Sanfino and Arsenault were arrested in Edmonton when the plane landed, Sanfino because of the disturbance and Arsenault because she refused to stop filming the RCMP officers arresting her friend.

The police addressed the women by male pronouns throughout the ordeal, and allegedly threatened to put them in the male prison. Arsenault, who has had extensive plastic surgery, said one officer even questioned her about her operations, asking her what parts she had “down there.”

The incident occurred just as Bill C-279, which would add gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination to the Human Rights Act, stalled before the senate. Xtra reported June 24 that despite widespread support from senators, things don’t look promising for the bill, suggesting Conservative higher-ups may be blocking its progress. Opponents to the bill say transgender people are adequately covered under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

With Pride Toronto kicking off this week, LGBT activists from around the world, including Marcela Romero, are telling the senate to stand up for trans rights. The regional coordinator for the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Transgender People, Romero told Xtra: “We don’t want tolerance anymore. We want human rights.”

He’s not someone I knew well, but I’d reported on a couple events featuring Kyle’s presence in the past. It was a shock to think that he would no longer bump into me on the corner of a busy Toronto intersection. He won’t be smiling while I fumble with my notepad to get a quote from him in the middle of a party.

I’m consistently awkward in groups of people—especially when reporting. My back-up recorder falls out of my handbag as I turn my cellphone to airplane mode. My pencil slips between my fingers while I try to understand why my camera isn’t working. My heart is pounding, and I feel stupid. But when Kyle was there, that stuff wasn’t. He didn’t do anything big; he was just patient. And nice. My memory of feeling safe, light, like I could breathe around this guy is a strong one. He likely didn’t know that he was throwing me these little lifeboats. I certainly had no idea he could have used one himself.

It makes me think, if a nervous moment with Kyle could mean so much to me, how much could he have meant to his friends and family?

Then I think—how could a person who gave so much good to people be dealing with so much darkness on their own?

There’s no way to blame the world for one person’s journey. But I think that it’s time for us to take a hard look at the stigma that we allow to settle around words like “mental illness.” And reporters, especially, have a lot of responsibility here.

It wasn’t so long ago that journalism lived by an old code: suicide was rarely reported. It did not get talked about for fear that detail or glorification of the incidents would lead to copycat suicides.

But this left people struggling in the dark. People who did have depression or suicidal thoughts were left with no proof that they weren’t alone. And communities, rather than coming together to heal, pushed the memories deep down with no record of the hurt that happened.

That’s starting to change, for two reasons. First of all, social media has changed who gets to write the script of grief. Within 24 hours of the announcement that Kyle had died, people were sharing their own experiences over Facebook or Twitter.

Secondly, a new generation of journalists is questioning old rules. In 2010, Liam Casey at the Ryerson Review of Journalism demanded that we revisit the media’s discussion of mental illness. “Suicide avoidance is a throwback to journalism’s dark days, a time when editors and news producers could choose to ignore unpleasant matters,” Casey writes. “But the industry can no longer justify failing to cover a tragedy that will affect so many people, in one way or another, at some time in their lives.”

If we want to stop suicide, we have to start talking about it—with our friends, to our family, and in our newspapers. We have to talk about the way people are loved and valued. Tell people not to go, because they’ll be missed. Writers can’t keep these stories secret any more. Too many lives like Kyle’s are on the line.

If you are having suicidal thoughts, please call a friend or your local suicide hotline for help.

In the U.S.? Try the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.

Under 20? Call Kids’ Help Phone at 1-800-668-6868.

LGBTQ? You can call the Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386 or Ontario’s LGBT Youthline at 1-800-268-9688.

Protesters gather outside Union Station dressed as an oil spill in demonstration against Harper's environmental policy, June 17, 2010. Photo credit: Jesse Mintz

Unless you have been living under a fake rock beside a fake lake, chances are you’ve heard about this G8/G20 business in some way, shape, or form. The reasons why many people are protesting, however, may not be as clear. That’s probably because there isn’t any single issue uniting all protesters. And, despite what you may have heard, there is no one type of person who protests. Not all protesters are communists or socialists, not all are anarchists or against the government, and not all are ‘hapless hippies’, as one recent article stated.

