sexuality

The Mixed Media gallery

Words and photos by Sarah Mann
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2010

Two downtown neighbourhoods in Hamilton, Ontario - James St. North and Landsdale - have recently been the site of several skirmishes in a gentrification war waged in the media, art galleries and on the streets themselves.

James St. North is the vibrant hub of a burgeoning arts community. Busy cafés and bars owned by Portuguese and Italian immigrants who have called the neighbourhood home for decades sit next to swanky new art galleries showcasing the work of local artists. Just east lies the Landsdale neighbourhood, home to some of Hamilton’s poorest residents, including sex workers and other people living or working on the streets. These two neighbourhoods have become focal points of a fiery debate on surveillance, gentrification and the division of public space within Hamilton’s downtown core.

James Street North

Exemplified by two art exhibits and the media coverage that surrounds them, the debate over the right to space in Hamilton reflects similar gentrification struggles being waged in cities across the country in pursuit of sanitized downtown cores pandering to a “creative class” of young urban professionals (for more info on the “creative class, click here).

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By Robyn Maynard
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2010

Nandita Sharma is an activist, scholar, and the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006), and “Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid” (NWSA #17, 2005). In this interview, she addresses the effects of anti-trafficking on migrant women doing sex work. She critiques the notion of “trafficking” in the context of the increasing necessity of global migration and the tightening of borders in the global North. According to Sharma, border restrictions, rather than “trafficking,” are the biggest impediment to the self-determination of (im)migrant women in Canada.

Jessica Yee is the director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network. In this interview, she describes the conditions of ongoing and under-reported exploitation of Indigenous women in Canada, critiques the conflation of “trafficking” and sex work, and explains the oppressive effects of the anti-trafficking movement on Indigenous women’s self-determination.

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Illustration by Kim Sokol

By Penelope Hutchison
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

We once called ourselves Radical Obnoxious Fucking Feminists. When we meet again 20 years later, I discover that both f-words make us wince. What happened?

The day after the reunion, the subject line of Kelly’s email reads: “Did you hear?” On August 4, 2009, the same night as four university girlfriends and I had gathered for a 20-year reunion, a man walked into a gym in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, and opened fire. In response to what his online diary described as years of rejection by women and his inability to get a girlfriend, George Sodini shot three women, injured nine others – all unknown to him – and then killed himself.

The coincidence is surreal. My undergraduate girlfriends and I had planned the reunion as a memorial of sorts to mark the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. On December 6, 1989, 14 female engineering students were shot to death by a man who blamed women – feminists in particular – for ruining his life. The event shocked and scared us because we saw just how far the backlash against women could go.

I swiftly type my reply to Kelly’s email:

“The shooting and killing of those women on the same night as our reunion is unbelievable. Clearly misogyny is still alive and kicking. Getting together with you all made me realize that perhaps we still can make change. Instead of enlisting as junior members of the raging grannies, maybe we can morph into some fabulous forty-something gang? Something to ponder.”

Not a single one of my former fellow activists responds to my email. My disappointment turns to depression. How is it that as 40-something professionals, we don’t feel we have the same power and voice and ability to make change that we once believed feminism offered us? What has happened to us? To the world around us?

In the wake of this latest killing, we won’t be gathering in the Queen’s University Women’s Centre to plan a candlelight vigil. Julie won’t be making a sign that reads “Misogyny kills.” Nothing but a brief flurry of emails.

It is not that my girlfriends don’t want to speak out about violence against women anymore. It is, I tell myself, that in our supposedly post-feminist age, such outbursts from savvy professional women seem uncouth and unreasonable. Now that women are encouraged to pursue an education, a career, and be sexually independent, many see feminism as a thing of the past. To ease our way in the world, women like me have given up any public claims to feminism, or have at least tucked it away in an unobtrusive corner of our beings so as not to offend.

We have become lapsed feminists.

The rise of ROFF

Twenty years ago, my girlfriends and I, undergraduates all, formed ROFF – Radical Obnoxious Fucking Feminists. We gained notoriety in the media for our political protests. A Globe and Mail reporter described us in November 1989 as a “shadowy group” that shook “the serenity of Queen’s, a campus renowned as a hotbed of social rest.”

On Valentine’s Day we planted stop signs around campus to mark the places where, it was rumoured, women had been sexually assaulted. During Orientation Week, we whitewashed the “Golden Tit,” the speed bump engineering students decorate each year with a pink nipple, and spray painted “ROFF” over top in purple letters. We organized a 24-hour sit-in in the university principal’s office with two dozen other women. The sit-in was a response to the administration’s failure to discipline a group of first-year male students living in residence who had plastered their dorm windows with slogans like “No Means Kick Her In The Teeth,” “No Means Tie Me Up” and “No Means Harder.” The signs were the men’s response to a “No Means No” anti-date rape awareness campaign on campus.

My ROFF girlfriends and I had come to Queen’s in the late 1980s believing the battle of the sexes was over. Instead, we faced signs on student ghetto houses with messages like “Bring Your Virgins Here,” “Show Your Tits” and “Why Beer is Better than Women: Beer Doesn’t Run to Tell the Police When you Rape It.” We met one another in classes on feminist jurisprudence, women in politics, literature and philosophy, and made the Queen’s Women’s Centre our clubhouse.

