Hatin' On Transpeople For The Holidays In The Great White North

The North West Territories to be precise. 

According to the Dented Blue Mercedes blog, we had another eruption of Holiday Transphobia Gone Wild on December 9.

Seems that student Gabrielle Landrie was alleged to have been asked on three occasions by Northwest Territories Finance Minister Michael Miltenberger to leave the campus during the visit of Governor General David Johnston to Aurora College.

The reason?  Because according to Miltenberger she allegedly spooked the Governor General.

Hmm. Sounds like yours or if it's true the Governor General's issue, niot Gabrielle's.   She had every right to be on that campus as a student there.

Interestingly enough, Gender Identity is an explicitly protected grounds of discrimination in NWT human rights law and policy so a human rights complaint has been filed.by Landrie against Miltenberger. .

Stay turned, this is going to be a very interesting situation playing out up there.

New Canadian Border Services Agency Rules For Strip Searching Trans Travellers

For you trans folks who are planning on visiting Canada soon or in the near future, if you're asked by Canadian Border Services Agency officers to do a strip search and you're apprehensive about it, a new option is available for you per recently created guidelines.

Due to questions from field officers concerning what to do in those cases, the CBSA adopted special strip search rules back in August for travellers who've had SRS, are pre-operative or non-operative, intersex or who feel neither fully male nor female.

The person can choose the split search option, in which a female officer conducts half the search while the male officer does the second half.

It was created according to Canadian Border Services Agency senior media spokeswoman Esme Bailey after it was pointed out the CBSA agency manuals originally gave no information to officers about how to handle strip searches when the subject was transsexual or intersexed.

"The development of the changes to the policy was a proactive effort by the CBSA to ensure consistency with other law enforcement agencies and to resolve this gap in our policy," Bailey said
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The policy was guided by a 2006 Ontario Human Rights Tribunal decision filed by transwoman Rosalyn Forrester. 

She complained of feeling humiliated by strip searches conducted on her by a male officer from Peel Regional Police near Toronto in 1999 and 2001.

The Canadian Border Service Agency has conducted more than 2,000 strip searches this year according to Bailey, but there are no statistics available as to how many were split searches.

But know that if for some reason you're asked to do so by a CBSA officer while in the process of entering Canada, the option is available to you.

Ecole Polytechnique Massacre Anniversary

December 6, 1989 is a date that Canadian women will never forget.  It is the anniversary of the worst school shooting ever conducted in Canada.

Canadians lover their flags to half staff and remember the fourteen women whose lives were cut short on that horrific.day in Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, and Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz.

Thirteen of them were students at the Ecloe Polytechnique.  Twelve were studying engineering, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz was a nursing student, and Maryse Laganière worked in the school's financial services office.. 

It was perpetrated by Marc Lépine, who harbored a deep seated hatred of women and feminism, and believed that both were ruining his life.  A little after 4 PM EST he barged into one of the classrooms in the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, separated the nine female students from the male ones and after declaring he hated feminists, shot them all, killing six.  

Lépine roamed the building for the next twenty terrifying minutes killing another seven students, a female clerk  in the financial services office, and wounded another 21 people in a twenty minute span before killing himself in a third floor classroom.

The suicide note found on Lépine had a list of another 19 women in Quebec that he planned to kill because he perceived them to be feminists.  The list included journalist and feminist newspaper founder Francine Pelletier, a union leader, a politician, a television personality and six female police officers who came to his attention because they played together on a volleyball team.    

The Ecole Polytechnique massacre led to the passage of the Firearms Act in 1995 that ushered in stricter gun control regulations in Canada.  The Firearms Act includes a gun registry that the Conservative Harper government has been trying to overturn since they gained power in 2008.

On the anniversary of the event last year I posted an essay that Renee of Womanist Musings had previously written about the tragedy..    


In 1991, Canada’s Parliament declared December 6 a National Day of Mourning and the National Day to End Violence Against Women with flags lowered to half staff across the nation to commemorate the day.

Elsewhere around the world, we should  also take a moment to reflect on women who are senselessly killed every day around the world by violence aimed at them for simply being who they are.

Proposed Nova Scotia Name Change Bill Has Controversial Provision

The province of Nova Scotia introduced a name change bill that has a provision in it that is drawing criticism from not only transgender people but victims of stalkers.

The proposed bill would require that anyone requesting a legal name change except people getting them via marriage or children submit fingerprints for a mandatory criminal background check.  

British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba have legislation on their legal books similar to the one that Nova Scotia is trying to pass, while provinces such as Ontario allow name changes without mandatory fingerprinting.

Nova Scotia's Justice Minister Ross Landry said the Identification of Criminals Act is intended to help police track people with criminal records who want to change their names to hide their past.  He claimed that once the criminal checks are completed and name change applicants cleared, police will be required to destroy the fingerprints.   .