You don’t have to be a feminist to believe that the Harper government’s paltry track record with domestic policies towards women has discredited any maternal health discussion led by our government. You don’t have to be a civil liberties advocate or an anarchist to oppose the spending of 1 billion dollars to turn Toronto into an military zone, complete with barricades, checkpoints and closed circuit security cameras monitoring our every move. And you certainly don’t have to be an environmentalist to doubt the Canadian government’s willingness to combat global warming and to turn a blind, or worse, defiant eye towards the Tar Sands issue.

While outrage over the price tag of the summits is pretty easy to understand, it’s the other issues on the table in front of us today in Canada, in our cities, and throughout the world, which are harder to untangle. It may require a lot of breath, but now is the perfect time to demand firm commitments instead of half measures and excuses on issues such as the environment, Indigenous rights, women’s and queer rights, the end of systematic economic injustice, justice for migrants and non-status people and an end to all wars and occupations. The interconnectedness of these issues shouldn’t be a problem–it should just provide more fuel for your fire.

Here are the reasons why everyone–not just the anarchists, hippies and commies–should give a damn and make yourselves seen, heard and understood in the week before the summits.

1. Gender justice: the Canadian government has pledged 1 billion dollars over 5 years for maternal health initiatives. This number stands in stark contrast with the 1 billion spent on security over the three days of the summit. The sad reality is that any initiative tabled by Harper will be a half-hearted one at best as he has refused to advocate the same rights for the women of the global south–specifically, the right to a safe abortion–as women enjoy in Canada. In addition, our government’s inability (or refusal) to understand the link between the health and status of women, children, the queer community, climate change and the failing global economy further, hinders any potential progress for these already marginalized communities.

2. Creating a just global economy: the road the current G8/G20 leaders in conjunction with the IMF and World Bank are taking us down will simply repeat the economic mistakes of the past. The economic crisis must impel leaders to implement a more sustainable development model worldwide. There are currently roughly 50 million people living below the poverty line–that is less then $1.25 U.S. a day–and this summit must be seen as an opportunity to push for fair economic trade regulations to help those in the global south.

3. Indigenous rights: The policies of the G8 have consistently marginalized indigenous populations around the world facilitating the transfer of wealth and power from the global south to the political elite. Domestically, indigenous populations have been dealing with the effects of globalization and neo-liberal economic policies that have ravaged their land and exploited their communities. Indigenous women and children are hit especially hard by ‘economic reform’ and budget cuts, and some Indigenous communities in Canada do not even have access to clean water.

4. Environmental justice: The summit presents the first opportunity since Copenhagen for world leaders to meet and reevaluate their commitments to reducing carbon emissions and aiding poorer nations in their attempts to adapt to climate change. Canada received the Fossil Award at Copenhagen as the nation that has done the most to impede global action on climate change. The summit must be used as an opportunity for us to ensure that our government knows that its environmental policy will not stand.

5.  Imperialism: The G8 nations are responsible for roughly two-thirds of the world’s military spending. G8 nations are engaged in a self-serving global war on terror that militarizes the world. Domestically, Harper has increased our defense budget in the wake of massive cuts to public services, such as feminist-minded NGOs and arts programs.

These protests cannot be for the select few; they must be the voice of the many. There isn’t one issue that concerns and unites all people–but that’s okay. These issues fall under the same banner of demanding justice and rights from our government, for us and for others throughout the world, and that in and of itself, is quite a mandate.

We are no longer dealing with “Canada the good”; and we can no longer afford to be silent.  So please, give a damn.



Queer rights are on trial left, right and centre this month.