We were empowered by the possibil­ities feminism offered to challenge society’s power structures. We devoured the texts of writers like bell hooks, Catharine MacKinnon and Carol Gilligan, and the lectures of our young, untenured female professors who sparked discussion about the exploitation of women in a male-dominated culture.

The gender politics at Queen’s and other campuses across Canada certainly reinforced this perspective. We read about panty raids at Wilfred Laurier University where male students splashed ketchup on women’s underwear and hung them out for display. Blindfolded and bikini-clad mannequins were paraded through Carleton University’s campus. We saw the world anew, and it seemed a threatening place, full of hatred towards all things feminine. In feminism we saw hope; a way to make the world a safer place for women.

ROFF reunited

The release of the film Polytechnique, a dramatization of the Montreal Massacre, in early 2009 inspired me to track down my ROFF girlfriends and host a reunion. I remember how devastated we were by the massacre, how it felt like the culmination of everything my ROFF girlfriends and I were fighting against at Queen’s. After reading a review of the film in the Globe and Mail, I decided to re-establish contact with my girlfriends and engage in some collective soul-searching about our university activism. I was curious to hear about the paths their lives and their feminism had taken.

As Kim, Kelly and I gather around Kim’s living room table, noshing on low-fat, low-carb crudités, white wine and Diet Coke, Jen and Julie join in the reunion by teleconference from British Columbia and Nova Scotia respectively. Once we are past the niceties, the conversation turns to our feminist activism as undergraduates.

We laud ourselves for our political protests and remind ourselves how the media attention we got for the sit-in sparked a national debate about sexism on campuses. Toronto Star columnist Michele Landsberg wrote at the time that “women from all over Ontario have written me letters of blazing indignation about the sexist hazing they receive at universities in this province. Some of the language they endured – language on banners and T-shirts – would make you faint with shock.” We talk about how our actions helped raise the issue of systemic discrimination against women in universities, and how that discussion spilled out into the workplace and onto the streets until it became a matter of public debate.

Despite the pride evident in my ROFF girlfriends’ voices, not a single one of us identifies professionally as a feminist today. “I don’t say I’m a feminist, but talk more about social justice issues. They are much broader than gender politics and that language,” says Jen, director of a network of HIV/AIDS organizations in B.C. After a brief stint articling at a corporate law firm in Vancouver left her miserable, she took on advocacy work in the predominantly gay HIV/AIDS community in the mid 1990s. There she used her legal expertise to help those with HIV/AIDS access Canada Pension Plan and B.C. benefits.

For Jen and many other women today, the discourse of gender politics is a thing of the past, its legitimacy giving way to other issues – social justice, the environment, antiglobalization, etc. Julie, now general manager of a non-profit arts organization in Nova Scotia, was ROFF’s leading agitator. She has continued to be a vocal proponent for change, working for a London, Ontario, homeless coalition and eventually running for the NDP in the riding of London North Centre in the 1990s. Now living in a hamlet near the Bay of Fundy, she describes her current political activism as more locally focused. Managing a theatre company, running artist retreats and art camps for kids where discussion centres on issues like the environment and mental health, she says she’s “gone from making bigger changes and contributions to smaller local things. I feel like I have more personal impact this way.”

As we aged, we began to choose more manageable goals, but the playing field also shifted. At the same time as we were launching our careers, falling in and out of relationships, acquiring mortgages and having children, society was rebranding feminism as irrelevant. Feminist scholar Angela McRobbie says this is not a straightforward right-wing backlash against feminism. Instead, feminism has been incorporated into this new “post-feminist” landscape through media depictions of independent, sex­ually liberated women like Bridget Jones and Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw. These images of strong, educated and sexually independent women (who also happen to be white and middle-class) give the message that equality between the sexes has been achieved, and suddenly feminism is passé.

It is not that the feminist demands for equality have been met, however. It is that in this new social and cultural landscape, the language of feminism has been delegitimized. What happened for women like my ROFF girlfriends and me is that in one way or another, we have all had to make the bargain so many ­middle-class women come to make to find success in our personal and professional lives. The bargain is this: women can be powerful as long as they give up their claims to feminism and the notion that women are unequal and marginalized in society.

‘Post-feminist’ malaise

Kim, a single mother with a high-status job with the government of Alberta, outwardly personifies the changes feminism has undergone in the intervening years. She has transformed from a curvaceous, bohemian-dressed, unruly-haired brunette to a thin, blonde Gabrielle Reece look-alike in tailored suit and heels.

Bunking at her house for the reunion, I see how she organizes her life to meet all the demands on her time. Up at 5:30 a.m. to work out on the elliptical machine in her basement, she’s showered, dressed and feeding her boys by 7:00 a.m., shuttling them off to school to clock in at the office by 8 a.m. A full day at work is followed by a busy evening of attending to her kids’ after-school activities, meals, homework and bedtime. Her attention then turns back to the briefcase of work she’s brought home before her head hits the pillow at 11 p.m.

