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Creative Class Struggle: Gentrification and sex work in Hamilton’s downtown core

briarpatch — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:28:34 +0000

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).

In May 2008, creative class theorist Richard Florida was the keynote speaker at Hamilton’s day-long economic summit. The Hamilton Spectator reported his proclamation that “you can’t help but be part of a boom, you can’t really miss,” given Hamilton’s location in the cross-border “mega-region” that Florida described as stretching from Waterloo, through Montreal and Toronto, and into New York state. It was the city’s first economic summit, with more than 125 of “Hamilton’s most powerful voices in business, the arts, government, social services, health and education” in attendance, who called for a reinvention of Hamilton’s image within three to five years, according to the Spectator. The city of Hamilton began full-force promotion of the Hamilton Creative City Initiative to support the creative economy in 2009.

Gore Park.

Gentrification in Hamilton’s core

To support the business of art, Hamilton’s downtown core has been subject to various efforts to “clean up” the streets, including the introduction of 24-hour video surveillance, increased police foot patrols, and legal and illegal evictions from heritage buildings to make way for businesses serving young, hip consumers. As developers work to re-create space for the incoming creative class, people living in poverty, who have long resided in the downtown core, are being forced out. The neighbourhoods of James St. North and Gore Park, the heart of downtown Hamilton, have borne the brunt of these changes - both neighbourhoods feature a special police foot patrol, 24-7 video surveillance and more assigned police presence than any other area of the city.

Acclamation Bar and Grill, James Street North

Public discussion around the cleansing of the downtown core has been especially disdainful towards sex workers. Articles in the Hamilton Spectator have cited sex workers, along with other perceived evils like high crime rates, panhandling, unsightly businesses and loiterers, as barriers to a thriving downtown economy. One Spectator article, describing the eviction of tenants from the historic Hotel Hamilton to make room for creative entrepreneurs and a trendy coffee shop, noted that the building “had ended up as a rundown boarding house that spawned numerous complaints from nearby merchants and residents about prostitution and hardcore drugs.” Similar articles, notable for the consistent exclusion of the voices of the people implicated, have suggested more policing, a ban on social services and the creation of a pedestrian mall as possible solutions.

In nearby Landsdale, prostitution and drugs have been cited as problems of “epidemic” proportion, and blame for everything from low property values to building abandonment and demolition has been attributed to the “decay” of the downtown core. In an article for H Mag in May 2010, landlord Julie Gordon expressed her sense of urgency in pursuing efforts to cleanse the downtown: “the status quo in Hamilton is unacceptable. . . if we do nothing the social climate in Hamilton will not stay the same. It will deteriorate.” Gordon went on to express her desire for “a safe home, good neighbours and pleasant surroundings” in the inner city. Like many of downtown’s wealthier and more powerful citizens, she cited the threats to this ideal as “prostitutes, drug-users and the homeless.”

Amber Dean, a post-doctoral fellow at McMaster University and resident of the Landsdale neighbourhood, described her experiences with the neighbourhood association as alienating. “It felt like to voice an opinion that differed from the majority there was just too risky, and that my input wouldn’t be valued,” Dean said. She recalls her impression that their goal was “to clean up the neighbourhood, and that this meant getting rid of anyone the association deemed ‘undesirable.’ There seemed to be little understanding of the effects of poverty or injustice, and little willingness to consider the bigger issues that were at stake.” After a few meetings, Dean stopped attending. “Their law-and-order agenda seemed unshakable,” she explained.

It’s an all-too-common case of gentrification, where class divisions determine the division and use of public space. Gentrification displaces poor and marginalized populations from physical and cultural spaces, and transforms them into spaces used exclusively by the more affluent. In a city where class divisions between white and racialized groups, men and women, able and disabled persons and cisgendered and transgendered persons are magnified, the wealthier class that moves into a gentrified space is inevitably predominantly white, male, able and cisgendered. While it is difficult to count the number of people displaced by gentrification - they are necessarily not around to be counted - it can be helpful to examine the ways that space and the discourses around space have been transformed to meet the needs of the wealthy.

Young men pose beneath the video surveillance warning sign on James St. N. They spoke about resistance to, and white privilege within, surveillance culture, acknowledging the systems of classism and racism that criminalize their assembly in this space.

The creative crass: Moral outrage as art

The transformation of space by and for a wealthier class in Hamilton is exemplified by the recent work of local “poverty porn” artists, most notably Gary Santucci, whose surveillance and slide show project “The Hood, The Bad and The Ugly” was exhibited at You Me Gallery in September 2009, and Larry Strung, whose April 2010 exhibition at a nearby gallery was called “A Child of God.” Both exhibits consisted largely of photos of women presumed to be doing sex work. Both were collections of images of women in the Landsdale neighbourhood, exhibited in the James St. North neighbourhood. And both shed light on the invasive, forceful and colonizing nature of gentrification in the city.

Santucci’s exhibit was a slide show presented on several TV screens which displayed photos of several different women - some whose faces could be identified - who were photographed standing alone on the corner near his Landsdale gallery and performance space, The Pearl Company. One photo showed a partially nude woman seeking privacy to urinate behind a building. The photos were taken from surveillance cameras mounted on the walls and roof of the gallery and from Santucci’s personal camera, shot from the third-story window of the gallery. “Something must be done,” exclaimed a caption on one screen.

The Pearl Company

Strung’s exhibit included a series of framed portrait-style photographs of a woman whom he met on the same corner outside The Pearl Company, using drugs in her apartment. The accompanying narrative described the woman as a prostitute and addict who could be saved from her destructive lifestyle by faith and prayer. It included her home address and described Strung’s disappointment in her reluctance to model for him after he offered her $20. The narrative accompanying the photos struck a familiar chord with one local sex worker I spoke to, who likened Strung’s description of the photo shoot - watching the woman so she wouldn’t “run off,” and being unwilling to leave after an hour because he didn’t get the photo he wanted - to the disrespectful ways clients talk about street workers on Internet message boards.

It was a stunning juxtaposition of the experiences of women who do sex work and the experience of a privileged male artist who saw a sex worker as a blank slate for his artistic and ideological expression. What for sex workers is an issue of labour and human rights - negotiating with clients, maintaining privacy, adequate pay for their work, the right to refuse service - was transformed by the exhibit into an attitude of ownership and occupation. Given the dynamics of a white man photographing a black woman in the context of gentrification and the criminalization of sex work, the colonization of sex workers’ cultural space is palpable in these images and the spectacle of their display.

In both cases, the demeaning portrayal of women doing sex work in the Landsdale neighbourhood was presented for viewing by people frequenting the James St. North neighbourhood, where the ownership of public and private space by the affluent has been more or less secured. The surveillance style of the art in both exhibits juxtaposes the privileged position of the artists as entitled to the space with the sex worker subjects as persons whose right to privacy in public space and even their own living quarters has been usurped. This invasion was coupled with a lack of consent. In the case of Santucci’s exhibit, the sex workers he photographed were unaware of his surveillance. Those who found out were very distressed, whether they were featured in the exhibit, or just familiar with the corner as one of their workplaces. The woman in Strung’s exhibit consented to be photographed after what his own narrative described as months of pressure: he asked her to model for him every time he saw her, and eventually she agreed to do so for a paltry $20 payment. Activists contested the ethics of displaying Santucci’s images without the models’ consent, and in the case of the “Child of God” exhibit, were successful in convincing the artist and the gallery to remove the photos.

The controversy surrounding these two exhibits brings to light the politics of space, location and displacement at play in the surrounding communities. Keeping in mind that “space” is often as cultural and emotional as it is physical, we see gentrification at work in these images. From the streets where sex workers and other unvalued or criminalized labourers work to the cultural dialogue about the display of images of sex workers’ bodies, space is made over to attract wealthier and more powerful classes.

Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act

“The Hood, the Bad and the Ugly” remained in the gallery for its full run of about a month. As it was an exhibit intended to open dialogue about crime in the Landsdale neighbourhood, it generated discussion - and publicity - in the media. There was also reaction within the community. While sex workers were horrified by their representation in art, the Landsdale Area Neighbourhood Association was teaming up with nearby neighbourhoods for a community meeting at Wentworth Baptist Church.

The meeting followed hot on the heels of Santucci’s September exhibit, and provided a forum for the scapegoating of sex workers and drug users as the causes of the community’s perceived crime problems. Posters and a petition were circulated to advertise the meeting. “Drug dealers and Prostitution,” read the bold lettering. “Working together to get them off our streets and out of our neighbourhood!” Community members at the meeting were visibly hostile, describing sex workers as predators of children, dangerous and violent criminals, and insane drug users who, if you talk to one, will “stab you with an AIDS needle.”

