The call to protest had already been circulating for several days when protesters gathered outside the city library of Sainte-Catherine on Sunday, to disrupt story time with the drag queen Barbada, a playful reading activity which is held punctually for many years in libraries, bookstores and schools across the province. A sign of the times, this weekend the workshop had to be moved to a secret location, for the safety of the participants.
The rhetoric of the demonstrators was well oiled, we begin to recognize the choreography; that of the anti-queer panic that presents itself in puritanical garb, to speak supposedly in the name of child protection. When it comes to drag queens, who are more and more visible and loved by the general public, the message generally goes like this: fine, drag, but it has no place in libraries, nor elsewhere. in schools or any place frequented by children. The argument essentially stems from the fact that a drag queen cannot address children because she offers a necessarily sexualized performance.
That drag queens exist does not pose a problem, it will be said, as long as they remain confined to bars, cabarets, the nightlife, the margins. We refuse that this artistic practice can be deployed in a universe other than that which we associate with transgression, and we depict any effort in this direction as a gesture of predation. The rhetoric is dusty, but it is alive and well.
Politicians were sensitive to the disruption of story time with Barbada, even acknowledging that this event must be linked to a growing hostility towards sexual minorities. The National Assembly unanimously adopted on Tuesday a motion deploring “the rise of hateful and discriminatory remarks against people from the LGBTQI2S+ community in the public sphere”.
On Twitter, the Minister for the Status of Women, Martine Biron, also denounced the events in Sainte-Catherine. “UNACCEPTABLE,” she tweeted of the comments made against Barbada on the sidelines of the protest. “OPENING,” she added, still in capitals, “is Barbada’s message. She can count on my support.
This posture of principle may seem reassuring – especially since the caquists have never been embarrassed to refuse to recognize, even symbolically, the hatred and discrimination suffered by certain groups. We welcome the fact that it is still possible for the Coalition avenir Québec to publicly deplore the rise of homophobia and, in particular, transphobia in the province. Still, where it really matters, the government lacks consistency.
For the past few weeks, Liberal MP Jennifer Maccarone has been hounding the government on this subject, pointing out that the organization Interligne, which offers an emergency helpline for LGBTQ+ people, is struggling for its survival due to a serious deficiency. of financing. However, the CAQ has also, over the past five years, awarded half a million dollars in subsidies to PDF Quebec, according to what The Rover reports. This group, if it must be remembered, has been deploying considerable energy for several years in campaigning to slow down or limit the rights acquired in Quebec by trans people, and to push in the public space a discourse aimed at delegitimizing their existence.
To each his own mission, it is not a question of calling for censorship, but seeing this, one wonders in what way the CAQ government is really committed to countering the increasingly uninhibited hatred towards sexual minorities, and especially towards trans people.
You don’t have to look very far to realize that the antiquer and anti-trans panic is gaining ground in our country. While in the United States, we multiply laws relegating trans people to social death by erasing them from public life and criminalizing them in various ways, it would be naive to believe that this wind of reaction is not blowing here too . The protesters gathered in Sainte-Catherine last weekend bear witness to this, as does the controversy surrounding the LGBTQ+ pride night in the National Hockey League, which on Thursday caught up with the Canadiens with the refusal of Denis Gurianov to be associated with it. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.
You have to see the hatred, the vitriol, the relentlessness aroused by the mere mention of these questions. Particular attention must also be paid to the growing normalization of discourses that reduce gender to biological sex, which meticulously reconstruct the association, deconstructed by decades of struggle for the rights of LGBTQ+ people, between sexual diversity, deviance and predation.
We must also see that this discourse announces something else. Transphobia is today the lightning rod and the gateway to the far right, in the sense that it reinforces and goes hand in hand with all the discourses that are based on the biologization of social behaviors and the naturalization of hierarchies. social. The disruption of story time with Barbada is in this sense more than an isolated incident. Above all, it announces the urgency of building solidarity to counter a palpable and growing hatred.