rm on everyone else’s behalf. The challenges and successes were real, numerous, and life-changing for all: protection against discrimination in housing, employment, and immigration; the right to adopt children; the right to receive benefits in common law relationships; the right to serve your country; the eventual and important addition of sexual orientation into the Canadian Human Rights Act. The option to marry, if you so chose.
Compare this to the accomplishments of the “pride” we are meant to celebrate in 2021: the loss of single-sex segregation in women’s washrooms; the housing of male offenders with incarcerated women; the ability of men to compete in women’s sports; the erasure and harassment of women, and lesbians, as a result of “gender self-identification;” the dangers of puberty blockers and hormones for children; the tragedy of surgical procedures which are doomed to fail because they will never accomplish the desired wish; the return to harmful sex-role stereotypes; the dangers to women’s shelters as a result of accepting men into their midst. (Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is the only transition house in Canada maintaining a women only policy, and lost a city grant as a result.) These are just some of the accomplishments for which we are urged to feel “pride” — all month long.
I’ll admit I sound dark, even to myself. And I have wracked my brain to come up with something about these celebrations that we might cling to, and feel good about. Instead, what I see is that the LGB Alliance, the British-based advocacy group whose mission is to assert “the right of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men to define themselves as same-sex attracted,” is being campaigned against by trans-focused charities who hope to reverse the Charity Commission’s recent decision to grant the group charitable status. Lesbian And Gay News observes that “2021 Pride month will set the stage for an extraordinary legal spectacle of large, multi-million pound trans-focused charities seeking to silence and effectively destroy a lesbian/gay/bisexual focused one.” […]
[A] sensible case could be made that, after achieving rights and protections equal to those of our fellow citizens, the rainbow flag should have become nothing more, or less, than the symbol of a certain moment in time in which progress and human decency carried the day. Then, it might have been gracefully retired, surrendered back to the sky, so to speak, where we could gaze up, after a hard rain, and resist equating the spectacle with politics. Instead, like an indentured servant who has been bamboozled into an endless contract, the “pride’ flag has been forced to continue serving a dogmatic, ideological entity that has altered it — both philosophically and visually — to the point where what was once the sort of banner that could have complimented an ice cream shop, or a kiosk at the beach (something fun, anyway) has gone ominous, and dystopian.
It's the Stonewall story writ large: a campaigning organisation that achieved its goals, instead of quietly disbanding, morphed into something altogether darker.
Leave a Reply