In many communities, propaganda campaigns against sex workers and other “illegitimate” users of public space culminate in legislative solutions to the perceived threat of urban decay. These can take the form of anti-loitering bylaws, building code crackdowns, police sweeps against sex workers and panhandlers, or a piece of legislation that has recently become popular called a “SCAN” Act. Safer Communities And Neighbourhoods Acts have been enacted in Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Northwest Territories and Yukon, and a SCAN was recently proposed and defeated in Ontario. The legislation allows “problem” properties to be emptied via municipal and provincial court authorities. Targets are crack houses and common bawdy houses, many of which are rental properties used as living and working spaces, and evictions can be completed in as little as two weeks.

SCANs take different forms in different provinces, but the system for identifying “problem” properties is usually complaints-driven, and community members are encouraged to observe and report their neighbours. The acts of surveillance and social control become a cycle: surveillance makes some people more visible than others, amplifies perceptions of danger and threat, and the method of eliminating that threat incorporates more surveillance. The spaces occupied by outsiders in the community are continually squeezed by scrutiny and displacement efforts.

Sex workers are people in your neighbourhood

Recognizing sex workers as legitimate members of communities with the right to earn a living in public spaces may expand their opportunities for support and self-protection. In New Zealand, where sex work is decriminalized - prostitution is not a violation of the criminal code and is subject to the same labour and business laws as other forms of employment - a five-year review of sex work’s new legal status revealed that the number of people doing sex work stayed about the same, while opportunities for coercion and exploitation were reduced and most sex workers reported being better off.

According to Crystal, a former outdoor sex worker in Hamilton’s Landsdale neighbourhood, sex workers are “safer when we’re together [on the streets].” When sex workers are displaced through imprisonment or rehabilitation programs, they are often scattered across the city, which breaks down their system of mutual support. Decriminalization is an important goal, but defence of basic rights cannot wait until “after the revolution.” The needs of street labourers can be met now within the existing political, economic and social frameworks that protect other workers’ human, civil and labour rights. The work of activists and concerned community members should be first and foremost to promote the rights of sex workers and other street labourers to the spaces they occupy, and then to tear down the walls that prevent illegitimate labourers from accessing that right.

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Sex Work, Migration and Anti-Trafficking: Interviews with Nandita Sharma and Jessica Yee

briarpatch — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 09:35:46 +0000

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.

Robyn Maynard interviewed Sharma and Yee in February 2010 for No One Is Illegal Radio’s edition “Sex Work, Migration, and Anti-Trafficking.” Edited excerpts of that interview were published in Upping the Anti #10, and are reprinted here with permission.

Nandita Sharma

"If we want to end the exploitation of women, we need to challenge capitalism, which is the basis for all our exploitation. . . We don't give more power to the state to criminalize workers, we give more power to workers to end their exploitation."

How do the government and media use the idea of “sex slavery” to create moral panic? What are the consequences for migrant women doing sex work?

Without a doubt, the moral panic against sex work is fuelling the push for anti-trafficking legislation. Most people who are pushing the anti-trafficking legislation also want to eliminate the option for women to enter into sex work. And they want to do that by further criminalizing sex work activity, especially by criminalizing the entry of migrant women into the sex industry.

For example, in Canada the migration of women into sex work is increasingly scrutinized by the state. Not only are there police who continuously raid sex work establishments like strip clubs and massage parlours under the guise of “protecting public morality” or public health; we also have immigration police who are raiding sex work establishments looking for so-called “victims of trafficking.”

Of course, the vast majority of women who migrate do not enter into sex work. But for those women who do, one of the greatest vulnerabilities they face is their status in the country. The lack of legal or permanent status makes migrant women involved in sex work more vulnerable. Many women who are migrants in the sex industry are employed on temporary work visas in the entertainment industry - the visas given to sex workers were recently squashed by the government - or they are forced to work illegally. It is impossible to legally get into Canada as a sex worker and enter as a permanent resident. You don’t get “points” for being in the sex industry, even though there is high demand. The anti-trafficking legislation is another way to attack women’s ability to work in the sex industry, and it does so in a way that further legitimizes (and relies on) the idea that no woman should ever be engaged in sex work. Ultimately, the moral panic against sex work makes migrant women more vulnerable in the sex industry.

What does anti-trafficking legislation fail to address in terms of women’s rights and agency? What are the root causes of what gets called “trafficking”?

The key issue is to understand why, over the last decade, national governments around the world have been pushed to pass anti-trafficking legislation. There is increased migration in the world today, largely resulting from practices of dispossession and displacement through political and economic crises and war. And yet, alongside increased migration, most states - especially in the so-called “First World” - have implemented restrictive policies that prevent more and more people from entering these states legally. The result is that most people who enter these states are considered to have “illegal” status.

Anti-trafficking legislation is used to target so-called “illegal migration.” Instead of placing the blame for migrants’ vulnerability on the restrictive immigration policies of national states that force people into a condition of illegality, it blames those who are actually facilitating their movement across borders. In today’s world, where it is increasingly difficult to enter First World states legally, it is also next to impossible to enter without someone’s help. It’s impossible to simply get on a plane, get on a boat, get into a car, or walk across the border, without some kind of official identity papers. It’s very difficult to get forged visas or forged passports, and to cross without someone helping you across that border. For many of the world’s migrants, the urgent need is assistance with their movement. Anti-trafficking legislation criminalizes people who facilitate migrants’ entry into national states. I think this is the underlying agenda behind anti-trafficking legislation. It offers ideological cover to target both the migrants themselves and the people who facilitate their movement. In this way, anti-trafficking legislation strengthens border policing.

How can we fight the exploitation of women that takes place in sex work without resorting to anti-feminist hysteria and characterizing women engaged in sex work as victims of trafficking?

I think that we need to take our cue from sex workers themselves. Sex worker organizations are very clear on the steps needed to ensure safe, dignified, decent working conditions for women in the sex industry. At the top of the list is decriminalization. The anti-trafficking agenda moves in exactly the opposite direction. It actually further criminalizes sex work by targeting those people, especially in the case of migrants, who are facilitating women’s entry into sex work. Basically, there is a fundamental disagreement between those who want to end sex work and those who want to make sex work safer for women. The fundamental disagreement is whether or not women have the right to engage in sex work. Most people in the anti-trafficking camp believe that there is no way that women can ever engage in sex work without being fundamentally exploited. I disagree with that, as do most sex workers’ organizations. Most of them point out that sex work can be made safer, can be made more dignified - and the way to do that is to stop demonizing those who are engaged in it. Along with decriminalizing sex work, we can support union organizing within the sex industry. This is exactly what some sex workers’ organizations in India, Bangladesh, San Francisco, and elsewhere have attempted. We need to understand sex work as one of the options available to women in a capitalist economy. We need to work, and sex work is a viable option for many women.

Ultimately, if we want to end the exploitation of women, we need to challenge capitalism, which is the basis for all of our exploitation. Whether we’re working in the sex industry, a restaurant, or in a university, we’re being exploited by those who are benefitting from our labour. So, if we want to end exploitation, we don’t give more power to the state to criminalize workers, we give more power to workers to end their exploitation. Of course, being a university professor is not demonized like sex work is. So we also need a major attitude adjustment. Feminists have long been demanding freedom for women, including control over their own bodies and sexuality. Supporting women in the sex industry and recognizing them as part of the broader collective of workers is part of this struggle.

Those of us who are critical of anti-trafficking rhetoric and legislation are often accused of not caring about women. We’re accused of not caring about women who are kidnapped, women who are beaten up, women who are enslaved or not paid wages, women who have their passports and other documents withheld from them so that they’re rendered immobile. In response to these accusations, the important thing to remember is that all of those crimes are already addressed in the Criminal Code of Canada. It is illegal to kidnap people, to beat them up, to rape them, to not pay them wages, to withhold their documents without their permission, etc. Why do people think new anti-trafficking legislation will make women safer when the police seem completely disinterested in enforcing Criminal Code measures that already exist to protect women? Instead of anti-trafficking legislation, we should be demanding that workers in the sex industry are protected under occupational health and safety regulations, as all workers should be. We should demand that illegalized workers have access to the same rights and entitlements as any other worker in the country, which would of course require that we eliminate the distinction between illegal and legal workers. There are many things we can do that do not rely upon further criminalizing people’s movement across borders. This is the challenge we must pose to people who tell us that the only way to protect women - especially in the sex industry - is to criminalize the people who facilitate their entry into it.

Restrictive immigration policies are causing much of the exploitation of “trafficked women.” How do we fight for migrant women’s safety?

Ultimately, the only way that migration is going to be safe for anyone is to decriminalize it. We need to ensure that people have the autonomous right to move whenever they decide it is in their own best interest. If women today could be assured that when they needed to move they could do so freely - without being criminalized, without needing forged papers, without having to get smuggled into the back of a boat or the underbelly of a car - then they would be much safer.

