Writer and committed citizen, the author taught literature at college, she is president of the governing board of an elementary school and member of the editorial board of Quebec letters. She co-edited and co-wrote the collective work Shock treatments and tarts. Critical assessment of the management of COVID-19 in Quebec (All in all).
Lately, drags have been on everyone’s lips — and we have to admit that they’re taking it seriously. While Barbada has been rolling its hump quietly since 2016, a story hour planned at the Sainte-Catherine library had to be moved in secret to escape protesters on April 2. So what happened in the meantime?
Baltimore, 2019. Julia Beck gets kicked out of a city’s LGBTQ+ committee for her anti-trans stance. Invited by Tucker Carlson to speak to Fox News, the woman, a lesbian, sums up her thoughts as follows: women are biologically different from men. If men can declare themselves women, predatory men will do so in order to access strictly feminine spaces. All women and girls are therefore at risk. As proof, this non-operated transgender inmate who raped women in prison. This position, in line with the anti-trans bills introduced in some states since 2016, allows Carlson and others to reaffirm one of the lines of their speech: “trans” equals “predator”.
Beck also explains to Carlson her thoughts on the acronym LGBTQ+: according to her, the letters “LGB” refer to sexuality, “their reality is biological”, while the “T” refers to gender identity, which “is not based not on a biological reality”. An editorial from the magazine Nature published the previous year may recall the scientific consensus that gender is a spectrum and that we should stop classifying people based on their anatomy or their genes, “LGB” and “T” should not be encompassed in the same acronym, according to Beck, who also refuses to refer to trans or non-binary people by their chosen pronouns.
Music to the ears of Fox News and the right, which will do a lot of mileage on these claims. Transgender people are “against nature”; a gender is not self-determining; pronouns that don’t match what’s between your legs are heresy.
Gender ideology, groomers and co.
In 2020, the tide continues to turn, as politicians like Ron DeSantis relentlessly fight what they call “gender ideology.” Teaching the existence of trans identity or non-binarity to children is, according to them, a mass indoctrination that threatens all American children. After trans people who threaten “all women”, now gender identities threaten “all children”.
In 2021, the Proud Boys are getting into it. The far-right group, which campaigned against Black Lives Matter and participated in the storming of the Capitol, is now fighting drag queens — who are nothing more than cisgender (very rarely trans) people who practice an art. While the Drag Story Hour has been hosting very well-received reading sessions in libraries since 2015, the Proud Boys are disrupting many of these activities. In June 2022, not far from San Francisco, five men violently interrupt a story hour, shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs. ” Who brought the tranny? It’s a groomer. It’s a pedophile. Why do you bring your kids to this event? »
That spring, in three weeks, according to a tally by Media Matters for America, Fox News had aired 170 footage evoking the grooming, “long debunked”, and which peddles that transgender, non-binary and/or gay people (as well as those who fight for their rights) “pose a threat to minors and seek to entrap them”. Everything converges.
According to Jonathan Hamilt, executive director of the Drag Story Hour, hate is now more directly targeting drag culture: “For right-wing conservative and Republican groups, coming out and saying they don’t like gay people doesn’t look very good.” he confided to washington post last year.
However, the tip of the anti-drag iceberg bears witness to a deeper phenomenon, which marks a significant setback in human rights: as of April 11, 2023, at least 452 anti-LGBTQ+ bills had been tabled in various states since the beginning of the year; a summit, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. This is more than double than for the whole of 2022.
On this side of the border
For several years here, columnists and columnists have regularly discussed transidentity. They usually just need to take one or two lines of communication from the American right and mix them with a few big words or seemingly innocuous jokes to obtain a copy-paste with Quebec sauce.
Three scenarios come up often: prisons (where, remember, “men identifying as women” assault female prisoners), sports (where transgender women have dominated since they competed in the women’s category), and (very rare) detransitions. These complex particularities are then used as levers to discredit all trans realities. Chronicle, after chronicle, after chronicle.
Any attempt to address gender issues with children is perceived as evangelism, “a contagious ideological subculture”, as if exposing young people to certain realities would “contaminate” them. Same principle for drag queens, which would serve to “convert the population to the theory of gender”, which a columnist even wrote that they were infiltrating our libraries; as the enemy in a territory of peace. Some politicians are also jumping on the bandwagon. Pierre Poilievre thus stuck to the psychologist and anti-queer communicator Jordan Peterson and, while this text was already well advanced, Éric Duhaime (out of opportunism or real belief?) launched the petition “Drag queen: let’s protect our children”.
When François Amalega Bitondo and his troops demonstrate against a story hour, or when Jean-Guy from Shawinigan and Nicole from Sept-Îles share an article in which drag artists ask to be better protected by writing “in front of children, it’s is NO”, “protect from pedophiles, never”, “children don’t need the speeches of pedos”, that’s all there is behind it. A discourse matured and tied up by the American right, one liners repeated over and over again, slightly less frontal, but no less innocuous regional adaptations, trivialized hatred and stigma.
To intolerance, I will always prefer the glitz and exaggerated makeup of colorful characters, who tell stories that value differences — all differences. Looking forward to other motions that protect them, in all lucidity.