
Siksay tried a third time in 2009, expanding the bill to add gender identity and gender expression to the hate crimes provisions of the Criminal Code.
That one eventually made it through the House of Commons after MPs from all parties, including several Conservatives, voted in favour of it, but it died on the Senate order paper when an election was called in April 2011.
After three terms, Siksay retired from politics, passing the trans-right torch to NDP MP Randall Garrison.
Though his efforts may have failed, Siksay says he knew the law would change in his lifetime. “It was very clear to me that this was the right thing to do and that it was going to happen. It was just going to take time.”
The House of Commons passed Garrison’s first trans-rights bill. Garrison had to endure the taunts of opponents who called him a “friend of pedophiles” and agree to remove the words “gender expression” to satisfy some MPs who would have otherwise voted against the bill.
Further amendments proposed by Conservative Sen. Don Plett led the bill even farther down the wrong path.
Plett publicly worried the passage of the bill would encourage deviant men to dress up as women and access women’s public washrooms, so he proposed an exemption for crisis centres, prisons and public washrooms. The amendments were passed, but the bill died when Parliament was dissolved ahead of last year’s election.
In December, Garrison tried again, introducing Bill C-204, even though he knew the new Liberal government has promised to present its own trans rights bill, which would take priority over his private member’s bill.
He wanted to keep up the pressure.
Whether or not it worked, Wilson-Raybould gave him a head’s up about the legislation she was planning to introduce and invited him to stand beside her at the May 17 news conference.
Garrison used to opportunity to press the minister to commit to introducing the legislation quickly and ensuring that it gets through the senate. How soon that will happen is unclear.
“We’re not done yet,” he says.
查看原文...
It was the third time in her life she had come to Parliament Hill to urge MPs to extend human rights protections to transgender people like her.
But this time was different.
Johnson and about 40 other activists, one as young as 10 years old, stood behind Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, forming a human backdrop to the Liberal government’s announcement that it had introduced Bill C-16 – an act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code.
It was May 17, the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.
“As Canadians, we should feel free and safe to be ourselves,” the minister said. “No one should be refused a job, disadvantaged in the workplace, be unable to access services, or be the target of harassment and violence because of their gender identity or gender expression.”
It was a fantastic feeling, says Johnson, to stand on the national stage with a crowd of like-minded people from across the country. The day also marked the first time the pink and blue trans flag had flown in Parliament.
Yet there was the undeniable sense, among Johnson and the others, that this was a moment long overdue.
“While there is celebration,” she says, “it’s tempered by how long it’s taken to get to this point.”
This was, in fact, the seventh time such a bill has been proposed in Canada, albeit the first by a ruling party.
The symbolism of C-16 cannot be overstated. But it alone may do little to improve the everyday lives of trans people and the challenges many face in accessing health care, finding stable employment and in seeing accurate reflections of their lives in the media.
Laws may bring legal victories, but winning the hearts and minds of people is the ultimate prize.
And much of that journey lies ahead.
•
Alexandre Baril’s office inside the University of Ottawa’s social sciences tower is just down the hall from the new all-gender washrooms recently opened by the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies.
Baril’s teaching and research focuses on trans and queer issues. He says the introduction of the new law is a “clear message to the Canadian population” that trans people deserve basic human rights and protection against discrimination.
But the law has limits, he says. And blindspots.
Focusing too much on punishing individuals or companies for transphobic acts could gloss over the larger systemic discrimination most trans people encounter on a daily basis, often at the hands of the same government now seeking to extend them certain basic rights.
“Most of the violence that trans communities suffer is from the state and from the law and from the government, and institutions that are run by the state and the government,” Baril says.
“Even if this initiative could improve the lives of some trans people concretely … stopping there and thinking this bill will solve everything is a mistake.”
He also fears legal protection is not accessible to everyone, but depends instead on a person’s class, race, age, level of education and ability.
University of Ottawa Prof. Alexandre Baril says the new law has blindspots as well as limitations.
The government says adding four words — “gender identity or expression” — to federal laws will ensure that all Canadians can identify themselves and express their gender as they wish while being free of discrimination and hate.
There’s an importance to referencing both gender identity and gender expression, as there is a meaningful distinction between the two.
“Identity” is a person’s internal sense of their own gender and may not necessarily be visible to others. “Expression” is how people present themselves and includes behaviour and outward appearance, such as clothes, hair and makeup, mannerisms, name and pronouns.
Advocates say explicitly including “gender expression” in the bill is key because it makes the law more inclusive, including for those who identify as genderqueer, gender fluid or two-spirit.
And yet, some raise valid concerns about the government’s plan — and whether it goes far enough.
“Will Canada stop incarcerating trans women in men’s prisons? Immigration detention centres? Will sex work be decriminalized? Will women’s shelters now have to help trans women? Will non-binary people get identity cards that match their gender? Will doctors refusing to prescribe hormones to trans people be seen as discriminating?” wrote Montreal-based trans advocate Sophia Banks in an opinion piece published by the Citizen this week.