Let me give you two examples of how anti-trafficking legislation actually increases the vulnerability and exploitation that many women migrants face. First, anti-trafficking legislation targets people who are helping women cross borders. This raises the cost of moving across borders and, as a result, women have to go further into debt in order to do so. Second, by imposing these enormous penalties - which, in Canada, can include a life-sentence and in the United States can include a death sentence - those facilitating movement make migrants use routes that are less safe. People are being forced to cross borders in very vulnerable places like deserts and mountains, places where hundreds of migrant bodies are found dead every year. Anti-trafficking legislation is thus making migration less safe for women.

Jessica Yee

"The government and the media are using the ideas of the left – ideas of human rights and labour rights – to advance right-wing projects."

Please speak about the situation faced by Indigenous women in Canada in terms of forced labour and exploitation. What do you think about the use of the term “trafficking” given that “Canada” is actually Indigenous territory?

Indigenous women have faced forced labour and exploitation for 500 years. What is interesting is that this seems to be a revelation for the media right now; all of a sudden, people are aware of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, and aware that young Aboriginal girls under the age of 18 are eight times more likely to experience sexual assault than other women in Canada. I find it interesting that suddenly this seems to be a priority for both mainstream and alternative media. If you were to ask any Indigenous person if it is new that women are being displaced from communities and beaten out of positions of power and political significance, they would tell you it’s not.

I think that the term “trafficking,” and the way that it’s used in Canada, doesn’t speak to the reality that Aboriginal women face in our own communities. I see a lot of ongoing internal oppression and lateral violence as an Aboriginal woman. Forced labour and exploitation is a reality for many Aboriginal women. It’s not new and it happens in many different forms. As an Aboriginal woman, I don’t think I’m less likely to be sexually assaulted working in an office than working on the street - I feel like there’s an equal chance that I’m going to be assaulted, maligned, and subjected to violence, and that there’s an equal chance that the government, the police, will not help me.

It is important to consider how women are valued on the basis of race in both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal society. Violence committed against Aboriginal women is normalized. Aboriginal women are deemed less important than non-Aboriginal women. This is something that we’ve internalized, and that is mirrored in society.

Women around the world, especially racialized women, shoulder the burden of labour that doesn’t get acknowledged or reported. Forced labour and exploitation are reported even less. When we’re talking about “trafficking,” people assume we’re talking only about sex work, and only about cross-border trafficking. We need to remind ourselves that sexual slavery and the forcing of sexual acts are not the only kinds of exploitation, even though they seem particularly salacious compared to other forms of forced labour. We also need to understand that “trafficking” takes place within nation states, and against Indigenous people.

Many people uncritically accept the conflation of trafficking and sex work. The same people who think it is taboo to talk about sex are the first to suggest that this is the number one issue of forced labour, but it’s not. And people who are actually being trafficked and moved against their will receive no attention because the state is so focused on raiding massage parlours and arresting women who are sex workers. This neglect occurs in the name of righteousness and “saving” women, yet it is merely the further colonization of women’s bodies, women’s spaces, and women’s choices.

Can you talk about how the anti-trafficking movement affects Indigenous women who do engage in sex work? What is your analysis of the government’s efforts to present anti-trafficking as support for “women’s rights”?

Recently, Saskatoon Conservative MP Brad Trost attempted to de-fund the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health and the international Planned Parenthood Fund because they perform abortions and support sex workers. In defence of de-funding, it was suggested that he really cares about women and is concerned with how men are attacking women, forcing them to use sex work as a means of employment, and thus have abortions. I think that this is important because it seems like the government and the media are using the ideas of the left - ideas of human rights and labour rights - to advance right-wing projects.

The common misconception that “trafficking” refers only to sex work reflects people’s ignorance of the realities of sex work. A lot of anti-trafficking campaigns aren’t organized by sex workers. The campaigns involve re-victimizing.

In Toronto, we’re really lucky. The Native Youth Sexual Health Network has partnered with Maggie’s (The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project) to form the first harm reduction pro-choice project - pro-choice means that we respect women’s choices to engage in sex work - called the Aboriginal Sex Worker Outreach and Education Project. It is the first project in Canada by and for Aboriginal women that isn’t exit-focused; it doesn’t solely tell women to get out of the trade. As someone who has engaged in sex work over the years, I know that exit-based programs are not working.

I think it’s dangerous that the government tries to present “anti-trafficking” campaigns as advocacy for women’s rights. And I think it’s really important for people to not only stand up against it, but also to challenge prevailing misconceptions of sex work. These misconceptions are affecting Indigenous women throughout the world. A crude example of these effects is MTV’s “MTV Exit” campaign, in which they team up with UNAIDS and go to countries where they think there is a lot of “sex trafficking” to try to rescue women. Indigenous women in these countries are then arrested on suspicion of being sex workers. Their human rights are under assault by this western imposition in the name of “anti-trafficking.” So, in addition to the impact on Indigenous women in Canada, we’re also responsible for stuff that’s happening throughout the world to other Indigenous countries and people.

If criminalizing sex work is not a solution, what is a more meaningful way to struggle for justice?

First, a meaningful way to struggle for justice is to actually work with sex workers. Take their lead, just like you would with any other ally-based movement. Second, we have to address people’s great unwillingness to talk about sex and sexuality more generally. Without these conversations people will have a difficult time coming to terms with real trafficking and real exploitation.

We need to have frank discussions about sex work, and about sex and sexuality more generally. These topics are particularly taboo in Indigenous communities. This is because colonization is such a real presence for us. And if you’re going to take away a people’s most powerful abilities, you’re also going to take away their sexuality, which is why I think we have members of our own communities who conflate “trafficking” with sex work and assume it is all “bad for women.” We’re in survival mode and trying to keep our communities together, trying to keep our communities free of violence, and ain’t nobody helpin’ us! And if nobody’s helping us, then we get left to our own terms and our own measures to deal with things.

There is a lot to discuss. I get many questions from people asking about youth and sexual exploitation, for example. Even within the sex worker movement, people do not agree that young people have the right to engage in sex work. I recommend that people check out the Young Women’s Empowerment Project in Chicago, which is the only organization for young women engaged in sex work between the ages of 13 and 24. We work with them quite a bit in the United States. They just produced an amazing research report on your question: what’s a more meaningful way to struggle for justice? Their answer is that we should listen to to the people who are impacted, and shut up a little bit more! Respect the ways we decide to organize. People need to recognize that there are so many spaces that aren’t safe for us, as sex workers, to be real and frank about our lives and our struggle. In the meantime, correct people who are confused about what really constitutes trafficking and exploitation. More importantly, teach people about self-determination - not just over land, but over our own bodies.

When we were feminists

briarpatch — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:42:49 +0000

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.

From invisibility to stability: Transgender organizing for the masses

briarpatch — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:02:55 +0000

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.

Queering the Scene: Vancouver’s Fuck Off and Dance Collective

Andrew Angus — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:36:25 +0000

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.

A pound of flesh: The cost of transsexual health care in Canada

Andrew Angus — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:32:13 +0000

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.

Adultery and other half revolutions: Towards a post-scarcity economy of love

Andrew Angus — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:28:09 +0000

By CrimethInc.
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2009

What would it look like to have relationships in which there was no such thing as adultery, or at least no cause for it?

If the two-party relationship system is the pinnacle achievement of a hundred thousand years of human loving, why is adultery so common that it forms the most reliable material for bourgeois drawing-room humour - not to mention employment for a whole army of marriage counsellors? If all any of us truly desire is our one true love, why can’t we keep our hands off everyone else?

If you really want to know, you should cut straight to the source and ask the adulterers themselves. Or maybe you don’t have to go that far - maybe you’ve had adulterous affairs or inclinations of your own, as the statistics suggest.

“Good marriages take work”

Growing up in an environment dominated by capitalist economics teaches certain psychological lessons that are hard to unlearn: Anything of value is only available in limited supplies. Stake your claim now, before you’re left alone with nothing. Unable to imagine that love and pleasure could multiply when shared, we come to measure commitment and affection by how much others sacrifice for us. An outsider might counter that in a healthy relationship, friends or lovers enable each other to be able to do and live and feel more. If you feel, in your gut if not in your head, that having a romantic partner means giving something up - your “freedom,” as they say - then the patterns of exploitation and control have penetrated even into your love life.

We all know that “good marriages take work.” There it is again, work: the cornerstone of our society. Wage labour, relationship labour - are you ever not on the clock? Do you accept stifling limitations in return for affection and reassurance the same way you trade time for money at your job? When you have to work at monogamy, you are back in the exchange system: just like the capitalist economy, your intimacy is governed by scarcity, threats, and programmed prohibitions, and protected ideologically by assurances that there are no viable alternatives. When relationships become work, when desire is organized contractually with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labour from employees, when marriage is a domestic factory policed by rigid shop-floor discipline designed to keep wives and husbands chained to the machinery of responsible reproduction - then it comes as no surprise that some individuals cannot help but revolt.