It is a rigid schedule but one that is reinforced through women’s magazines and TV talk shows that promote the message that working women’s demanding timetables show how competent we are because we can, and do, “do it all.”

Kelly and I have similar schedules to Kim’s. We’re both at the gym four or five times a week, working out with personal trainers to fit the thin, tailored professional woman mould. Kelly, the mom of twin boys conceived through donor insemination, manages a busy family law practice where as a legal expert to the federal government on assisted reproduction, surrogacy and ovum/sperm donor agreements, her services are in demand.

As a self-employed writer, I have the luxury of working in my home office but my day is still rigidly structured. Bouts of writing interspersed between meetings with clients, meal preparation, car-pooling my son between school and after-school activities, and trying to care long-distance for my aging parents.

By adopting these roles, Kim, Kelly and I have been able to achieve success in the still predominantly male workplace. The price we have paid for such success has been to have to distance ourselves from our earlier feminist identities, or at least from contemporary culture’s view of feminism as a juvenile, extreme dogma typically associated with hatred towards men. It is not that we believe that equality between the sexes has been achieved; it is that living the day-to-day practice of feminism in our professional and personal lives is much harder than we anticipated as young women. Feminism is a long historical movement; as individual women striving to find fulfillment in our personal and professional lives, it is hard to live that struggle on a daily basis in the face of a culture that tells you feminism is a thing of the past.

“In my circle of friends, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist but wouldn’t say I’m not. I talk about broader social justice issues. Despite feminism’s efforts to be more inclusive of other issues, it’s not,” says Kelly.

As we recount the trajectories of our various career paths, the joys and challenges of raising boys (Kim, Kelly and I all bore sons) and the ups and downs of our sexual relationships with men and women, we recognize the irony of our situation. Feminism has played a significant role in making our professional, ideological and identity choices possible. As a successful lawyer active in Toronto’s gay and lesbian community, Kelly can partially credit the gains made by the feminist movement. Yet, like the rest of my ROFF girlfriends, she has come to distance herself from feminist rhetoric in order to succeed in the legal profession.

While my ROFF girlfriends no longer identify as feminists, they readily acknowledge the ample evidence that exists showing how women have not overcome the problems feminism sought to solve. “I firmly believe that as much as women think they are sexually liberated now and sexual equals to men, it’s crap. At work, if a man sleeps around, he’s unremarked; if a woman does, she’s labelled the office bicycle. That has not changed one iota,” says Kim.

According to Statistics Canada, women are over six times as likely as men to be victims of sexual assault, the majority perpetrated by someone they know. Women working full-time still earn 29 per cent less than men employed full-time; the gap between male and female earnings has not changed significantly in the past decade. Women are still the primary family caregivers, far more likely than men to have to take time from their jobs because of personal or family responsibilities.

Recognizing the imbalances of power women still face, my ROFF girlfriends and I reflect on how important women’s studies courses were for us as young university women, offering us a critical lens and analysis about the place of women in the world. But today, young women are losing those avenues. The recent closure of the women’s studies program at the University of Guelph, the under-resourcing of women’s studies in general within Canada and the complete disappearance of women’s studies as an undergraduate degree in the United Kingdom highlight how the discipline is increasingly seen as a soft subject, lacking academic rigour and based on dated politics.

Not so radical

As the wine bottle empties and our reunion winds to an end, the discussion turns to our love lives: new relationships bubbling up for Kim and Julie, Jen making peace with being newly single, Kelly and I in long-standing relationships. Perhaps we are no different from Carrie Bradshaw: strong, independent, professionally successful, yet still, in the end, looking for life’s fulfillment through our relationships.

It is evident that the politics and passion for change that first brought us together 20 years ago are gone. We once felt so powerful in our efforts to make the world a better place. Now, looking back, I’m disappointed in myself, and to some extent in my ROFF girlfriends, for not holding on to our feminist principles as we aged; for not fighting against the inequality we met in our workplaces and in our personal relationships; for what many might call “selling out.” I don’t think we’ve necessarily sold out; there is just so much working against us in this struggle for broader equality.

As the fall deepened and the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre drew near, I managed to put aside some of my sadness about the reunion and my ROFF girlfriends’ loss of faith in feminism as a tool for change. I know now it wasn’t that we were naive or too radical to realize that the feminist project was some impossible dream. Rather, it was that we weren’t radical enough to stop the backlash that has sidelined feminism as a force for change – that keeping feminism meaningful for younger generations of women has proven a harder task than we ever imagined.

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When people are generally required to check one of two boxes - male or female - those whose gender identity falls outside the boxes are rendered invisible. (Illustration: Elisha Lim)

By Mandy Van Deven
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

The first step toward addressing an issue is to make it visible. An alcoholic will fail to get sober until he or she admits to having a problem. Slapping around one’s wife was not a punishable offence until it became socially and legally recognized as domestic violence. Visibility is gained through definition, and with visibility comes the power to create social change.