During a recent committee hearing for the bill MLA's got an earful from transgender people and their advocates opposing the bill.   They felt it was a violation of their rights and would stigmatize them just for getting a name chane that is a crucial part of us moving on and living lives in our correct gender.

A name change is one way of alleviating the anxiety and stress of being "regularly outed as trans," local activist Kaley Kennedy told the committee.

For many people who can’t afford to undergo a sex-change operation or treatments, a legal name change is one of the only "affordable options available for them," Kennedy said.

And we shouldn't have to go through the dehumanizing stigma of being fingerprinted just to have our names match our gender presentation either.

All Is White In So-Called Multicultural Canada

Guest post from Renee, the editrix of Womanist Musings and my fave north of the border mommy blogger.

So, Saturday was the annual Santa Claus parade in Niagara Falls.  I am not a big believer in Santa, because I don't like the idea that this benign White guy travels around and grants wishes.  I think I would be more amenable to the idea, if Santa was occasionally a person of colour.  I always think of Santa as just another manifestation of Whiteness, and we all know that White men are not exactly lining up to do people of colour any favours.  At any rate, after writing their letters to Santa, we headed off to the parade.

We have been going as a family for the last seven years, and so my kids were super excited.  We always have a big breakfast, watch the parade and then go out to lunch.  It's really a family day of fun for us. Each year, the people participating in the parade hand out treats to the kids lining the parade route.  This year, my kids sat down on the sidewalk next to two White kids, with their hot chocolate and blankets to watch the parade.  They were just brimming with excitement.  As the parade got going, we noticed that the participants would hand candy to the two little White boys sitting next to the left my kids and the White girls on the right, but not to my sons.

When they were skipped time and time again, my kids would look back at us to ask what was going on.  Neither of them could understand why they didn't receive candy, while the White boys on their left did, and the White girls on their right did.  The unhusband finally asked me if I thought race was a factor, and I told him of course it is.  Despite the bullshit lie that we tell ourselves about all children being special, marginalized children are just seen as surplus population.


Finally, noticing that nothing was going to change, the unhusband encouraged Mayhem to step further into the street and hold his hand out.  It was not until the Mayhem pushed ahead, and held is hand out that parade participants deigned to give him candy.  At six years old, he is too young to figure out that what he was experiencing was discrimination first hand, but as his mother, I was absolutely enraged.  Standing right next to them, I could not protect them from the bigotry and privilege of others. 

I am quite sure that the people participating were not actively thinking about what they were doing, but their actions still amounted to discrimination and ruined any form of fun I could have potentially had at this event.  Whiteness has been so ingrained socially, that racism often happens without any premeditated thought. The sad truth of the matter is that while White kids are being sheltered and taught to believe that they are special, kids of colour are actively being torn down and encouraged by the world to see themselves as "other".  White people may look at them as babies, and think that they are cute, but shortly after getting out of diapers, they begin to see Black boys as future rapists, thieves and gang bangers. They are systematically written off as a matter of course.  The childhood that White children have, is denied to children of colour, in order to teach them their role in the pecking order. Discrimination does not wait until adulthood.

If you read mommy blogs written by White women, they are full of things like recipes, rainy day activities, coupon deals and pictures of their smiling kids.  White women may write about the stress of working and raising their kids, but they will never have an experience like I did this past Saturday.  They will not have to cheer up their kids after being passed over repeatedly.  They will not have to teach their children that they will have to be better than everyone else to succeed in life, or that the world is happy to see them fail. They can afford to have fluffy little blogs talking about nothing, but as a mother of colour, I have to deal with the realities of White supremacy, as I attempt to salvage some kind of childhood for my precious boys. I wonder if on their business cards, these women have the words only my kids matter.

I know that in years to come, my kids will look back and know exactly what happened to them and why. I know this because there are plenty of events from my childhood that I now understand to be racist.  I know that my parents attempted to shield me as much as possible from the harshness of this, but one can only do so much, when society is determined to undermine your every effort to invest your child with self worth.  Each act of racism will build upon the other, creating rage, and in some cases outright depression.  They will be told that they are reading too much into things, and that they are just looking for a reason to be upset, because it is easier to accept that the marginalized person is wrong, rather than deal with the fact that the world has not moved into this post racial utopia that we continue to hear so much about.

I know that what happened to my kids is not an anomaly, and I also know that they are going to have experiences that are far worse due directly to the colour of their skin. This is the unavoidable future of children of colour.  Even as I am writing this, I am fully aware that this not considered appropriate mommy blog conversation, because isms are something that don't get discussed in parenting spaces.  The generic standard is Whiteness, just like everything else, and this simply reinforces the idea that there is a monolithic experience that constitutes childhood.   I don't have the luxury of such vanilla conversation, and this is why this why social justice is a priority here at Womanist Musings.  You can only afford to ignore race, if you are never going to be a target of racism.