Adultery, in stark contrast to the Good Marriage, comes naturally, arriving without even being invited. Suddenly you feel transformed, awakened from the graveyard of once-vital passion that your partnership has become to feel that excitement again. You shouldn’t be feeling any of this, damn it, and yet it’s the first time you’ve been carried away by pure, unforced happiness in who knows how long - and oh, the sweet optimism of something new, something that isn’t yet predictable. It’s as if surprise, risk, gratification, and fulfillment were again genuinely imaginable possibilities. Who, if they could feel what you’re feeling right now, could possibly demand you resist?

Stolen moments

The adulterer gets a crash course in the extent to which his space and time is controlled. It immediately becomes clear how little time he possesses when he is not under observation - it turns out that the workday does not end when he leaves the workplace, but extends before and after it, consuming practically his entire life. The domination of the space around him is revealed, as well: how many places are there for him to spend time with his new lover, places he need not rent with money, respectable explanations, and the image of social propriety? In what few moments of his life is he not held to guidelines imposed by outside forces, guidelines which plainly no longer have anything to do with his emotional and physical needs?

The adulterer becomes a virtuoso of petty theft, stealing the moments of his life one by one from their rightful owners: his spouse, his employer, his family and social obligations. Just like the vandal, he resists the domination of his world in the only way he knows how - by tiny, symbolic acts of daily sedition, out of which he carefully constructs an infinitely fragile alternate universe. There he hides, in spirit when he cannot in body, hoping not to be found out and called to account for what he has become: a traitor to the entire civilization that raised him.

“Honesty is the best policy”

Society, personified by her unfortunate spouse, demands that the adulterer be honest and frank about all things when it will only punish her for this. It attempts to secure her compliance through routine interrogations (”who was that on the phone, dear?”), surveillance (”do you think I didn’t notice how much time you spent talking to him?”), search and seizure (”and just what the hell am I supposed to think this is?”), and more serious intimidation tactics: the threat of total expulsion from the only home and community she likely knows. The adulterer who would like to tell the truth is forced to compute whether she really can permit herself this luxury: divide your current unhappiness by the harmful consequences of admitting it, multiply by your fear of the unknown, then think twice about whether you really need to say anything after all. This is the same formula used by exploited migrant workers and children locked in private school hells, by battered wives and sexually harassed secretaries.

What our society is missing here is the wisdom to know that telling the truth is not just the responsibility of the teller. If you really want to know the truth, you must make it easy for people to tell it to you: you must be genuinely supportive and ready for whatever it may be, rather than just making self-righteous demands or playing good cop/bad cop (”just tell me, I promise I’ll understand. . . . You did WHAT?!”). These traditional forms of interrogation will only lead the subject of your cross-examination to take evasive action or to find ways to lie to herself as well as to you. Neither our society nor its cuckolds are ready for the revelation of truth that the adulterer has to offer; it is only safe in the sheltering ears of her illicit lover.

Telling the truth is not just the responsibility of the teller. If you really want to know the truth, you must be genuinely supportive of whatever it may be.

“People will get hurt”

Inevitably, despite the best intentions and most secretive schemes of the adulterer, people get hurt. More to the point, people already were hurting, only invisibly, in the enforced happily-ever-after of domestic silence - or else such drastic measures would not have been necessary in the first place to bring dead hearts to life. Would it have been better for the routines and illusions of the marriage to remain undisturbed forever, to stay the course in mutual ennui to the embittered end? Could it be preferable for your unsuspecting partner to go on measuring her value as a lover and spouse according to a standard of fidelity that boils down to self-denial, a standard which has already been violated in spirit if not in letter? Of course, instead of cheating you could always have gone to counselling, stayed faithful to your spouse rather than yourself and turned away from the new landscapes you saw about to be born in the eyes of your potential lover, trying instead to achieve a passable substitute with your officially sanctioned partner - or resorted to dulling your senses with television or Prozac, if that failed.

To cut to the heart of the matter: can it possibly be wrong to desire to not be emotionally dead? What vast measures of self-confidence and entitlement would it take the modern married man or woman to risk feeling alive, unarmed with the twin weapons of self-justification and self-abasement, the excuses and apologies and self-recriminations? The adulterer discovers that he is trapped in the life he had adopted under the encouragement and threats of the established romantic norm - and, despite his best efforts to restrain himself, has begun plotting an escape. Were he to reflect lucidly on his situation, his secret self might rebel and begin to ask the important questions: What kind of life does he really aspire to live? How much freedom and fulfillment does he deserve to feel? How has it come to be that he hurts others just by expressing his own needs?

The fact is, people always get hurt when someone contests a long-entrenched order, and often the victims are “innocent.” That’s why anything less than complete prostration to the status quo is considered bad ethics - standing up for yourself is just too damn dangerous for everyone else. But once the itch to mutiny takes hold, the status quo becomes untenable, until the adulterer takes it upon himself, often unwillingly but without being able to resist, to do things that can hurt others.

If he were prepared to embrace and proclaim his outlawed desires (rather than ultimately rejecting them in a fit of rueful revisionism: “I didn’t know what I was doing!”) and accept full responsibility for the further pain that would cause, he would finally be positioned to step out of the circle of hurt that is the scarcity economy of love. But he lacks the courage and analysis for this final act: that is why he is an adulterer.

“What about the children?”

“What about the children?” demand the shocked sentries of the bourgeoisie when they hear about yet another marriage endangered by an affair, terrified that their own strayings might come out next. Well, what about them? Do you think you can protect the next generation from the tragic tension between the complexity of desire and the simplicity of social prohibitions just by knuckling under yourself? If you smother your own aspirations for happiness, displacing them instead onto future generations, you will end by smothering your children as well as yourself. Your children would be better off growing up in a world where people dare to be honest about what they want, regardless of the consequences. Would you prefer that they learn to beat their own longings into flattened reminders of shame and remorse, as you do?

And it’s worth pointing out that nuclear-family monogamy, which these self-appointed judges would protect from the assault implied by adultery, is the very thing that replaced the broader, more fluid, extended family structures of the past. By all accounts, children were better cared for in those environments, and their parents had more freedom as well. Could it be that adultery is a blind, desperate lunge from the cage of the contractual relationship towards the extended community we once had? More importantly, can it serve as a stepping stone towards a new resurgence of that community?

Marriage exalts the bond between two people with the unspoken implication that it is them against the world - and the stress of this setup often turns them against each other.

Faithful to many

What would it look like to have relationships in which there was no such thing as adultery, or at least no cause for it? First, it would necessitate that communication be prized above obedience to social norms. The conditions that foster honesty - trust, self-awareness, unconditional love - would have to be safeguarded by extensive support structures. Communities would be interlinked by networks of close relationships in which everyone could count on assistance from and intimacy with others even if one relationship changed. There would be no social or legal rewards for any particular relationship format, and no looking askance at any format either. We would have to grapple with our own insecurities rather than attempting to limit others’ autonomy. In short, it would demand maturity in the same way a monoculture of monogamy rewards childishness - including the childishness of adulterers.

Of course, we don’t live in a society that equips us in any of these ways, or else you wouldn’t have gotten yourself into this predicament. The question now is how you get yourself out of it: do you continue on the path that compelled you to cheat in the first place, or try something else?

And here the ultimate irony awaits: even if you leave your spouse for your partner in crime, you will probably find that he expects the same kind of relationship you just escaped. When he got involved with you, he knew you were capable of loving more than one person at a time, that monogamy imposed impossible choices upon you - and now he wants to return you to the situation you were in when he took up with you, with the same pressures and perils. But it’s different with him because he’s “the” one, right? Small wonder if one day you cheat again.

Could it be preferable for your unsuspecting partner to go on measuring her value as a lover and spouse according to a standard of fidelity that boils down to self-denial, a standard which has already been violated in spirit if not in letter?

Marriage and other affairs of state

It serves the interests of the powers that be to have everyone separated into couples and nuclear families, with all unions suitably licensed and policed. A divided people is a conquerable people; the fewer the ties connecting individuals and the narrower the range of permissible associations, the better. When you’re attached to and responsible for only a handful of people, your enemies always have potential hostages: “But I can’t run any risks - who would take care of Sheila?” On the other hand, when you feel passionately connected with and accountable to an entire community, you’re more likely to conceive of your interests in collective terms - and better situated to fight for them, too.

