Still Unnamed
The report by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women was a major milestone for gender equality in Canada, but it failed to address the LGBTQ community. SARAH RATCHFORD explains that while we’ve come a long way in recognizing gender nonconforming folks, there’s more work to be done
“She’s trying to check in!” the receptionist at the Halifax doctor’s office hollered to a colleague as I approached the desk for my appointment. Despite the walls being covered with signs about how the clinic respected queer folks and their pronouns, I had been immediately misgendered. This happens everywhere. I’m nonbinary, or enby, but I was assigned female at birth. I’m usually not asked about my pronouns. Most people, by default, assume that I identify as a woman. Some of my friends struggled with my pronoun shift from she to they, and most of my family members chose to disregard it. While people in my personal life have had trouble with my identity, Canada as a country is doing a slightly better job making the jump from a binary view of gender to a more multifaceted one. Status of Women Canada, in becoming a recognized government department, has changed its name to the Department for Women and Gender Equality (wage). Transgender people are now protected under Canadian human rights law. We can have an X on our passports to indicate that we don’t identify as male or female and, for the first time, Statistics Canada is going to start counting us in its next census. This is progress, considering that the report published by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada didn’t include anything about lgbtq people, who also face serious gender inequality and many of the same issues the report identified as affecting cisgender women. But a closer look reveals that not enough has changed in fifty years. In the official announcement on its creation in 2018, WAGE announced that it had “an expanded mandate for gender equality that includes sexual orientation, gender identity and expression”, but it didn’t name trans and gender nonconforming people outright. This is a problem because much of the inner pain trans people experience stems from the constant erasure they face. Failure to explicitly identify and include queer, trans, gender non-conforming, two-spirit, nonbinary, and genderfluid people in national discussions of gender equity and status leads to continued violence against these communities. The exclusion perpetuates the very genderbased othering the department purports to be fighting against. It’s crucial to include us in order to keep us alive and well. Due to continued erasure and discrimination, trans people face high rates of poverty and violence. Canada is only just beginning to include trans and nonbinary people in its data collection, and trans people are often misgendered in death, so we don’t know how many trans people have been murdered. Globally, however, we know that at least 331 trans and gender nonconforming people were murdered in 2019 alone. Trans people are also at a higher risk of suicide than cisgender people: in 2015, more than 10 percent of trans people reported attempting suicide. Up to 43 percent of trans people have attempted it at some point in their lives. Trans, nonbinary, and two-spirit people across Canada, though, have long been fighting for safety and recognition. Sustained community activism has pushed us to the point we’re at now, where federal changes have been implemented. Groups like Egale and The 519 in Toronto demand better policy, awareness, and community protection. Powerful individuals like Monica Forrester, who does outreach with Maggie’s Toronto Sex Workers Action Project, and Susan Gapka, a trans rights activist and educator, speak out about the same issues. We gather to hold trans marches across the country. Within our communities, we spend a lot of time caring for one another. Change is needed on a wider scale, though. As we mark the anniversary of the historic report on the status of women, I think it’s time to start talking about a new status report, this time led by queer and gender diverse people. We deserve the opportunity to spell out our needs and find ways to work toward a future where we can be seen and supported. When people and institutions talk about gender equality and stop at men and women, they’ve lost the plot. Trans and gender nonconforming people have to be explicitly included. Our lives depend on it.