Transgender and gender nonconforming people are just beginning to shed the cloak of invisibility that has shrouded their participation in social and political life. The success of productions featuring middle-class transgender people, like the film Transamerica and the television show The L Word, is opening the door to public conversations that had previously been relegated to academic departments of women’s and queer studies. These popular portrayals are not always politically correct, but they do help to foster the development of an active and visible transgender citizenry working for public recognition of equal rights. Unfortunately, however, transgender visibility seems to be stalled along class lines, a problematic development that advances the rights of a privileged few at the expense of community-oriented movement building.

Similar to queer activism, transgender rights organizing appears to be gaining ground in major metropolitan areas including Washington, D.C., and Toronto. Legal victories for public bathroom access in New York City and anti-discrimination laws in Maine, as well as the election of a transgender mayor in Silverton, Oregon, are certainly cause for celebration. However, the focus on battles that require class privilege means that other battles that would make a significant impact on the majority of poor transgender people have scarcely begun. Would-be transgender activists must often favour their own material conditions above collective advocacy in order to simply survive – a position working-class feminists and feminists of colour have been arguing for decades regarding their place in the movement for women’s liberation. Given this reality, organizing around transgender issues should be viewed through an economic lens in addition to one of gender.

Transgender and gender nonconforming people in the U.S. list their three most important and immediate needs as housing, employment and health care. This is no different from the main preoccupations of low-income people generally, which is not a coincidence as a great number of transgender people live in poverty. (In the United States, a transgender person is twice as likely to live below the poverty line.)

A disproportionate number of transgender people are relegated to low-paying jobs, denied work, or fired for reasons directly related to their gender identity. More than two-thirds report experiencing verbal and physical harassment on the job. Since there are few legal protections against such discrimination, transgender folks have little recourse to address mistreatment on the job, and employers consistently fail to protect transgender workers; in fact, many times they contribute to the abuse. All of these factors contribute to the disproportionate numbers of transgender people experiencing chronic unemployment.

Transgender people who apply for public assistance face difficulties in obtaining the benefits they both need and are entitled to, particularly when they lack access to appropriate identification documents. Those who do receive benefits may do so in a program that has a minimum work requirement in an environment that proves to be dangerous for transgender people, creating a difficult choice between losing benefits and maintaining one’s personal safety. Given their limited employment options, many transgender people become involved in the illegal activities of the street economy – sex work, theft, selling drugs – and so may wind up entangled in the legal system, thus further marginalizing them.

Access to affordable housing is also a problem. Housing refusal is common, leaving many people to live in homeless shelters or on the street. Shelters, which tend to be sex-segregated, bring another unique brand of difficulty, particularly when transgender individuals are not allowed to bunk with members of their self-identified sex or given access to shower and bathroom facilities that suit their needs. Shelters can be unsafe and harassment from other residents and staff is common. Transgender people are frequently turned away from shelters (some even have policies barring their entry) or are thrown out when the staff finds out they are transgender.

Although class and gender intersect deeply and complexly for transgender folks, very little research has been done into the discrimination they face. Figures that are typically calculated by means of the census, public assistance intake forms or social service agencies are lost because transgender identity is not tracked. When people are required to check one of two boxes – male or female – those whose gender identity falls outside the boxes are rendered invisible. The same is true for laws that do not specify protections if a person’s transgender status makes them a target for a crime, such as workplace discrimination or hate violence.

This lack of data contributes to further barriers, as non-profit organ­izations that have trans-specific initiatives face an enormous challenge in obtaining funding. “Getting government funders to understand the risk and vulnerability that transgender people are at to be homeless and getting grants that apply to this work is the biggest challenge we face,” says Yasmeen Persad, the transgender program coordinator at Supporting Our Youth (SOY) in Toronto. A lack of finances is not simply a reality for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals; it is also a reality for the organizations that assist those individuals.

No one decides to do social justice work because they think it will be easy, but some areas are more challenging than others. Low-income transgender people are highly vulnerable to social isolation, abuse and violence – factors that make becoming an advocate or activist extremely difficult. According to Lynn E. Walker, the program director of the Transgender Transitional Housing Program at Housing Works in New York City, “One of the greatest challenges for our clients derives from the reluctance of trans and gender nonconforming people to advocate for themselves. Many clients have experienced long years of disempowerment and homelessness, sometimes complicated by physical and mental illness, and unfortunate encounters with the criminal justice system. Consequently, they tend to prefer to avoid advocacy events where they may encounter institutional and governmental authority, which for them are symbols of ignorance and instruments of oppression.”

The topics that get the most attention from transgender advocates and activists, therefore, are often those of primary interest to middle- and upper-class transgender folks. This is particularly the case in the U.S., where health care disparities are so pronounced: advocating for insurance companies to cover sex reassignment surgery will no doubt benefit transgender people with enough class privilege to actually have health insurance, but what about the need for basic medical care that low-income transgender people are unable to afford?

Organizing to provide free, comprehensive health care services for transgender people would prove to be a much more inclusive and effective organizing strategy. These services could include the provision of basic medical care and medications, including hormones and antidepressants; psychi­atric and psychosocial services like individual and group counselling; and HIV prevention and treatment as well as substance abuse treatment facilities for the disproportionate number of transgender folks who are afflicted with these ailments. A breakthrough in health care provision would represent a momentous step forward for the rights and well-being of transgender people, and would foster the conditions for more activists to step forward.