Marriage exalts the bond between two people with the unspoken implication that it is them against the world - and the stress of this set-up often turns them against each other. But like it or not, we all have to live on this planet together and bear the consequences of each other’s actions: effectively, we’re all married, and it’s high time we start thinking and acting accordingly. Once the false promises of two-in-a-coffin matrimonial bliss have utterly failed you, is it any more utopian to fantasize about conceiving of your relationships as One Big Union? Imagine being close and comfortable with everyone around you, letting each relationship evolve independently of other relationships, and - yes - making love with anyone who also wanted to make love with you without it bringing about the end of the world as you know it. You can’t, can you?

Adultery is marriage’s loyal opposition

Ultimately, adultery is only possible because it leaves the questions it asks unanswered. Just like the shoplifter, the hooligan, and the suicide, the adulterer makes only half a revolution: she violates the decrees of authoritarian convention and law, but in such a way that they remain in place, still dictating her actions - be those actions obedient or reactive. She would do better to expose what she is and wants to the whole world without guilt or regret and demand that it find a place for her and her desires, whatever they might be. Then her struggle could be the starting point for a revolution in human relationships from which everyone might benefit, not just a flash of isolated passion and insurgency to be stomped out before it illuminates anything.

Let us shelter and defend her from the shaming of this society whenever she does step forward, so that she may do so - for she acts, as we do, out of a passion burning unquenchably for a new world.

Hell yes, I cheated!”

This essay, which borrows liberally from writings by Laura Kipnis that were later included in her book Against Love, is reproduced (promiscuously and unrepentantly) from the book Expect Resistance, written and published by the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective.

Polyamory in practice: An open discussion with Tristan Taormino and Jenny Block

Andrew Angus — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:24:09 +0000

Tristan Taormino

By Mandy Van Deven
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2009

Conversations about polyamory - the practice of having more than one intimate partner at a time - are slowly finding their way into public consciousness. Two newly published books (Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage and Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships) reflect an increasingly popular postmodern view of love and relationships led by post-second-wave feminist and queer communities.

In Open, Jenny Block uses personal narrative to shed light on the complex normality of open relationships. Her book nicely complements Tristan Taormino’s “how-to”-style Opening Up, which provides practical advice on making open relationships work. These two authors’ perspectives on legitimating family structures that encompass many kinds of love, not just that of one man and one woman, are a valuable addition to the debates that were rejuvenated in the wake of California’s passage of Proposition 8 banning gay marriage.

Briarpatch: Open relationships seem to be making their way into mainstream media of late. Why do you think that is?

Jenny Block: People are becoming more open-minded about all sorts of things. They are also becoming more and more fed up with relationships that never seem to work for them. I believe that, ultimately, all most people really want is to be happy. People have that right, and they are coming to recognize that right. That leads to curiosity, which leads to media coverage, which leads to visibility, which leads to normalization. One of the reasons I wrote Open is to put a familiar face on what might seem, at first glance, to be a highly unfamiliar subject.

Tristan Taormino: As long as people have had relationships, some of those relationships have been consensually open. Many things that were once considered taboo - queer sexuality, anal sex, BDSM - gradually gain more visibility and acceptance in the mainstream. Open relationships are part of the shifting dialogue about love and sex in our society.

Although your books have overlapping topics, your approaches to writing about open relationships are quite different. Why did you choose these particular formats?

Taormino: Several books written about non-monogamy have been memoirs or have focused on the author’s personal experiences. I wanted to write a book that would get down to the nuts and bolts of open relationships, show people what their options are, and give them advice and guidance.

Block: The truth is, I had writer’s block. I was stuck about halfway into the process of writing the book, and I didn’t know how to break out of it. So, I was talking to my girlfriend about my dilemma and she said, “Well, what’s the book really about?” In that instant, the whole book manifested for me. I wrote down almost exactly what I told her, and that became the prologue and the framework for the book.

I chose personal narrative because it’s what I know. It’s my experience. I have a Master’s degree; I’ve read all the research. But what I know best is what I’ve been through. And regardless of what any research might say, you can’t argue with experience.

Tristan, you’ve spent a large part of your life educating people about sex. The focus in Opening Up, though, is more on relationships than sex itself. Do you see this as a departure from your other work?

Taormino: Yes and no. I don’t think I ever would have met so many different people in non-monogamous relationships if I wasn’t part of a sex-positive community. But this book is definitely focused on relationships; if people are expecting steamy tales of dirty three-way sex, they will be disappointed.

How do you each define “open relationships”?

Taormino: Definitions of polyamory usually characterize polyamorous relationships as both sexual and loving, because polyamory involves not just sex, but emotional relationships. But based on my research, “sexual and loving” doesn’t capture the nuances and complexities of polyamorous relationships. Those terms also don’t communicate how polyamory can not only reject mainstream models, but expand ideas about what constitutes a relationship.

I define polyamory as the desire and practice of having multiple significant, intimate relationships simultaneously; the relationships may encompass many elements, including love, friendship, closeness, emotional intimacy, recurring contact, commitment, affection, flirting, romance, desire, erotic contact, sex, and a spiritual connection.

I use open relationships as an umbrella term to encompass many different styles of non-monogamous relationships. There has been a lot written about swinging and polyamory, but people who are practicing non-monogamy who don’t identify with those terms, identities and communities have been left out of the discussion. I wanted my book to cover a diverse array of styles of open relationships.

Block: My husband and I are open to change. We are open to new ways of seeing ourselves, of viewing sex, of defining marriage, and of being. We are open to outside partners. But more than anything, we are open to thinking about new ideas and looking at the world in a new way instead of simply saying, “That’s the way it is, so I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be” when it comes to love and sex and marriage and relationships.

My parents raised me to think for myself. My sexual partners, from my first boyfriend to my current partners, encouraged that too. I feel lucky. Really lucky. Sexual confidence is something everyone has a right to. It’s something we have to allow ourselves despite whatever outside pressures to ignore or suppress that. Being whole sexual beings is as important as all other aspects of our personhood.

Many people think non-monogamy is just about sex or about “having one’s cake and eating it too,” as it were. But non-monogamy can be about a lot of things. For some people it’s about love. For others, it’s a life philosophy. But, ultimately, it’s about living honestly.

Many people think that being non-monogamous means being a bad parent, a bad person, a slut, a sex addict, an immature person. The thought is that if you’re not like everyone else you must be wrong or bad. Those things simply aren’t true, at least not for me. Reading this book, hopefully, will help people to see that.

Some see non-monogamy as a means to resist heterosexual norms. How do you see it in the larger cultural and political spheres?

Taormino: I think open relationships resist norms about gender, commitment, marriage, and love. For some people, having an open relationship is part of a larger mission to challenge society’s norms, and for others, it’s simply a choice.

Block: I see it as one choice in a sea of many - an acceptable, healthy, workable choice. I’m not trying to make a larger statement; if that’s what my lifestyle does, it’s a by-product. I’m not trying to do anything; I’m just living in a way that feels true to me and my partners.

What fears do people have about open relationships?

Taormino: People fear they will be jealous, that their partner will find a “better” partner, that they will be replaced, that their relationship will end. These are pretty deep, intense fears that are intertwined with our feelings of self-worth and security. It takes a lifetime of work for people to work on their self-esteem, but it’s a crucial part of maintaining healthy relationships, whether they’re open or not.

Block: People are always comparing the worst of open relationships to the best of closed ones. I challenge those comparisons by living openly and honestly. I wrote the book, I continue to write articles, and I do as much press as I can. The key is to not be invisible. The only way that people will grow to understand other people’s relationships is by actually seeing them at work.

What are components to successful open relationships and what mistakes are commonly made?

Block: It’s important to communicate and remain flexible. I can’t predict the future; all I can do is live fully and intentionally. Speaking from my own experience, cheating on my husband was a mistake. I was not communicating as much as I could or should have. Not listening fully. I make the same mistakes everyone else does. Relationships are challenging. Being open is not a greater challenge, just a different one.

My husband and I know ourselves and each other better now. We are no longer sleepwalking through our lives. We don’t take things at face value. Now, whenever we examine what we do and how we do it, we ask, “Does that make sense? Does it work? Is it real?” That’s what I work towards every day - being present, being honest, and being forgiving of myself and others.

Block: “Relationships are challenging. Being open is not a greater challenge, just a different one.”

Taormino: There are probably as many mistakes as there are relationships. I think a common one is that people jump into the deep end too quickly. They want to be open about everything, with few rules and boundaries, and that can get them into trouble. Better to wade in slowly.

Some people have tried monogamy repeatedly, and it just does not work for them; open relationships offer an alternative. Many people feel free to explore different relationships, different desires and different dynamics when they are involved with more than one person. The elements of a successful open relationship are really the elements of any successful relationship: consent, self-awareness, honesty, communication, trust, good boundaries and commitment.

You both suggest that open relationships may be an antidote to the decline of marriage and the prevalence of adultery. Why is that?

