Growing hatred casts a shadow over Pride, needing spotlights to protest and celebrate
Anna Murphy receives so many death threats that she has befriended the Calgary police officer she reports to.
As a transgender woman in the public eye, she’s been subject to an avalanche of hate — one that she and other community members and experts say has intensified in recent years, underscoring the need for protest alongside celebration during Pride.
Murphy says that while many members of the LGBTQ community — including herself — have had negative experiences with the police, she’s lucky to be able to rely on one of the officers who investigate hate crimes.
“I know I can call him and say, ‘Hey, guess what happened on a Saturday morning while I was drinking coffee?'” says Murphy. “Not only is he a great cop, but he’s also a great friend.
“As morbid as it is, we find a way to laugh about it. He finds a way to take the pressure and the fear away.”
But despite the support she receives, Murphy, who is a community organizer, says the constant stream of vitriol is exhausting.
She has seen anti-transgender sentiment grow in recent years along with increasing institutional acceptance of LGBTQ people.
The term “gender identity or expression” was added to Canadian human rights law in 2017, but since then people who don’t fit the heterosexual gender binary have faced an onslaught of hate.
According to Statistics Canada, there were seven alleged hate crimes against transgender or agender people reported to the police in 2016. In 2021, the last year with available data, there were 33.
There’s been a similar increase in hate crimes against people because of their sexual orientation: There were 423 reported incidents in 2021, compared to 176 in 2016, StatCan data shows.
But experts say those numbers paint an incomplete picture. The actual number of incidents is almost always higher than what is reported to the police.
For example, the advocacy group Equal Canada recorded more than 6,400 anti-LGBTQ protests and online hate crimes in the country in the first three months of 2023.
Recently, the Toronto Blue Jays cut ties with a pitcher who posted online in support of anti-LGBTQ boycotts, and several municipalities and school boards have banned the raising of Pride flags on their property.
This week at a school assembly in Kelowna, BC, a man made headlines for falsely suggesting that a nine-year-old girl was transgender and demanding proof that she was biologically born female. The girl’s mother says a woman who was with the man accused her of being a groomer and “genital mutilator.”
Murphy says the hate is inhumane.
“It’s hard for people to understand what it’s like to have to wake up every day, in some way, shape or form, and deal with dysphoria – which myself and so many others do – but then also have to debate and otherwise defend, justify, validate and quantify your existence to everyone around you,” she says.
In recent months, anti-transsentment seekers have targeted a number of LGBTQ community events, ranging from Pride flag raising to drag performances.
In late April, protesters gathered outside a public library in downtown Toronto determined to stop a drag queen from reading stories to families.
Some carried placards with baseless accusations that drag queens were predators, that exposure to their performances threatens the innocence of children.
Police were on the scene and kept the anti-drag protesters away from the library entrance. Behind the officers, a larger group of counter-protesters formed what they described as a human barrier to protect the event.
Gary Kinsman, a member of the No Pride In Policing Coalition, was among their ranks. There were about 35 anti-drag protesters there, he says, and at least twice as many counter-demonstrators.
“A number of speakers with megaphones denounced us all as perpetrators and pedophiles,” he says. “They’re reusing the language the right wing used against gay and lesbian organizers in the ’70s and ’80s, when they would denounce anyone as a so-called pedophile.”
In this case, he says, the event went ahead as planned and the drag queen and families were all able to leave safely once it was done. While Kinsman says one person reported being burned by a cigarette butt, no one was seriously injured.
Kinsman was on the front lines of Toronto bathhouse raids in the 1980s and says these protests are echoes of past intolerance.
Travers, a sociology professor at Simon Fraser University who goes by only one name, says that’s no coincidence.
The ubiquitous anti-transgender rhetoric is being promoted by the same people who protested gay and lesbian rights in the 1970s and 1980s, says Travers, whose pronouns are she and they.
“There’s a long, long history of the Christian right targeting gay and transgender people,” they say. “And they are very well funded.”
Those demographics want the state to stick to their reading of biblical teachings on gender, says Travers: that there are only men and women, that biological sex and sex are the same, that sex should only take place within the confines of marriage, and that a marriage must be between two people of the opposite sex.
Travers says that’s why homophobia and transphobia seem so closely linked, and why drag queens, whose gender and sexuality vary, are targeted in the same way.
“Most of the homophobia people experience tends to be directed at people who are gender nonconforming,” they say. For example, heterosexual cisgender men who are perceived as effeminate and heterosexual cisgender women who appear more masculine may experience homophobic harassment.
Travers says there’s a lot of harmful misinformation out there about transgender people. Contrary to fear mongering, transgender people do not commit more crimes than their cisgender counterparts. In fact, they are much more likely to be victims of crime.
But they say members of the far right on social media and politicians hoping to rally voters are spreading dangerous lies.
Murphy, back in Calgary, says she hopes people take the time to educate themselves and correct misinformation when they see it.
She says there are plenty of credible sources people can refer to from organizations like Egale, Skipping Stone in Calgary, and the 519 in Toronto.
But, she says, it can be even simpler: “One of the easiest things a human being can do is first and foremost recognize my existence as a transgender woman, and the existence of people like me who are transgender or non-binary. being, or gender diversity, is not a debate.
“It’s not an opinion and it’s not an ideology.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on June 15, 2023.