The Transgender Transitional Housing Program at Housing Works in New York exemplifies the kind of work organizations could be doing to address low-income transgender people’s needs. Tackling all three of transgender people’s most pressing needs, Housing Works provides “one-bedroom furnished apartments for gender non-conforming people and people of trans experience living with HIV/AIDS for up to twenty-four months. Along with appropriate medical, dental, and mental health care, [they] assist them in finding affordable permanent housing, and for those who are interested, the agency provides legal and administrative support as well as vocational training to enable them to obtain satisfactory employment.” Housing Works takes a holistic approach and works for transgender rights where it can make the broadest impact.

Increasing the visibility of low-income transgender people is a step in the right direction but it is not enough to make a sustained impact on their most pressing needs. For that, activism is needed.

Creative solutions can be implemented to solve the problems that are inherent in the current systems that serve low-income people. Transgender-only housing units or floors in existing facilities can be established with private, lockable restroom facilities and staff who are trained in transgender sensitivity. Exclusions of transition-related and gender-specific health care can be removed from the policies of medical facilities and health insurance companies. Governments can invest in transgender-specific workforce development and public assistance programs. Laws and policies that prohibit employment discrimination and workplace harassment can be amended to include transgender and gender non-conforming people. Although transgender organizing is newly emerging, the movement need not make the same mistakes as its well-meaning predecessors by ignoring the class-based needs of the majority of its members.

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By Michelle Miller
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2009

On the third Saturday of every month, a throng of self-identified queers descend on an East Vancouver community centre in search of cheap drinks, good music, and the chance to dance off the month’s drudgery in a safe and inclusive environment. These parties, thrown by the local Fuck Off and Dance (FOD) collective, are well known throughout the community for offering an alternative to the famous West End bar scene, which is thought by many East End queers, including FOD collective members, to be “shallow, apolitical, capitalistic, expensive, exclusionary, trans-phobic, ableist, inaccessible, queer-phobic, totally homo-normative, and male-dominated, with girls who want to look like the L Word version of what a lesbian is.”

After attending several FOD parties I decided to sit down with members of the collective to discuss their reasons for rejecting Vancouver’s gay bar scene and organizing their own queer dance parties instead.

I was invited to attend the tail end of one of the collective’s weekly meetings, held in a dimly lit but homey-feeling basement suite just off Commercial Drive. Vancouver’s East End, with Commercial Drive as its epicentre, is known for being artsy and activist-filled, with a strong community feel. The houses are painted bright colours; coffee shops, fair trade importers and fruit markets abound. When I entered, collective members were sitting on mismatched furniture, drinking herbal tea and talking finances.

Although they were excited to discuss the party, they requested that I not print their names, preferring me to attribute their comments to “the collective.” Jokingly, one member suggested they were “like (Star Trek’s) The Borg,” a race of hybrid robot/organic beings bent on interplanetary assimilation. “Except in a good way.”

Their desire to present a unified front underscores the group’s guiding principles. “We run things by consensus. That was really important to all of us when we started planning and organizing [the parties] so that one person isn’t in charge and people can come and go and the power doesn’t tip.” Another member added, “[When you speak as a collective] everybody is heard, everybody is considered and valued. It’s about love and respect, and it’s about anti-oppression and supporting each other, and an array of perspectives. You can reach more people. We don’t have everyone in the community represented here, but maybe someday we will.”

Overwhelmingly, however, the current demographic of the party-planners aligns quite closely with that of the partygoers: predominantly young, white, and queer-identified folk looking for a good time. The parties also seem to attract more women than men, and more gender-non-conforming folk than I generally see out at mainstream gay bars. The collective’s goal is to “queer” the gay bar experience, which they define as providing “an alternative to what we were saying about the West End. It’s not image-centred, it’s not class-centred, it’s not sexuality-centred, it’s not gender-centred, it’s kind of radicalizing all of those things, and I think being political, or striving to be, trying to be. And a safe space. Which means it’s inclusionary of allies.”

The hundreds of people who attend these parties every month seem to agree that there’s a need for a safer and more inclusive weekend option. Although the mainstream bar scene is important to the gay community, many young queers are not interested in what they see as the expensive, exploitative and uncomfortable atmospheres of many downtown gay bars. According to one member, “going to [mainstream] clubs means getting groped and touched and, you know, you wait in line for two hours, you pay $12 [to get in], you wait in line for a drink and it costs you six. It’s not fun.”

Many people don’t realize that transgender and gender-non-conforming folk, as well as allies and working-class or poor people, report facing discomfort at many mainstream bars. There is a lot of pressure to be “appropriately” or fashionably gay, which acts as a barrier for some members of the gay community. As well, the sexualized environments of these bars can often lead to unwanted sexual attention, which is not always addressed by bouncers or club owners. A lot of FOD partygoers are fed up with feeding their money into a corporate-feeling club scene where they feel like someone’s cashing in on their discomfort. “People know that [at FOD] the money they’re spending is going back into the party. No one is profiting off people having fun.”