Taormino: The decline of marriage and the prevalence of adultery are two strong indications that traditional monogamous marriage does not work for a majority of people. Cheating is a way that some people identify that they are unhappy or unsatisfied in their relationship, but it’s by no means the most common way people come to choose an open relationship. Some people begin as open, others discover it after many years of monogamy, and some are faced with a significant change that compels them to open their relationship. Open relationships aren’t the only antidote; crafting unique relationships, letting go of the happily-ever-after fairy tale and working hard at your partnerships are really the antidote.

Block: Cheating is what made me start to think about the nature of relationships and of human beings, but it wasn’t the cheating that led me to being open. That came from beginning to understand the history of marriage (commerce) and the biology of people (non-monogamy). I don’t think people who are monogamous are necessarily suppressing anything if they are choosing monogamy happily and consciously.

Heterosexual, monogamous marriage simply doesn’t work for everyone, but society all but demands that we live in one - or, at the very least, in the illusion of one. If open relationships were seen as an equally viable and acceptable option, I’d like to think that people would be able to make choices that really work for them, choices that actually are choices as opposed to simply doing something because that’s what everyone else is doing.

Open relationships won’t fix bad relationships, but having the option to be open or closed can soothe people’s fears of entrapment when they feel like it’s either marriage, loneliness, or being some sort of outlaw or freak for not feeling happy and fulfilled in a heterosexual, monogamous marriage.

Can education around open relationships - particularly how participants can recognize and negotiate emotions like jealousy and possessiveness - play a role in challenging domestic violence and promoting healthy relationships, be they closed or open?

Block: Yes. The more you know, the better - open, closed, whatever. True, honest, open communication is the key to any good relationship, whether it be family, friends, or lovers.

There are currently very few, if any, scripts or models for open relationships. Do you see your book as the beginning of script creation?

Taormino: I hope so. Society still does not accept or support non-traditional relationships. Many people feel that there is too much at stake - friends, community, parents, custody, employment - for them to come out about being non-monogamous.

Block: Open is an invitation for others to share their stories and experiences. So many people write me and come to see me at readings and say, “Thank you for being visible. Now I feel like I can be visible, too.”

I hope the book serves as a model of how relationships can be different from the mainstream and still work - open or otherwise. People have to be honest with themselves and one another about how they want to live and love and how they do live and love, despite appearances. I think it’s important that people not be judged for who and how they love. Because of the book, my life is, well, an open book. No pun intended.

Two things that are often left out of these discussions but are quite important are the legal and sexual health aspects of having multiple partners.

Block: Those were both outside of my purposes in writing Open. You can’t do it all in one book, and I had to make some tough decisions. This book focused more on my personal experience and the research that I found compelling in telling my story.

Taormino: Everyone I interviewed talked about safer sex, and I think it’s an important issue that needs to be discussed in some depth when talking about open relationships. The same is true for legal issues; our society is not set up for multi-partnered marriages, co-parenting, and polyamorous property ownership. People need to find creative ways to protect themselves, their families, and their property.

Jenny, how do you negotiate having an open relationship and being a parent?

Block: The same way one negotiates having a closed relationship and being a parent. I am a parent first. My daughter doesn’t see anything that is inappropriate. Right now she knows my girlfriend as my best friend. As she begins to ask questions, I will answer them. We aren’t ashamed of how we live and so we aren’t ashamed to tell our daughter about our choices. We want her to grow up with a strong sense of empowerment, empathy, and fairness.

People are different. People can be hateful. Love is all any of us have in the end. All we want is for my daughter to know those things and understand their truth and their power.

You both write about the ethical and emotional issues that can arise in open relationships. What types of support do you recommend for those exploring open relationships?

Taormino: It’s important to seek support from like-minded individuals in a community of folks who have experience with non-monogamy. If you seek therapy, it’s also crucial to find a therapist who is non-judgmental and has experience with non-monogamous clients.

Block: Identify friends and acquaintances who either are in open relationships or who understand that there’s not just one way to navigate the world. Read books and articles. Join the listservs and online groups. Seek out poly-friendly educators and counsellors. Surround yourself with people who love and understand you.

Who do you want to read your respective books and what do you want the reader to take from them?

Taormino: Opening Up is for anyone interested in creating a relationship that’s custom built for them, for loved ones of folks in open relationships looking to better understand them, and for people in helping professions who want to educate themselves about open relationships.

Block: Whether you are in an open relationship, curious about open relationships, or appalled by open relationships, Open gives you the chance to see inside someone’s marriage, to really see inside it. I cannot tell you how many letters I’ve received from people who have said that the book helped them to better understand themselves and their partners and strengthened their monogamous relationships.

Jenny Block is a freelance writer whose work has been featured in numerous publications and anthologies, including Rebecca Walker’s One Big Happy Family. A regular blogger for The Huffington Post and Tango, Block has written about politics, relationships, and parenting. She is also the weekly sex columnist for the Dallas Morning News publication Quick.

An award-winning author and filmmaker, Tristan Taormino is most known for her unabashed book and film guides to anal sex for women. She gives lectures around the U.S. and runs the website PuckerUp.com, which seeks to “educate people of all genders and sexual orientations in their pursuit of healthy, empowering, and transformative sex and relationships.”

Photo captions:

“The elements of a successful open relationship are really the elements of any successful relationship: consent, self-awareness, honesty, communication, trust, good boundaries and commitment. “

-Tristan Taormino

-Jenny Block

Sex Work and the State: An interview with Kara Gillies

Andrew Angus — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:21:31 +0000

By Emily van der Meulen
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2009

Kara Gillies is a sex worker and activist who has been advocating for sex workers’ rights and well-being for the past two decades. She co-founded both the Canadian Guild for Erotic Labour and the former Toronto Migrant Sex Workers Advocacy Group. Gillies hosted a sex worker rights radio show on CIUT 89.5 FM called The Shady Lady and was a health worker at the Hassle Free Clinic. She has been involved with Maggie’s (www.maggiestoronto.ca), a Toronto-based sex worker-run organization, for 18 years and currently coordinates its education program. Gillies is also the Executive Director of Voices of Positive Women (www.vopw.org). Emily van der Meulen interviewed her in September 2008. This interview was originally published in Upping the Anti #7 and is reprinted with permission.

Please tell us a bit about Maggie’s.

Maggie’s is a sex worker-run organization dedicated to promoting the safety and dignity of women, men and trans people working in the sex trade. Maggie’s was formed in 1986 by a small group of Toronto-based sex workers who chose to fight against the social and legal injustices that sex workers face. Over the years, Maggie’s has taken a stand against the criminalization of prostitution and fought for the recognition of the labour and human rights of sex workers.

Of course, these are long-term struggles, so the early organizers recognized the necessity of providing basic, ongoing support to fellow sex workers while the systemic battle was being fought. In addition to meeting immediate needs, this approach allowed us to build a community base and to facilitate sex workers’ capacity to mobilize for change. Maggie’s offers a range of practical support to sex workers, including workshops, health information, and advice on workplace health and safety.

You speak about “the sex trade” and “sex workers.” What industries and which workers are included in these terms?

Good question. I have to say that there is no universal agreement about these terms. It is certainly the case that many people, especially those in social services and the media, use the term sex work as a synonym (some would say euphemism) for prostitution. At Maggie’s, we use the term sex work as an umbrella term that encompasses a full range of erotic labour. This includes prostitution in all its forms, such as street-based prostitution and escorting, for example. We also include exotic/erotic dancing, pornography, phone sex, erotic massage, professional domination/submission and other erotic work.

One of the organization’s key strengths is our ability and willingness to bring together a diverse group of workers across a spectrum of sectors. We aim to recognize the shared challenges, oppressions and even joys we may share, while acknowledging the very real differences in the work and work conditions among sex-trade sectors.

Most media and pop-culture attention to the sex trade focuses on street-based work, with an occasional nod to exotic dancing. In fact, street-based workers make up about five per cent of the sex trade in Toronto, and up to 10 or 15 per cent across Canada. The public focus on street-based sex work is often fuelled by exaggerated fears and inflammatory notions of street-based sex workers as vectors of disease and a public nuisance who bring down property values in newly gentrified neighbourhoods. The resulting targeting of street-based sex workers by police, organized residents’ groups and business associations increases their vulnerability to violence and incarceration. Street-based workers are the most marginalized of all sex workers and bear the brunt of the stigma, criminalization and violence that stems from these oppressions.

You mention criminalization. Tell me about the legal status of sex work in Canada and how it impacts sex workers.

Because sex work involves a range of activities and sectors, there are many laws that can be invoked, including laws against indecent theatrical performances, for example. For now, I will limit myself to addressing the legal status of prostitution, as that is the activity subjected to the strongest negative sanctions.

