For a number of years suspiciously co-equal to the duration of mine having been out of the proverbial closet, I’ve increasingly resented Pride in exponential increments year after year. This year, more than any year previous, Pride Month has announced itself with all the tact of a fire truck running over a kitten.

The beginning of June saw the Progressive (a label I consider more than a little tasteless given the decisions I’m about to describe) Conservative Party of New Brunswick put under review the Education and Early Childhood Development’s Policy 713—Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity—which outlines the standards for the treatment and accommodation of LGBTQ+ students in the province’s public education system. 

Warning signs, including Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development Bill Hogan’s own comments on certain sections of the legislation, indicated to many that the party aimed, to some extent, to repeal provisions for the use of preferred pronouns, first names, and the right to access bathrooms and play on sports teams which aligned with a student’s gender identity. The revised Policy, which was revealed to the public on June 7th, stipulates that rather than comply with a child’s wishes to be referred to as they themselves prefer, teachers must now direct them “to the appropriate professional (i.e. school social worker, school psychologist) to work with them in the development of a plan to speak with their parents if and when they are ready to do so.” This seems problematic on the face of it, given the sheer difficulty in accessing a school psychologist in the province. 41 of the 48 positions in the province’s English school board are vacant, and wait times are reportedly more than two years long. 

More concerningly, Minister Hogan has been on public record to assert that—as he interprets the legislation—teachers should be required to use a student’s legal given name and pronouns which correspond to their assigned gender at birth (AGAB) until such time as the parents approve of the decision, tacitly calling for education workers to misgender their students in the name of promoting “transparency” with their parents.

The decision ripped a slit at the heart of the New Brunswick legislature. While legal experts say there’s little to no indication that the Minister’s comments or the way the Policy itself is written could be interpreted in such a way as to be binding, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs has gone on to order a comprehensive review of the policy, a decision contentious both with the Liberal opposition and with members of his own bench.

On June 15th, Dorothy Shephard, MLA for Saint John Lancaster, resigned from her position as Minister for Social Development, citing the review of Policy 713, as well as a lack of decorum and due process from Higgs’ PC government. Shephard and six other PC MLAs voted in favour of an opposition motion to rescind the June 7th changes made by Minister Hogan, leading it to pass with a 26–20 majority.

Amid all this Premier Higgs—a politician for whom I reserve much contempt, even amongst the comparable detritus which constitutes the Progressive Conservative caucus of any number of provinces—has been on the record spewing transphobic dogma, going so far as to claim that gender dysphoria is becoming “popular” and “trendy.” Higgs claimed that Policy 713 "kind of slid into the system" beneath his notice when it was ratified in 2020, raising the question of how fucking neglectful an elected politician—whose job it literally is to supervise this process—can be so as to somehow miss the implementation of a piece of legislation. He has previously implied that the provisions enshrined in the policy contribute to “an erosion of the family role in child's upbringing,” and, despite having pointedly lost this vote, made no move to commit to the policy recommendations that child and youth advocate Kelly Lamrock will put forward in August.

Beyond its reaching an unfortunate climax at the precise median of a month dedicated to the nominal celebration of queerness and the inclusivity of all, the fracas within New Brunswick over what is fundamentally a fairly innocuous and short piece of legislation serves as indisputable indication that transphobic hysteria has come to roost here in Canadian politics, just as it has in both the United States and United Kingdom before.

The cultural rot has finally metastasized.

In October of 2021 I spent a considerable amount of time reading the 112-page entirety of Quebec’s proposed Projet de loi n° 2 (National Assembly of Quebec Bill 2), a bill which drew controversy for its stipulation that it would require trans, intersex, and non-binary residents of the province to undergo gender confirmation surgery in order to change the sex designation on their ID, as well as creating a secondary category to indicate a person’s “gender identity” on their official documentation immediately following their sex designation.

The bill represented a marked regression to established provincial legislation at the time: Bill 2 would have made it harder for trans people living in Quebec to legally change their name and sex designation, police trans identity by separately categorizing sex and gender identity on ID, make it necessary for trans and non-binary people to undergo invasive and potentially unwanted surgery in order to change their sex designation, police the parental designation on the birth certificates of children with trans and gender-non-conforming (GNC) parents, and force intersex people (who in the words of the Bill are categorized as those whose sex is “undetermined” at birth) to be binarily categorized by either themself or a parent or guardian “as soon as it is possible to determine the person’s sex”.

In an November 2021 article I described this as “tantamount to a mass-outing of trans people who had, up until that point, been living content ‘stealth’ lives, being treated (at least in theory) more-or-less as any other person would,” which “while unpleasant for any trans person, will in particular affect trans sex workers, trans women, Two-spirit people, and trans people of colour, groups that already face intersectional modes of oppression, and who experience higher rates of violence than most other demographics.”

That article was never published, as Bill 2 was subsequently revised in the legislature. 

Nonetheless, I will reprint the final two paragraphs of that piece (near) verbatim.