Here in Canada, an HIV-positive gay couple from the States has won their appeal against Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Until now, the majority of HIV-positive applicants have been excluded because of the excessive burden they posed on health services. This couple was initially rejected, but appealed on the basis that they could afford to cover their own health costs. CIC might still choose to appeal themselves, but the case is still encouraging for future HIV-positive immigrants to Canada — providing they have some cash behind them. Xtra has more here.

Meanwhile at the Ontario Superior Court, an HIV-positive man named Kyle Freeman is challenging the ban on blood donation by gay men. The trial moved to closing comments last week, and a decision is expected in a few weeks. Freeman’s lawyer Patricia LeFebour said in her closing remarks, “The current rule unfairly singles out the entire gay population,” and “doesn’t take into account the reality of today’s HIV statistics of gay men.”

Across the border, an interesting legal challenge has begun against the ban on same-sex marriage in California. Perry v. Schwarzenegger opened on Monday, and there is some speculation that this case may progress all the way to the US Supreme Court. Queer rights groups are divided over whether this would be good news. Some claim public opinion in the US is still deeply divided over gay marriage and for the Supreme Court to rule in its favour would trigger a major backlash. Others think a favourable ruling from the Supreme Court is unlikely, and that an unfavourable one could set the cause back a decade or more. The New Yorker has an interesting piece on the case, and you can also track the progress of the trial at this new Courage Campaign blog.

In Uganda, it is still unclear whether a bill imposing life sentences and even execution for homosexuality will pass into law. President Museveni has intervened, saying that the death penalty is a bridge too far, but the harsh prison sentences may still remain part of the bill. In the meantime though, debate over the bill is stirring up some seriously ugly anti-gay sentiment in the country.

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and the web and reviews editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.

The bill hasn’t seen as much press coverage as you might expect, but it has spawned some headlines I hope never to see again. The BBC wins the prize for most alarming, with “Should homosexuals be executed?” as if the prospect was merely thought-provoking and ripe for discussion.

The headline, from a post on the BBC website, actually turns out to be part of a show broadcast on the BBC World Service called Have Your Say. The episode—which aired on Wednesday and is still available online)—makes for powerful listening. A woman calls in from Zambia to say she can’t understand how a female can look at another female in a sexual way. When the host presses her on whether she would actually support the death penalty for doing so, she says, “Being executed for being something sinful, it’s okay.” From her tone of voice as she utters those final two words you could easily imagine she was talking about a vegetable she doesn’t like, but that she’d be willing to eat if it ended up on her plate.

The debate over this bill should be a warning to every casual homophobe the world over: this is where revulsion for your fellow man leads you. This is what happens when communities let their intolerance go unchecked, when governments refuse to step in to defend the rights of minorities. And let’s be clear: this bill would government-stamp the elimination of a group of people based on a particular attribute. We have a word for that: it’s genocide.

The bill’s sponsors get around the word by claiming that homosexuality is chosen rather than innate, that it is something you do rather than something you are. But I think it’s telling that the caller above says “for being something sinful.” I think that’s more than a slip of the tongue. Homophobes often claim that homosexuality is something you can “recruit” another person into, or that it’s something you can choose to indulge or ignore, but I think a lot of that genuine revulsion towards queer people has its roots in the opposite belief.

The death penalty is something you advocate for a person whom you believe cannot be saved. The kind of hatred that inspires a person to call a radio show and say, “Gay people don’t deserve to live” does not come from the mere belief that a single act of same-sex intimacy is immoral. It comes from a belief that committing that act transforms you into something irredeemably other and unfit for society.

The ex-gay ministries whose efforts in Uganda gave rise to this bill have denounced it because they believe that gay people can be saved. But the bill is only the ministries’ basic premise taken to its logical conclusion. If you preach that being gay is grievously sinful, but you fail to convince your listeners that rehabilitation is effective, or if those “rehabilitation” attempts fail, it’s not hard to see how we end up here. Several people who call into the show to support the bill justify their position by claiming that that being gay is not a necessary attribute. The ex-gay movement needs to take their share of the responsibility for that.