Significant issues clearly remain.
•
Access to health care
Many trans people avoid hospitals and encounters with health care professionals due to their past experiences of discrimination or fear of it.
The Trans Pulse Project, a landmark Ontario study based on data collected from more than 500 trans people, found that one-quarter of participants reported being belittled or ridiculed by an emergency care provider for being trans, while among those with a family doctor, approximately 40 per cent had experienced discriminatory behaviour at least once, including refusal of care and the use of demeaning language.
Some family doctors feel trans care is outside their scope of practice, even if the person is seeking treatment for something completely unrelated.
Meanwhile, trans people experience alarmingly high levels of depression and suicide. According to the Trans Pulse study, the distress many feel is not because they are trans, but rather due to the discrimination and violence they face.
•
Medical transition
In Ontario, the province is taking steps to make it easier for trans people to get a medical referral for gender confirmation surgery, which refers to the surgical alteration of anatomy to affirm one’s gender identity. But even after people get a referral, they still often face a years-long wait and must travel to Montreal or the United States to get the procedures performed.
There is only one clinic in Canada that provides the procedures to those covered by provincial health insurance plans, such as OHIP. A May 2 blaze at the Montreal clinic caused about $700,000 in damage, but surgeries have reportedly continued on schedule. A statement on the clinic’s website says steps have been taken to “temporarily transfer its activities in order to avoid surgery cancellations and delays for its clients.”
Ontario was also the first province to drop a requirement that trans people undergo surgery in order to change their sex designation on a birth certificate and other government identification. That was in 2012.
Requiring people to surgically modify their genitals and remove reproductive organs was tantamount to forced sterilization, Baril says. When he transitioned eight years ago, he had to undergo surgery in order to change his civil status to male. At the time, the Quebec government also required him to ask a second doctor to perform a physical exam of his genitals and submit documentation to the government.
While other provinces, including Quebec, have since followed Ontario’s lead and dropped this requirement, surgery is still necessary in Saskatchewan in order to change sex designation.
Many people don’t want to undergo surgery, Baril says. It is but one of the many routes of transition. People may not be able to afford it, can’t get the time off work or have other health concerns. They might not want to modify their bodies or may seek to retain their reproductive organs in order to have children one day.
•
Employment and housing
The Trans Pulse study reported a median income for trans people of $15,000 a year, even though almost half have a post-secondary or graduate degree.
Thirteen per cent of survey participants said they have been fired for being trans, while another 15 per cent suspected they were fired because they are trans.
Johnson is keenly aware of these stats.
Since beginning her transition journey in early 2009, she has not lived above the poverty line. She says she doesn’t get called for interviews and has had difficulty finding steady work.
She’s now back in school, taking courses to improve her chances of getting into grad school. She also works one day a week as a counsellor and would like to become a psychotherapist.
Johnson, 43, keeps her living expenses down by living with a roommate.
A few years back, she was asked to move out of a basement apartment with a shared entrance because she was transitioning. Someone didn’t want her living there “because there are children in the neighbourhood.”
“I was peeved,” she says. But she didn’t have the money or the energy to seek an apology or redress because she was too focused on her other needs.
In terms of housing, Trans Pulse found that all of the trans youth with supportive parents reported having adequate housing, while less than half — 45 per cent — of those with unsupportive parents enjoyed the same.
•
Exclusion
There are often subtle ways trans people, particularly trans women, are shunned, ignored or excluded. They can range from not feeling welcome in a social setting to not seeing your identity reflected to the same degree other minorities are.
Baril says universities have embraced the importance of hiring people from specific communities and indigenous people, as well as those with disabilities, yet there are few trans scholars like him, despite growing numbers of trans students attending college and university.
Meanwhile, the people who get funding to research trans issues, he says, are often not trans themselves.
These examples may not be active discrimination, but Baril says people in positions of power don’t appear to think the situation is important enough to address.
Being excluded chips away at a person’s self-esteem and confidence, says Amanda Ryan, a trans woman who belongs to Ottawa’s Gender Mosaic, the country’s oldest transgender social and support group.
“That’s tough to take,” she says. “You can’t prove it as discrimination, it will never hold up in court, but you know people are doing that to you.”
The 2016 census provided only two boxes for gender: male or female. That posed a huge problem for genderqueer or non-binary people, that is, those for whom gender identities are neither exclusively male or female, as well as intersex and two-spirit people.
Statistics Canada encouraged people to select the gender they most identify with or leave the question blank and include an explanation in the comments section.
Baril and Ryan agree it was a missed opportunity. “It would not have been complicated to add more boxes,” Baril says.
•
Media Representation
There’s no question trans people are more visible now than they were a decade ago. It was only a year ago that a glamorous Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair and a year before that Orange is the New Black star Laverne Cox prompted Time magazine to suggest America was at a “transgender tipping point.”
The media is paying attention. The problem, says Baril, is what the media gaze focuses on. Media focus on trans people who pass or correspond to certain beauty standards, while little attention is paid to the structural discrimination and violence many others face.