FOD parties are designated as safe and accessible spaces. The collective specifically chose a venue that is physically accessible, with non-gender-specific bathrooms. They offer free, volunteer-staffed off-site child care, and admission is charged on a sliding scale, with a policy that no one will be turned away for lack of funds. “And drinks cost three bucks, so you can afford to get in and have a couple of beers, and just focus on shaking your ass and having a good time.”

The collective’s focus on safety is evident in all areas of party planning, from security to decorations. While the collective does hire security staff, they purposely stay away from “big, burly, intimidating men. [We hire] people from the community. We have a safety approach, making sure that nobody’s passing out, or riding their bikes home drunk, and make sure that washrooms are fine and nobody’s getting into fights.” FOD partners with a local queer-positive sexual assault organization to promote a respectful and sexually responsible environment at the parties, which prominently feature posters reading “Ask. Listen. Respect” and “This is What Consent Looks Like.”

Similar to a mainstream bar, of course, many people come to FOD parties to hook up. And the collective is glad they do. “You spend the time and you put the party together and it’s midnight and people are laughing and dancing and flirting and kissing, and people are getting laid because of us, right over there! It’s the best part.” They mean “right over there” quite literally, as parties feature a make-out booth, and the baskets of condoms, gloves and female condoms by the door are always cleared out by last call. It’s not unusual to see two or even three pairs of legs in a bathroom stall after midnight, and there’s never any shortage of dance-floor groping.

The collective members emphasize, though, that the party’s sexual activity is non-exploitative and consensual. “We let people know that the people organizing the party are aware of these problems and we’re not okay with them. We won’t ignore you, or capitalize on you getting touched or treated inappropriately.” I asked the collective if there had ever been a time that they had to intervene, but they shook their heads as one.

One collective member explained, “People get in the space and they feel the energy and I think they just live [in a safe-space way] while they’re there. We create the space and people enter it and they feel it and they just behave in a way that’s respectful and inclusive.” As New Age and idealistic as that sounds, the vibe they describe is definitely there. Which makes hooking up in the bathroom much sexier.

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By Calvin Neufeld
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2009

One of the great myths of our culture is that at birth each infant can be identified as distinctly ‘male’ or ‘female’ (biological sex), will grow up to have correspondingly ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ behavior (public gender), live as a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ (social gender role), and marry a woman or a man (heterosexual affective orientation). This is not so. . . . A significant number of people in fact do not fit this simple idea of biological gender destiny.
- Lisa Josephine Lees, Gender: Exploring Diversity and Acceptance

Yesterday I received a long-awaited item in the mail: an application package for admittance to the Gender Identity Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. This is the golden ticket for Canadian transsexuals who are in need of medical care (including hormones, surgeries and counselling) and who can’t afford to pay for it themselves. Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, commonly referred to as CAMH, is the gateway to it all.

Many provinces, including British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, require that transsexuals seeking government-funded medical care be assessed at this Toronto clinic by a team of doctors who are considered to be experts in the field of gender identity. With their stamp of approval and recommendation for surgery (both are required and can take years to receive), most provinces will fund all or part of the cost of all or some of the procedures the patient needs. It’s an elite program from which 90 per cent of applicants were reportedly turned away between 1969 and 1984. Evidence suggests that they have made few changes to their methods or approach since then.

I’ve been wondering for months what I have to do to be one of the lucky few. I don’t know for certain; like everything else related to transsexuality, no one seems to know for certain - not my doctors, not other transsexuals and not my health minister.

Guided only by rumours and the accounts of transsexuals who have been through this process, I have had to machete my own way through the neglected undergrowth of transsexual health care in Canada.

Regarding Caitlin

The first thing I pull from the package from CAMH is a letter. The letter is addressed to me, Calvin. But in the subject line I see written in bold, RE: Caitlin. I assume that they got this name from my endocrinologist when he made the referral, and seeing it makes me uneasy. That name has no place there since it’s neither my legal name nor my chosen name. It’s a name I haven’t used in years.

I’m a guy now. I have a flat chest and a beard, and according to my birth certificate I was born Calvin Neufeld, a boy. I don’t even have female reproductive organs anymore; that was the price I had to pay for the birth certificate. More on that later.

There is only one thing left for me to do before my transition is complete: genital reconstruction. It’s a relatively straightforward procedure for male-to-female transsexuals (in effect, turning an outie into an innie) but a considerably more challenging undertaking for female-to-male transsexuals. Complete genital reconstruction is typically achieved through several surgeries over several years. The entire procedure is high-risk and costly, with generally unimpressive (and often impotent) results.

It sounds crude and insane, I know. But when you don’t know what it’s like to have sex with your wife, when you have to hide in the men’s change room for fear of becoming a victim of violence, when you’re terrified of being left to die by a shocked emergency crew, when half of your body still feels like someone else’s, even the poorest of options becomes palatable.

