Bill C-16 received royal ascent a few days ago, and there are victory celebrations planned for this year’s Pride. Royal Ascent is the final stage at which the colonial system forces its laws on occupied territory. In a similar way, for about a decade privileged people forced this campaign on our community without reasonable feedback or community-wide consensus.
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Leading the charge for “Trans Rights” have been privileged white, cis and trans people. Most trans POC, marginalized and homeless trans people were completely cut out of shaping the struggle for “trans rights”. Political bills like this one are often deceptive. They’re titled as something progressive, but the context and details are usually harmful for marginalized people.
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Political objectives and priorities differ and often conflict in the trans community, mostly depending on what privileges you can access, where you fall along the intersections of different axes of oppression, and your surrounding social circles. For people who can align with and function within a colonial state, access to the mechanisms and institutions of a colonizing state are a priority. The same mechanisms and institutions have a violent presence in the lives of marginalized people, and hence the priorities differ.
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For Trans POC, the priorities are to reduce violence, poverty, homelessness, targetting by police and unjust laws, forming and defining our own spaces free from colonizers, colonial institutions, colonial healthcare, colonial education, colonial responses to transphobic violence, colonial social services, colonial “shelters”, colonial narratives and instead, having the freedom to preserve and rebuild our many histories and cultures. The bill that was passed in our name does little to address any of these interests, and instead introduces multiple barriers in our struggle to achieve these objectives, while deprioritizing others.
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The fact that there was an immense amount of political momentum that had to be built up over the years all over the country to get this bill passed, meant that a lot of social and political networks had to be created to align themselves with a political agenda that purported to represent all trans people in the entire country. Those entire social and political networks now stand in a conflicting and hostile relationship with trans POC.
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What the specific changes in the bill did get right were to mandate anti-discrimination changes at a federal level that will result in trans people gaining greater access to government services like obtaining a passport or driver’s license, being able to access legal mechanisms in case of discrimination related to housing, education and work, and a symbolic change to hate crime laws that will at best have a negligible impact for marginalized trans people who are most often the targets of direct violence.
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For the most marginalized people in our community, a driver’s license or passport has little value when you don’t have the privilege to travel. Being able to sue or access legal mechanisms is usually far too difficult, and sometimes virtually impossible, like when it comes to getting housing or accountability from a corrupt police force. Framing the bill as being representative of all trans people and a major milestone in the struggle against the oppression of transpeople sends us the message that the priorities of Trans POC are unseen and negligible, and hence, Trans POC are unseen and negligible.
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Amending hate crime laws is especially insensitive and a symbolically racist move, as not only do these laws change very little in terms of the violence experienced by Trans Women of Color, but they also lend support to the prison-industrial complex, the fight against which lies at the very foundation of the resistance built up by POC. An endorsement of this strategy (unsynchronized with IBPOC communities) undermines our strategies of creating justice through community accountability and anti-racist transformative justice.
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The upcoming celebrations and flag-raisings following the passing of this bill mark an end for the trans community. Passing C-16 is the trans community’s “gay marriage”. This is an endgame for privileged trans people, and the struggle left for them is to harness the system’s mechanisms to their advantage, while fine-tuning the groundwork laid by their narrative of what constitutes “trans rights” to make institutions and the rest of the trans population fall in line.
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For Trans POC, homeless and marginalized trans people, our struggle for safety and community has been pushed into a future that is uncertain and dangerous, while being accompanied by fewer allies. It isn’t a coincidence that at last year’s Trans Day of Remembrance flag-raisings, Trump was quoted in the context of positive social change for trans people, while police were used to kick out trans women of color from criticizing the events.
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In the name of progress our community has shifted to the Right, which I’m told is a hallmark of neo-liberalism. Not being an educated woman, I can’t speak to these types of political theories. I mourn for the losses in our community, and the loss of community. I’ve rarely had access to safety, housing and community for almost my entire life, and these days I’m trying to navigate an ever complex changing political reality. I try to remember and honor the street folks, homeless and trans people/friends/family whose lives were tragically cut short, but end up fearing what appears to multiple fronts of approaching escalating violence.
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I hope that more of us can take a pause from the colonizer’s celebrations who brought over transphobia in the first place, be those celebrations in the form of passing a bill to stifle trans community, or 150 years of genocide, theft and occupation of a people who knew no homelessness and valued and celebrated two-spirited people.
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Kylie Brooks
Abuzar Chaudhary