There’s an objectification and sexualization of trans bodies, combined with a narrative he says is narrowly focused on stories of transition, physical transformation and family drama.
“We don’t want to see genderqueer, we don’t want to see people who don’t fit the binary, we don’t want to see people who are suffering,” Baril says. “We want to see the success story of the transition.”
The media’s focus on trans people prompted Rainbow Health Ontario earlier this year to publish suggested guidelines for reporters to help them choose appropriate language and questions for trans people.
•
The learning curve
If trans people are making inroads, it’s often happening far from the glare of media, in homes, neighbourhoods and schools, where greater awareness has helped many parents come to terms with their child’s gender diversity.
Not long after the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario launched its diversity clinic in 2012, doctors realized the need was greater than they had anticipated.
There were 17 referrals to the clinic that year, which provides children with a combination of talk therapy and hormone treatments. By 2015, that number had grown to 93. CHEO anticipates it will receive more than 120 referrals this year.
Children now wait two months to see the clinic’s social worker and as long as six months to see Dr. Stephen Feder, the clinic’s co-director.
By then, Feder says, many children are further along in their personal transition and awareness than they might have been just a few short years ago. Parents also arrive with more knowledge and acceptance, wanting what’s best for the child.
But it’s quite likely there are other children out there whose parents may be unsupportive or refuse to accept what the child is trying to express, Feder says.
“We don’t see the kids we don’t see.”
Family Services Ottawa launched a support group for parents of gender-creative and trans children in 2014 (“gender creative” describes children who identify and express their gender in ways that are different from what others may expect and are also sometimes referred to as gender nonconforming, gender variant, gender independent and, in the case of aboriginal children, two-spirit).
About two dozen families attend the group’s monthly meetings, some travelling as long as three hours to attend. New parents show up all the time.
And like CHEO, many come with more awareness of what their children need and where the gaps in services are, says Beck Hood, a trainer and public educator from the organization’s Around the Rainbow program.
Getting to know trans people personally, hearing their stories and experiences, and forging human connections helps break down barriers, says Johnson, who has facilitated workshops for church groups and grad students.
“In terms of changing attitudes, a lot has to do with making connections on a personal level and educating that way, rather than just purely flooding with information,” she says.
•
Imperfect as it may be, Bill C-16 is just a first step, says Ryan. “The Canadian government now recognizes us as an entity. We are something and that will be important to a lot of us.”
“Having the law in place gives you something you can point to and say to somebody, ‘You can’t do that to me,'” she says.
But education and visibility are the way forward.
“By simply talking about ourselves, we make ourselves more and more a part of general society,” Ryan says.
“It’s all about education. The more people learn about us, the more we become just another part of society. We are just people after all.”
•
A POLITICAL TIMELINE
The bid for transgender equality has repeatedly been undercut by electoral politics and the sometimes cruel timing of Parliament’s rise and fall.
Exactly 11 years before Wilson-Raybould introduced C-16, Bill Siksay, a lanky New Democrat MP from Burnaby, B.C., rose in the same chamber to propose a largely similar update to federal laws.
It had been an NDP campaign promise in 2004 and a personal commitment Siksay made to his predecessor, former NDP MP Svend Robinson, whose bill in 2003 extended hate-crimes protection to gays and lesbians.
Siksay’s bill was never debated and died when an election was called later that year. A second attempt met the same fate in the subsequent Parliament.
Siksay tried a third time in 2009, expanding the bill to add gender identity and gender expression to the hate crimes provisions of the Criminal Code.
That one eventually made it through the House of Commons after MPs from all parties, including several Conservatives, voted in favour of it, but it died on the Senate order paper when an election was called in April 2011.
After three terms, Siksay retired from politics, passing the trans-right torch to NDP MP Randall Garrison.
Though his efforts may have failed, Siksay says he knew the law would change in his lifetime. “It was very clear to me that this was the right thing to do and that it was going to happen. It was just going to take time.”
The House of Commons passed Garrison’s first trans-rights bill. Garrison had to endure the taunts of opponents who called him a “friend of pedophiles” and agree to remove the words “gender expression” to satisfy some MPs who would have otherwise voted against the bill.
Further amendments proposed by Conservative Sen. Don Plett led the bill even farther down the wrong path.
Plett publicly worried the passage of the bill would encourage deviant men to dress up as women and access women’s public washrooms, so he proposed an exemption for crisis centres, prisons and public washrooms. The amendments were passed, but the bill died when Parliament was dissolved ahead of last year’s election.
In December, Garrison tried again, introducing Bill C-204, even though he knew the new Liberal government has promised to present its own trans rights bill, which would take priority over his private member’s bill.
He wanted to keep up the pressure.
Whether or not it worked, Wilson-Raybould gave him a head’s up about the legislation she was planning to introduce and invited him to stand beside her at the May 17 news conference.
Garrison used to opportunity to press the minister to commit to introducing the legislation quickly and ensuring that it gets through the senate. How soon that will happen is unclear.
“We’re not done yet,” he says.
查看原文...