I try not to get too involved in the question of whether queerness is innate, because in asking it we generally assume that being gay is abnormal. But it clearly matters in this case. A reaction as extreme as the death penalty speaks to a belief on the part of its advocates that gay people are fundamentally unlike them, that they are a species apart. That is what makes it genocide. And all we can hope for at this point is that, when the bill is debated in the Ugandan parliament tomorrow, the members recognize it as such.

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and the web and reviews editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.

A CCTV image of an SUV suspected in the murder of Chris Skinner (inset).

It’s hard to read the story of Chris Skinner, the 27-year-old gay man who was beaten and then run over at Bay and Adelaide in Toronto just over a month ago, without feeling chilled. In addition to the obvious horror, there is something extremely disturbing about a violent attack you can’t pin an explanation on.

In some ways, news like this is easier to digest if you can point to something the victim did to bring it on himself. You know, something you would never do. And inevitably, rumours are beginning to circulate that the victim made the first move. What’s interesting though is that the queer community — those with arguably the biggest stake in convincing themselves that Chris Skinner wasn’t murdered solely for Walking While Gay — has refused to accept this explanation.

Instead, the queers have rallied around Skinner in the weeks following his death. On October 25 there was a candlelit vigil in the city’s gay village, and open skepticism has met the police’s assessment that this was not a hate crime.

I get the sense though from media coverage and from letters Skinner’s friends and former lovers have written to Xtra just to mention what a great guy he was, or to complain about the lack of mainstream media coverage, that what matters is not actually whether Skinner was murdered for being gay. What matters to the strangers who turned out to mark his death is simply that Skinner was gay.

“Community” is a word that comes up a lot in the queer press, and I have occasionally been guilty of typing it while doubting that what I am referencing really exists. But the reaction to Skinner’s murder looks to me like the definition of community. It assumes the best of its members, and assumes the worst of those who attack them. It matters less that Skinner’s murder could have happened to any of us than that it did happen to one of us. And amid the gruesome facts of his death, I can’t help but find something encouraging in that.

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and the web and reviews editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.

In a case before the Ontario Superior Court this month, an Ottawa man is challenging the ban on blood donation by gay men. Currently, any man who has had sex with another man since 1977 is “indefinitely deferred” from giving blood. Not only is this ban unnecessarily broad, it does a disservice to the very people it is supposed to protect.

The reasoning behind the ban is that gay men in Canada account for 60 percent of HIV-positive people, and for nearly half of new infections. All blood collected by Canadian Blood Services is screened for HIV, but the justification for the indefinite deferral of gay men is that the virus is not immediately detectable after infection—it can be several weeks before it shows up on a blood test. Clearly, these are compelling arguments for caution.

Toronto sexual health clinics deal with the issue of detection by waiting three months after a risky sexual encounter to confirm a negative result. Blood agencies in some countries subject gay men and other high-risk groups to a six- or twelve-month deferral period after last sexual contact to make sure the results of screenings are accurate. So why have CBS and Health Canada refused to rethink the total ban?

Another option would be to amend the ban to focus more narrowly on behaviour.

HIV infection rates are higher among gay men, but you are not inherently more likely to wind up with HIV just as a consequence of being gay. You have to have actually engaged in unprotected sex with an infected partner. So why not accept blood from gay men who have not been sexually active for the last six months? Or who have not had unprotected sex? Or who have not had anal sex?

Perhaps CBS simply does not trust gay men to be honest about their activities, in which case we may as well ask why CBS thinks they can be trusted to honestly self-identify at all.

Kyle Freeman, the Ottawa man who launched the current challenge against CBS, claims that asking donors their sexual orientation on their questionnaire is a violation of their Charter rights. In a way though, this isn’t really a fight about queer rights.