Most people assume that prostitution in itself is illegal in this country. That is not true. Prostitution itself - the exchange of sex for money or other direct compensation - is not illegal in Canada and never has been. However, most of the activities integral to prostitution are considered offences under criminal law. For starters, it is illegal to communicate for the purposes of prostitution in places that are public or open to public viewing, including parked or moving cars, hotel bars and so forth. This law makes it impossible for sex workers to properly negotiate the terms and conditions of their services before they end up one-on-one with a potential client in a private place. This means, especially for workers soliciting business on the street, that if they want to obey the law, they cannot agree upon the type of service, the pay, or condom use before being alone with a client in a potentially volatile situation.

Upon hearing this, many people wonder, “Well, why not work in private then?” One response is that many street-based workers are under-housed or homeless, living in poverty and sometimes dependent on substance use. Street-based sex work becomes a viable way for them to support themselves. Off-street, self-employed work involves overhead that can be prohibitively expensive (advertising, transportation to clients’ places or rent for your own workplace).

There is the popular option of avoiding overhead by working for an employer such as an escort agency. However, the instability of many street-involved workers’ lives renders this option unviable for most of them. There are some street-based workers who could or even do work off-street but report that there are elements of street-based sex work that they like. For some workers, there is a particular sense of community with other street-active people (including non-sex workers), as well as what can be described as a subculture.

Another reason not to work in private is the bawdy-house law. The term bawdy house often conjures images of swanky brothels brimming with lingerie-clad ladies reclining on velvet settees. In reality, however, a bawdy house is any place used regularly for prostitution or “acts of indecency.” This includes a sex worker using her own home or renting a separate work space, even if it is just for her own use. It also covers massage parlours, professional dungeons, and other venues.

So on the one hand, the state criminalizes public communication for prostitution and on the other hand it criminalizes the use of private spaces.

Exactly. The internal contradiction is clear. Unfortunately, so are the consequences. Criminalizing work sites through the bawdy-house law makes it impossible for the industry to develop and enforce occupational health and safety guidelines because the work space itself is illegal. It also means that workers and management can lose everything they have if they get busted on bawdy-house charges, because their earnings and assets can be seized. This seriously impedes sex workers’ economic security. Physical security is compromised as well, because many sex workers do not want to report an assault or robbery for fear of attracting police attention.

I have talked about the criminal laws against communicating and bawdy houses. The third big criminal law around prostitution makes it illegal to participate in someone else’s prostitution activities, whether or not you make money from this engagement. This is the procuring law. Again, many people think of “pimp” when they hear about procuring. However, the law in Canada is extremely broad and captures any sort of third-party involvement in prostitution, regardless of the nature or conditions of that involvement. So a completely ethical escort agency owner who pays really well and provides excellent services such as advertising and security is subject to the same sanction as an asshole boss who exploits or even violates workers.

It is ironic because the law against procuring is the one anti-prostitution law that people assume is there to protect sex workers. However, the opposite is true: this law means that managers and employers of prostitution workers need to distance themselves from the sexual component of the work. This is why services are referred to as “escorting” or “companionship” services instead of sex work services.

This imposed lack of clarity means that workers are not advised of job expectations, safer sex practices, or what they can or should charge for particular services. This makes workers vulnerable because when they encounter a client who has been booked by an agency, no proper negotiation has taken place. What services are included in the fee? Are there services the worker chooses not to provide? What are the safer sex practices? As with the communicating law, the state places workers in a volatile and even dangerous situation.

Another harmful consequence of the procuring law is that the criminalization of the labour/management relationship precludes the application of labour and employment law protections to sex workers. So workers who happen to be employed in the prostitution sector are denied access to basic labour rights such as minimum wage, employment benefits, restrictions on work hours, conditions of fair termination and so forth. The procuring law has particularly severe implications for racialized women and women living with disabilities because it prevents them from seeking redress for discriminatory employment practices through human rights commissions.

There is such a deep mythology of the “pimp” in our culture. How do you respond to people who ask, “But what about the actual pimps? Don’t we need the procuring law to protect workers - especially women - from these violent predators?”

I totally understand this concern. Nobody wants women to be subjected to violence and exploitation. What I need to explain is that the stereotypical street pimp is a rarity in Canada. The coat hanger-wielding, fedora-wearing man with a stable of girls is not a reality. Unfortunately, this very class-biased and typically racist construct of the “pimp” misinforms most people’s understanding of the sex trade.

That said, it is certainly true that abuses do occur in the sex trade, just like labour abuses occur in other sectors and gendered physical/psychological abuses are perpetrated against women throughout all of society. The answer is to make sure that sex workers are afforded equal protection against labour violations under employment laws, as well as equal protection against violence under general criminal laws. We already have strict criminal sanctions against assault, kidnapping and robbery. We do not need the procuring law, especially given the harm it causes. When we talk about criminalization, we need to remember that criminal law is by far the strictest and most severe form of negative state sanction. It really needs to be reserved for instances of demonstrable and serious harm.

To sum up the legal status of prostitution in Canada: the only way to work within the bounds of the law is to work by yourself, go to the client’s home or hotel (not your own place), never go to the same place twice and never negotiate the conditions of your services unless you are in a private, isolated location. This is clearly a recipe for disaster. Not only is it blatantly unsafe, it makes no business sense. Imagine working as a hair stylist but not being able to open your own salon, rent a chair, or advertise your services. Imagine working as an auto mechanic and being criminalized for stating your rates in public or working out of an auto shop. The absurdity of the situation is clear.

What would Maggie’s like to see instead?

Maggie’s and other sex workers’ organizations across the globe believe that the decriminalization of prostitution is a necessary step toward realizing sex workers’ rights and well-being. Decriminalization would involve repealing all of the Criminal Code sanctions specific to prostitution and allowing the sex trade to be governed as an industry or business.

I want to stress that this is an entirely different approach from legalization. Legalized prostitution is a model that, like criminalization, continues to view sex work as a social evil to be contained and controlled. As a result, sex workers labouring under legalized prostitution systems are subjected to oppressive regulations that are far more onerous than those placed on other working people. For example, counties in Nevada that legalize prostitution impose regulations such as identity cards and curfews on sex workers employed in legalized brothels. Needless to say, these extreme forms of regulation seriously curtail workers’ civil rights.

Another negative outcome of legalization is that the strict regulations and conditions exclude many workers, typically those who are marginalized through such things as criminal records, substance use, immigration status and racialization. This exclusion leads to a two-tiered system that forces the most vulnerable workers back into the illegal underground.

Is decriminalization a panacea? No, it’s not. Stigma and social discrimination would undoubtedly continue to plague sex workers for some time after legal reform. However, stigma does not exist in a vacuum. The labelling and treatment of sex workers as criminals sends the unambiguous message that the Canadian state views sex-working people as aberrant and harmful to the broader community. This gives permission and indeed ammunition to those who discriminate against sex workers. Even more seriously, violent predators receive the message that sex workers cause social harm and as such are legitimate targets of violence and aggression.

What would decriminalization look like in Canada?

If the federal criminal laws were repealed, it would be up to the provinces and municipalities to determine their own regulatory systems. This could be very good or very bad. It is important that sex workers collaborate with legal experts, community members, labour activists, politicians and others to develop consistent, fair and viable alternatives. The basic tenets, however, would involve the extension (and, if necessary, adaptation) of existing human rights, employment, labour, business, and zoning laws to sex trade businesses. Most sex workers oppose the licensing of individual workers because of the stigma and residual police harassment that this would entail. The licensing of owner/operators or establishments would not pose as severe a threat.

New Zealand recently decriminalized prostitution activities and now regulates the sex trade through a series of reasonable local laws that respect the rights and well-being of workers, management, and the broader community. In Canada, the Pivot Legal Society has published a report analyzing various regulatory frameworks that could be developed if prostitution were decriminalized (Beyond Decriminalization: Sex Work, Human Rights and a New Framework for Law Reform, available at www.pivotlegal.org).

How do we get to decriminalization?

That is a tougher question. There are really two methods of law reform. One is for Parliament to change legislation on its own, the other is for the courts to impose reform on constitutional grounds. Over the past 20-odd years, various parliamentary and intergovernmental committees have examined Canada’s prostitution laws with an eye to potential change. Although the predominant analysis stemming from these reviews has been that the current laws serve neither the community nor sex workers, Parliament has not moved forward with positive change.

The reality is that prostitution is still seen as a moral issue and one that politicians don’t want to touch for fear of offending their constituents. Until there is a groundswell of support for legal reform from the public or a significant portion of the social justice movement, politicians are not going to risk taking a stand.

This leaves the courts as an avenue for change. There are two challenges of the prostitution laws under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms currently before the courts, one in Ontario and one in British Columbia. The basic argument is that prostitution laws violate workers’ security of person, freedom of expression and, in the B.C. case, equality rights. Both challenges are in their early stages, so it is too early to speculate on the outcome.