I want to feel as complete as I can, now that I know it’s possible. My face, my voice, my chest - even the gut that showed up at around the same time that my butt disappeared - they’re all mine. I finally know what it’s like to look at my body without surprise. What I had before always felt foreign.

Hormones get most of the credit for my transformation - small doses of a clear, thick, yellow fluid that requires a large needle, a steady hand, and a deep intramuscular injection every week for the rest of my life. Thankfully, my wife gets a kick out of giving shots.

But hormones only change secondary sexual characteristics. From the beginning I knew I wanted my transition to be complete, and to be completed quickly so that I could get on with my life with as little awkward androgyny as possible.

My surgical corrections began with a hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy - meaning, in trans terms, that I had all my internal “girl bits” taken out. It wasn’t my first priority (that had always been chest reconstruction) but it was the only procedure I could access under provincial health care, and only through a loophole. It took some investigation to find a sympathetic gynecologist on the other side of the province who would overlook the fact that Ontario had not yet re-listed sexual reassignment surgeries. (It was announced in May 2008 that, after a 10-year hiatus, the procedures would again be considered medically necessary procedures under Ontario’s health care plan.)

“As long as your health card says you’re female,” said the gynecologist (my first and only), “it won’t be a problem.” She is a leading surgeon in her field and a Mother Teresa to trans men like me. Without the procedure, I would not have been allowed to change the sex designation on my birth certificate, leading to some awkward (if not dangerous) moments at hospitals or airports with my mismatched ID.

It was an experience I don’t regret - in fact, I am grateful for it. My uterus was an organ I had no desire to use and under the influence of high doses of testosterone over long periods of time it could have killed me. What I do regret is that I did it on someone else’s terms, to satisfy some random, meaningless criterion for legal sexual status.

Two months later, while still recovering from the hysterectomy, I managed to raise the $8,000 I needed to remove the breasts I had been painfully strapping down under my clothes, day after agonizing day. There were rumours that the provincial funding of sexual reassignment was forthcoming, but even once the funding was restored we were promised at least a two-year waiting list - and only if we happened to be approved by CAMH staff first. I knew I couldn’t endure several more years of the suffocating binding and back pain, and turning away from my wife when getting changed. It was more than a medical necessity for me; it was the most liberating experience of my life.

Today, with the help of the hormones, the hysto, and the “top surgery,” I move unquestioned and unobstructed as a male in the world. But I’m not yet complete. There is one last surgical process that I need to undergo, but for lack of the tens of thousands of dollars needed to pay for it myself, the only way I can get it is through the narrow gateway of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

A year on testosterone

The conditions of application

The letter from the CAMH introduces an attached questionnaire and informs me that they are requesting “a written life story regarding your gender identity issues and two photographs (one crossdressed, if possible).” Should I be admitted to the program, they tell me that I can expect to undergo assessment on an out-patient basis at their clinic, where I will be interviewed by two psychiatrists, a psychologist and an endocrinologist, and will undergo “a complete physical examination, and possibly [be] asked to undergo psychological testing.” I’m picturing myself on a glass slide under a human-sized microscope, a medical oddity squirming under their clinical gaze.

The questionnaire they sent is all but impossible for me to fill out, both practically and ethically: half of the questions don’t apply to me, and half conflict with my sense of integrity.

Since they begin by asking only my Name on Birth Certificate, Sex as on Birth Certificate, and Name Used, they don’t seem to have later-stage transsexuals like me in mind, whose birth certificate reveals none of the information they want. Throughout the questionnaire, the language they use forces me to picture myself as a middle-aged lawyer trying on his wife’s panties on the weekend in order to come up with an answer that fits the question.

Some of the questions seem routine. Others make me wince. They want to know all the jobs I’ve ever had that lasted longer than a year. My income. A sexual history (Please give details). Do I have kids? Followed by, At what age did these desires begin?

How can I squeeze my story through these slots? How can I remember when “these desires” began when my childhood memories are of Calvin - from Watterson’s comic strip - not of Caitlin. Or perhaps some androgynous hybrid of the two. I don’t even have blond hair, but my memories are of Calvin, doing the things I did, saying the things I said, playing with the stuffed tiger I made myself and digging up dinosaur bones in the backyard. It’s not what others saw, but it’s what I saw, or what I wished to see. I don’t remember a girlhood. And I don’t remember when that began.

Next, the questionnaire asks me whether I have “dressed in clothes of the opposite sex (crossdressed).” And at what age did I do it first? Then, at what age did I begin crossdressing occasionally? Frequently? Continuous crossdressing at home? Continuous crossdressing outside home? Full-time cross-living? And date when full-time living and working in the opposite gender role began.

I can’t even halfway bend my mind through the loops of what counts as crossdressing for me, versus what counted before, if it counted, and how often I did it, when and where. Not to mention the curious misuse of the term “gender role” in this context, as though I’d gone from dishwashing to chainsawing.
The last part to this particular string of questioning asks me to list previous attempts to get medical care for this condition. I’m given two lines for my answer. I could fill two pages.