An argument could—and has—been made that the policy unfairly portrays gay men in Canada as the harbingers of disease. Or that it spreads misinformation about HIV by implying that it is transmissible by any sexual contact including oral sex, whether you wear a condom or not. But it seems to me that the more pressing issue is about access to blood. CBS has a responsibility to people in need of blood transfusions to provide blood that is safe. But they also have a responsibility to, well, provide blood. Is eliminating every gay man in the country who’s had sex in the last 30 years from the donor pool, when we have the means to make sure that blood is safe, really in the best interests of patients?

Cate Simpson is a freelance journalist and the web editor for Shameless magazine. She lives in Toronto.

Should we be telling bigots to just shut up? Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Bronclune.

A provision governing hate speech in Canada is under the microscope this week, after a tribunal of the Canadian Human Rights Commission concluded that it violates the right to freedom of expression guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This body doesn’t have the power to strike down Section 13(1) of the Human Rights Act, but the tribunal’s reluctance to apply the section against freedomsite.org webmaster Marc Lemire has set an interesting precedent and kicked up renewed debate over the right to free speech.

Queer people being one of the groups that anti-hate speech laws are supposed to protect, the outcome of this debate could have consequences for LGBT advocacy organizations. Queer activists are divided on the subject of hate speech. Some believe that the kind of homophobic and racist rhetoric that appears on websites like Marc Lemire’s contributes to an unsafe environment for the groups it targets, and should be proscribed. Others, wary of censorship, are willing to let the haters say whatever they like and hope that in the process they expose themselves as irrational and crazy.

This has tended to be the approach of LGBT equality campaigners Egale Canada. In 2005, they refused to endorse a complaint before the Alberta Human Rights Commission against conservative pastor Stephen Boissoin, the author of a letter to the Red Deer Advocate newspaper denouncing the “homosexual agenda.” Egale’s Executive Director said at the time that the organization wanted Boissoin’s assertions “aired, debated and subjected to public scrutiny.”

On the face of it, the director’s statement sits a little uneasily with Egale’s ongoing campaign against “Murder Music,” Jamaican dancehall music that features violently homophobic lyrics. A letter Egale sent to HMV and iTunes asking them to cease sales of music by particular dancehall artists last year made specific reference to the Section 13 provision against hate speech.

Clearly, there are cases where silencing homophobic commentators only serves to elevate them. But there are other cases where homophobic speech can contribute to violence against queer people, and where it seems to have genuinely vicious consequences.

Section 13(1) doesn’t require that hate speech include a call for violence, only that it be “likely to expose a person or persons [of a certain protected group] to hatred or contempt,” which is a pretty fuzzy line. Increasingly there are people, both liberal and conservative, who do not believe the Human Rights Commissions are best qualified to decide what sort of speech crosses that line. Partly, this is because the HRCs seem to think everything does: not one person accused of violating this fuzzy provision has yet been acquitted at the first round of hearings.

Section 13(1) is not the only provision that protects queer people and other minority groups from hate speech. Sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code (to which Egale’s Stop Murder Music campaign has also made reference) prohibit public incitements to hatred or violence against protected groups. The only thing distinguishing Section 13(1) is a lower standard of proof, and the fact that lodging a Human Rights complaint is free.

It’s not clear that the mounting convictions under Section 13(1) and the associated penalties are actually doing us any good. While there’s something satisfying about fining someone for spreading bile on the internet, doing so does not actually alter people’s hateful convictions — it just pushes them underground. Or worse, it makes loud indignant martyrs out of the people who hold those convictions.

Are Maclean’s sorry for publishing an article declaring that Muslims were going to breed Western civilization out of existence, for which they were issued an ultimately unsuccessful Human Rights complaint? Not one bit: they’re mad as hell and they won’t shut up about it. Ditto Ezra Levant, whose magazine The Western Standard was the subject of a Human Rights complaint for publishing the infamous Danish cartoons, and who is now one of the country’s most vocal opponents of the Human Rights Commissions.

Breaking down homophobia, racism and religious intolerance takes time and education — the last of which might be a more efficient use of government money than the current human rights apparatus. But ultimately, the Human Rights Commission’s biggest cost might be that it silences our enemies — whom we would be far better off knowing.

