Thank you very much.
Hello everyone. I am very pleased to speak to you today about these important issues.
I acknowledge that I am on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, and Squamish territories.
I will introduce myself to you in this way. I am an old, white, cisgender lesbian. I was raised working class and Presbyterian in Regina.
I want to talk a bit about what the world was like for me when I was coming out in 1968. I fell in love with a woman, and she and I both believed that we were the only two women to fall in love with each other ever in history. As you can imagine, that put us way outside what we thought anybody would be interested in, could talk about, would know about. We existed in the Carleton public library in two books. One was Abnormal Psychology, and the other a “lesbian commits suicide at the end” novel called The Well of Loneliness.
We would certainly have told absolutely nobody of our sexuality. Bit by bit, after I moved to Vancouver from Ontario, one would encounter people and you'd wonder whether they might be gay or lesbian. It was way too risky to ask. You might have conversational gambits like, “Have you ever read Jane Rule?”, who was at the time a contemporary lesbian novelist. That way you could have a conversation without ever outing anybody. It was a sacred commitment that no one ever outed anybody else that they knew to be gay.
I'm using those words because back in those days, “gay” and “lesbian” were the primary terms for our communities. The term “homosexual” went many decades ago as a respectful term for description of sexual orientation. Oppression as a queer is different than other kinds of oppression, for example, political oppression, because what we stand to lose first and foremost are our families of origin. Our families do not share our experience of persecution, but rather we risk losing them and our community.
It was the fact of coming to consciousness in a context where you were absolutely invisible in the culture. You could find tiny references. You were either mad or bad because you were either crazy—they locked me up in a mental hospital when I was a teenager because I was a lesbian—or you were a criminal. It was still under the Criminal Code at the time. If I lived with a partner, I had two choices. I either switched her gender in the stories I told about my weekend activities, or we were just roommates. I certainly didn't tell my doctor. When I tried to tell the psychiatrist, he skipped that appointment and never raised the issue again.
I read about bar raids, street harassments by police, people who had been fired, and lesbians who lost their children when they came out. I and everybody else led an entirely bifurcated life. I was out to almost nobody. Very few people would guess, because then, unlike now, there was no notion floating in the culture about “maybe she's a lesbian”. As a lesbian, I have faced harassment and discrimination and so on.
As a cisgender woman—that is, someone whose sense of gender identity is congruent with the gender that was assigned to me at birth after they looked at my genitals—I am not harassed for my gender identity. I can walk down the street, and nobody will give me a second glance.
My partner, on the other hand, who is a very butch-looking woman, is routinely harassed in airports, washrooms, and public spaces. She has had the police call on her when somebody's boyfriend thought she was a man, and had gone into the wrong room. That has happened more than once. She and all transpeople are always one washroom from home, because you can never be sure that it's going to be safe to pee.
As a very out lesbian lawyer, I've been in a bar maybe three times in my life. Of transpeople in Canada—you may already know this, but think about it—more than a third of them considered suicide in the last year, and more than 11% of them attempted suicide. Some 57% have avoided public places; 98% reported a transphobic incident within the past year, including 24% who were harassed by the police; 39% have been turned down for a job, and 26% are physically assaulted. Typically transpeople don't seek medical care.