Still, they give me plenty of response space to list details of every suicide attempt. And confessions of self-mutilation. My psychiatric history. Have I used alcoholic beverages? Describe quantity and circumstances of intake. Oh, and describe the size, shape, and function of my sex organs. Now I need a drink.

Finally, they want to know the name, birthplace, age, address, and marital status of my mother, father, brothers and sisters (living and deceased) including step- and half-siblings.

I’ve never had to tell this much to anyone.

Meanwhile, south of the border

On June 17, 2008, the American Medical Association called for the removal of financial barriers to health care for transsexuals by passing Resolution 122. The resolution asserted the need for “public and private health insurance coverage for treatment of gender identity disorder as recommended by the patient’s physician.” The resolution affirms the effectiveness of medical treatment for transsexuals and emphasizes that Gender Identity Disorder is a serious medical condition which, if left untreated, “can result in clinically significant psychological distress, dysfunction, debilitating depression and, for some people without access to appropriate medical care and treatment, suicidality and death.”

The resolution also states that the American Medical Association, along with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and other health experts in Gender Identity Disorder, “have rejected the myth that such treatments are ‘cosmetic’ or ‘experimental’ and have recognized that these treatments can provide safe and effective treatment for a serious health condition.”

It is hard for me not to compare this to my experience of Canadian transsexual health care - the blind investigation, the awkward questions to inexperienced health care providers (and their receptionists), the bureaucracy of the Office of the Registrar General, the white lies and rogue doctors and long-distance travel, and the endless efforts to explain myself to a head-turning or head-shaking public in the absence of reliable statistical or medical data. In the distraction of medical controversy, religious debate, media carnivals, prejudice and tradition, the immediate well-being of transsexuals is being neglected. While the world decides what to make of us and whether we are in our right minds or deluded, we remain socially ostracized and without the medical care that we consider appropriate to our needs.

But the fact remains that, according to Ontario’s Ministry of Health, I am legally entitled to government-funded medical care for treatment of gender identity disorder. What I don’t have is access to that treatment, and the barriers extend well beyond the financial. I’ve had to fight and cheat and lie my way to the care that I needed - even when I had to pay for it myself - and now I’m being asked to trade my secrets and my dignity to get the rest. If I’m lucky.

I know I’m going to do it though. I have no other choice.

Sidebar: Trans Facts

• Statistics indicate that the total number of people whose bodies differ from standard male or female at birth (i.e. intersex people) are 1 in 100 or greater. This can mean many things, including incongruity in genetic sex (XX/XY), being born with at least partial sex organs of both genders, or having ambiguous sex organs. Unfortunately, this natural differentiation poses enough of a threat to our binary model that as many as 1 in 500 infants endure surgeries to “normalize” genital appearance. Among many disturbing forms of common medical intervention, this can involve surgically shaving clitorises longer than 1 cm in length, and surgically assigning a female sex to males with a stretched penile length under 2.5 cm.
• Some clinical reports suggest that over 70 per cent of transsexuals have contemplated suicide at some point in their lives and between 17 per cent and 20 per cent have attempted suicide at least once. (Egale Canada)
• Suicide rates are significantly lower in treated transgender patients than in nontreated. Untreated transsexual patients have suicide rates as high as 20 per cent while treated transmen have suicide rates of less than 1 per cent. (Medical Therapy and Health Maintenance for Transgender Men: A Guide For Health Care Providers)
• For many transgender people, finding a safe place to use the bathroom is a daily struggle. Even in cities or towns that are generally considered good places to be transgender (like San Francisco or Los Angeles), many transgender people are harassed, beaten and questioned by authorities in both women’s and men’s rooms. In a 2002 survey conducted by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, nearly 50 per cent of respondents reported having been harassed or assaulted in a public bathroom. (Peeing in Peace: A Resource Guide for Transgender Activists and Allies)
• In all cases of provinces offering coverage of genital reconstruction surgery, patients are forced to travel to a costly private clinic in Montreal, after which they are typically refunded only a portion of their medical expenses. Their travel and accommodation fees, which can amount to thousands of dollars, are not reimbursed. The Montreal clinic, which bills privately and refuses to accept Quebec health insurance, caters to the wealthy U.S. market which supplies 95 per cent of its patients. Canadians seeking sex reassignment surgery are put on a waiting list for a year or longer.

Across Canada, in order to obtain approval for SRS, patients have also been forced to travel to Toronto to undergo a lengthy and invasive assessment at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), a psychiatric hospital focusing on forensic psychiatry, sex offenders, and major mental illness (schizophrenia, first break psychosis, mood disorders and anxiety disorders). Patients who have been through the CAMH program report it being a demoralizing experience. In order to access hormone therapy, the CAMH requires a full year living and “passing” as your felt gender while working at a full-time job - all without the help of hormones. After hormone therapy begins, patients are required to undergo another year of this so-called “real life test” before CAMH staff will consider approving a patient for surgery. In 1999, the Ontario Human Rights Commission issued a discussion paper criticizing the CAMH for their stringent standards, their policies regarding hormone therapy, and their eligibility requirements. Some patients have reported that doctors and specialists at the CAMH would refer to them by their birth-assigned sex rather than their felt gender.

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