Police investigating yesterday's bombing of a Rome gay bar.

Several people were injured in Rome yesterday when two letter bombs were thrown into a gay neighbourhood bar. The attack wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a pattern of escalating violence against gay people in Italy which some speculate has been fuelled by the election of Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, a member of the post-fascist National Alliance party.

It is hard to see these attacks as anything short of terrorism. Something pre-meditated like a letter bomb attack is in a different category from spontaneous acts of street violence. The intention behind it is to make gay people in the region feel under siege.

And it works. My partner spent 10 days in Rome this summer, and while her straight friends endured the whistles and jeers expected in Italy, she got a lot of cold stares, and angry taunts from cars. It was a level of harassment she hasn’t experienced in Toronto for many years. She avoided the gay neighbourhood, along Via San Giovanni, because of a sense that being queer in Italy was a much more dangerous, underground experience than she was used to.

The threat of violence can shape the character of a community. In Toronto, safety is not a constant concern for me, but it was a consistent issue in parts of Edinburgh after dark. I still instinctively let go of my partner’s hand at night when I see men walking towards us. At concerts and baseball games, the first thing I do is take the measure of the people sitting around us. When considering travel destinations, before checking out the beaches I look into how safe we’d be there.

I grew up in a place where people get drunk and start fights more often than they do in Canada, but it’s not somewhere where, statistically, gay people are actually all that unsafe. So I can only imagine what it’s like to go to a bar that might get bombed, and the kind of self-preserving reflexes you pick up as an identifiably gay person in those places.

It’s easy to get stuck in definitions of terrorism that involve training camps in the mountains and plots against government buildings. But it is no less significant when a faction of people set out to terrorize a community or class of people within their own country. This week, my thoughts are with the queer community in Rome.

Alan Mathison Turing, computing pioneer and forgotten gay icon.

The other day I stumbled across a petition asking that the British government apologize to Alan Turing for “the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended [his] life and career,” and formally acknowledge the significance of his work.

Here’s some background. Alan Turing is most readily associated with the Turing Test, which sought to demonstrate whether a machine could think. The test, basically, involves a text-based conversation a human conducts with another human and with a Turing Machine. If he can’t tell whether he’s conversing with a human or machine, the machine passes the test.

The 1950s paper in which Turing laid out the test, and the conception of intelligence that it embodied, became one of the most influential in philosophical literature. It is still essential to most philosophical discussion of artificial intelligence and the essence of human consciousness.

Even more significantly, Turing was a codebreaker during the Second World War, ultimately devising a machine that could decipher the Germans’ Enigma Code. The Enigma Machine was so useful that some historians claim the information it intercepted hastened the end of the war by as much as two years.

Turing was also gay, a crime for which he was criminally prosecuted and chemically castrated. The conviction ended his career, and at the age of 41 he committed suicide.

Turing’s treatment at the hands of his own government is a detail absent from many histories of his work, and certainly absent from Enigma, the 2001 movie about the development of the codebreaking machine that substitutes Turing with a heterosexual character called Tom Jericho.

It’s particularly gratifying to see the tech community, which launched the campaign and petition, take on the cause of homophobia. And I think, even so many years after the fact, that the apology they are demanding on Turing’s behalf is warranted. Especially when you consider what it might have meant for the Second World War, and for students of the philosophy of mind, if Turing’s conviction had happened earlier in his career, before he could do the work for which he became known.

Of course, Turing was far from the only man to be convicted of “gross indecency” under the act that criminalized homosexuality before it was repealed in 1956 (’76 in Scotland)—Oscar Wilde being the most famous example. With this in mind, I wonder if this petition should go further.

Perhaps we should be asking that an apology be extended to all those who fell afoul of anti-homosexuality laws and had their careers cut short on the cusp of greatness—those whose contributions we will never know.

The petition is available to British residents and expats here: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/