Maggie’s is supportive of both challenges and of the sex workers who launched them.

What sort of support is Maggie’s getting for sex workers’ rights and decriminalization and from whom?

Over the years, we have had sporadic support from various individuals and social justice movements. There have been parts of the queer, migrant workers’ rights, feminist, anti-poverty and civil rights movements that have incorporated elements of a sex workers’ rights position. Unfortunately, there have typically been divisions within these movements over sex work and as a consequence, support has stalled.

Over the past five years, we have seen some limited interest in sex workers’ rights from organized labour. Most notably, CUPE National passed a resolution supporting decriminalization a few years back. Again, however, the momentum has stalled.

What’s the main barrier?

In the most general terms, I think that the whole concept of sex work as labour requires a paradigm shift. The popular constructs of sex work - especially prostitution - view sex work as negative on a number of levels: as a moral offence, a crime, an individual pathology and a reflection of social inequality. These are long-standing and deeply embedded social perceptions and ideologies that are difficult to change.

In addition to these social constructs, many of us as individuals are deeply invested in certain codes of behaviour, especially when they involve the value-laden arenas of sex and money. The dichotomies of “good girls” versus “bad girls” and socially “legitimate” jobs versus “illegitimate” jobs give us the tools to defend or even applaud our individual behaviours by allowing us to say, “At least I am not like that other person over there.” If someone breaks down those dichotomies - say, by normalizing the bad-girl sex worker - we are forced to examine our own behaviours and assumptions in a whole new light. That can be very threatening.

At this stage, some of the most fierce opposition to sex workers’ rights comes from individuals and organizations that have adopted what is referred to as a radical feminist perspective. To put it simply, this philosophy sees all sex work as inherently degrading and damaging to women - not just to sex-working women, but to women in general. Many feminists who subscribe to this viewpoint maintain that prostitution is in fact a form of violence against women. From this perspective, they do not want to see sex work reforms, social or legal, but rather the elimination of sex work. This is by no means the majority feminist voice, but it is definitely the most vocal. It is this lobby that frequently deters policy makers, labour organizations and other potential rights supporters from adopting a sex workers’ rights position as they do not want to be seen to be supporting the oppression of women. The unfortunate irony is that through their attempt to help women in the sex trade, abolitionist feminists actually contribute to the harm that sex-working women experience.

Are there other ways that abolitionist and radical feminist conceptualizations of prostitution impact sex worker organizing?

What is most troubling about the abolitionist perspective is that it contradicts and frequently silences the voices of sex workers not just in Canada, but worldwide. Sex workers in the global south have been particularly hard hit by abolitionist feminist ideologies that counter workers’ organizing efforts. Most sex workers’ groups across the globe believe sex work to be a legitimate economic option for many people, especially women. Based on experience, they view sex work as part of the solution to systemic challenges such as poverty and globalization, not part of the problem.

This does not mean that sex work is universally glamorous work or a fabulous choice for all who engage in it. Like any job or life experience, it is different for everyone. It is great for some people, horrific for others, and simply okay for what is probably the majority.

Ultimately, however, one does not have to take a position on the value of sex work in order to support sex workers’ rights and the decriminalization of prostitution. Regardless of whether you think sex work is good, bad, or are ambivalent, the reality is that people - predominantly women - are harmed by oppressive laws and a lack of social status. Racialized women and migrant workers are the most severely impacted. In fact, I would argue that it is the most marginalized and oppressed of sex workers who stand to gain the most from social and legal change.

There are a lot of misunderstandings about sex work in international contexts. What do you say when people ask you about the impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism on sex workers in the global south? How should sex worker organizations like Maggie’s respond to these kinds of questions?

First, I have to state that neither I as an individual nor Maggie’s as an organization are the ones who should be asked or who can legitimately answer these questions. Sex workers in the global south are highly organized at the local, national and regional levels and they are the best positioned, both practically and politically, to identify and address concerns about colonialism, imperialism and capitalism in their contexts. I feel it is imperative that I stress this point as I find the silencing of sex workers who live in the global south, especially by academics in the global north, extremely offensive.

In fact, I need to correct my last statement: sex workers in the global south are not so much silenced as they are completely unrecognized, despite the fact that sex workers in many regions of the global south are far better organized and engage in more productive program development and political activism than most of the sex workers’ groups in the global north. There is a sad and poignant irony to the fact that many academics and activists who bring an essential anti-colonial and anti-imperialist analysis to their critique of sex work actually reproduce those very oppressions by failing to consider the experiences and analyses of sex workers in the global south.

That said, sex workers and sex workers’ organizations in the global north have a responsibility to recognize our privileged location. It is incumbent on us to take the lead from our colleagues in the global south and incorporate an anti-colonial and anti-imperial position into our analysis and actions. For many years, the international sex workers’ movement was not truly global and, like other movements, was dominated by European and North American individuals and groups. There has been a lot of positive change in the last decade and the international movement is now a lot more balanced. Unfortunately, sex workers’ groups in the north continue to have more money, access, and, hence, power than groups in the south.

Perhaps one of the most problematic anti-colonial and anti-imperial analyses of the global sex trade plays out in the often inflammatory critiques of what is referred to as “sex tourism.” It is undeniable that negative factors such as globalization, the economic disparity between the south and the north, and the ongoing exoticization of racialized women all contribute to patterns of white men from the north incorporating sexual and companionship services provided by sex workers in the global south into their leisure and business trips. I need to add, however, that these factors also contribute to a scenario in which women in the global south provide professional sexual and companionship services to white men from abroad. I am compelled to spell out the reciprocity of this arrangement because the agency of sex-working women is typically ignored in examinations of “sex tourism.”

Sex workers in the global south are commonly portrayed as unequivocal victims of global economic disparity. While the power differentials are clearly present, they do not automatically render women helpless or inherently victimized. Women are able to negotiate and navigate the challenges and opportunities presented to them, and in fact create their own opportunities out of adversity.

I in no way mean to glamorize or romanticize sex-working women’s experiences, but I feel it is necessary to counter the prevailing image of sex workers in the global south as passive victims. In fact, that particular construct of sex workers as passive victims has strong racist and sexist implications.

Why do you use quotation marks when you say “sex tourism”?

I do this because I find the term extremely loaded and because it conjures the stereotypical images I mentioned earlier. I also question the underlying assumptions about sex work that underpin the desire to distinguish tourism that involves sex work from tourism that involves other labour sectors or entertainment experiences. Tourism from the global north to the global south is commonly imbued with a problematic exoticization of the other and takes advantage of global economic disparities. This is true regardless of whether the privileged tourist is seeking to sample “exotic” food, “exotic” architecture, “exotic” entertainment, “exotic” sex, or “exotic” culture in general. To separate sexual services from the myriad other services and attractions that make up the tourist trade is to reveal a bias against sex work in general. From that perspective, sex work is perceived as more exploitative and more degrading than any other type of work. Again, this is a social construct and not a universal lived reality.

If people are interested in hearing more from sex workers in the global south, how would you recommend they do so?

There are a number of international sex workers’ rights organizations around the world that have easily accessible websites. To begin with, I would recommend people read some of the publications and reports on the Network of Sex Work Projects site (www.nswp.org). If they are interested in a particular region or country they could look more specifically at Thailand’s EMPOWER (www.empowerfoundation.org), Hong Kong’s Zi Teng (www.ziteng.org.hk), South Africa’s SWEAT (www.sweat.org.za), Brazil’s Davida (www.davida.org.br), or Guatemala’s MuJER (www.mujer.cfsites.org).

Some readers might have seen the documentary film Born into Brothels. I mention this because it was well received in North America and the filmmakers were praised for their “empowering work” with Calcutta’s sex workers. What viewers were not told was that Calcutta is home to the world’s largest sex worker organization, the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (www.durbar.org). The DMSC has over 65,000 members and offers a host of organizing activities and community supports including health and education programs for sex workers and their families, a micro-credit loan program, literacy classes, and vocational training for older sex workers and sex workers’ children.

This vibrant organization was not only completely absent from the award-winning documentary, but the documentary itself portrayed Calcutta’s sex workers in such a disempowering and negative light that the DMSC called for a boycott of the film. Yet how many North American viewers were even aware of this protest?

If readers are interested in seeing a documentary that honours the amazing work done by Calcutta’s sex working community, I recommend Tales of the Night Fairies by director Shohini Ghosh.

All of the organizations I referenced are organized by and for sex workers and have their own perspectives on imperialism, trafficking, colonialism, and sex tourism. I strongly encourage readers who are concerned about these issues to listen to the voices of sex workers who are working in international and regional contexts and to hear what they have to say.