While you may wonder what the relevance of discussing a proposed Bill in Quebec might be, let me say this: Projet de loi n° 2, if passed, sets a precedent. It tells every other provincial government that it is permissible to interfere in the lives and dignity of trans, non-binary and intersex people, and it bolsters the attitudes of TERFs and transphobes everywhere. As I wrote in my June 2021 Op-ed, the passing of any transphobic legislation has a knock-on effect in reinforcing systemic transphobia. It legitimizes the State’s abuses of control over our bodies, and it tells transphobes that they are justified in harassing us, in questioning our identity and lived experience, and in trying to tell me which goddamn bathroom to use.

To pretend that this is isolated to Quebec (or New Brunswick) is naïve. There are implications for every Canadian citizen should this bill come to bear. Remember, whether or not you are trans or not, you likely know somebody who is. Whether it’s a classmate, a friend, a lover, or one of your children, this legislation will make their life harder, it will make them feel less welcome in the world. The passing of Bill 2 (or equally, a review of Policy 713) might make the difference in whether someone is able to find the security to come out or not. Bill 2 comes as a frightening reminder to trans people that our rights and legitimacy within society are still a consistent source of debate, that the very “issue” of our humanity remains an undecided subject matter. Until such time as we as a society can progress past debates over people’s rights to life and dignity, trans people will be forced to continue to fight to exist in ways both big and small, Bill 2 is just the latest hurdle to hit close to home.

I guess some things just never change.

On June 8th, one day after the changes to Policy 713 were made public in New Brunswick, a 9-year old girl in Kelowna, British Columbia, was accosted at a school track and field event by an elderly man and his wife, who accused her of lying about her gender and called for her removal from competition on the basis of her being allegedly either a boy or a trans girl. The hateful bastard in question was incidentally a Prince Albert Sports Hall of Fame inductee, on top of being a disgraceful grandfather, considering he proves the sort of person who thinks it right to mount a contemptible tirade against a faultless child for nothing save a perception of her assumed character.

 This abuse extended to the daughter’s mothers, of whom the one in attendance was called a “groomer,” a “pedophile,” a “genital mutilator,” and any number of despicable labels which social conservatives and violent bigots attribute to queer and transgender persons and their allies.

No degree of rhetorical emphasis can properly express exactly how incensed this makes me.

What has become abundantly clear to me as a journalist over the past several years, having watched many parts of the world succumb to the reactionary backslide into manic, transphobia-fuelled conservatism, is that this vile and infectious cultural attitude is not borne out of actual concern for the groups said transphobes profess to protect, so much as it is a concerted and rapacious effort on the part of conservative evangelicals to grasp dominion over the hearts and minds of children. 

It always comes back to that, doesn’t it?

“Think of the kids,” a rhetorical flourish invoked to justify any number of reprehensible overreaches in legislative intervention, are the favoured fighting words of deplorable swine the world over. Make no mistake though, these people couldn't care less about the children they claim to be protecting. 

These are the same serpents making pregnant children carry fetuses to term across the United States, an inhumane measure which will unquestionably result in the deaths of actual children, rather than the fictitiously-conjured strawchildren on which they rest their case to legislate trans and queer people out of the public sphere altogether.

Has even a single one of these people so besides themself in histrionics about The Children actually asked said children what they want?

It certainly doesn’t seem to be the case to me. In New Brunswick, after the announcement of the review of Policy 713, students took to the streets to demonstrate their opposition to the proposal. I’ve got nothing but respect for them, especially the ones who came forward to talk to the media, tacitly putting themselves at odds with their own government. Said Government, in their abundant wisdom, roundly ignored the mass mobilizing of those children, too young yet to vote, exercising political power in the only way they could find.

Young people are, generally speaking, politically engaged and capable of complex, rational, and critical thought. It’s easy to forget, in a society which has placed an arbitrary number on the age at which you’re conferred most of your basic rights, that children are just as much people as any of us and, if nothing else, that we should extend them the basic right to self-determination. In certain instances we actually foist this burden of self-determination on kids, asking seventeen-year-olds to pick a largely-arbitrary post-secondary field which will determine a considerable part of their future. Though while society generally accepts that asking someone with little-to-no meaningful work experience to choose the direction their life as a indentured wage labourer will take, it enforces a brutal double standard to those who—having lived through years of uncomfortable social conditioning to align with their gender as assigned at birth—express discomfort and a desire to align themselves with something more conducive to improving their quality of life. 

In spite of transgender children repeatedly and articulately having to justify their own existence day in and day out, conservative lawmakers—despite themselves being fundamentally incapable of passing judgement on a life experience to which they cannot lay claim, and who have as much in common with most children of this generation as a Macbook Air does to the Turing Machine—still deign to impose judgement against the self-professed best interests of transgender children in the name of some deluded conception of a “greater good.”

That, to me, seems as strong an indication as any that those who say they want what’s best for kids have no interest in what said kids decide is best for themselves.

Let’s be abundantly clear here, regardless of age, ability, and independence, children deserve as much freedom and dignity as any other person. They are themselves fully realized persons, moral agents capable of thought and self-determination regardless of the beliefs of a vocal microcosm of society at large. It is not the right of anyone, least of all decrepit Caucasian neoconservatives with lists of sexual harassment complaints levelled against them, to be telling trans children that they know better for them.

For those who call their political opponents “groomers,” it strikes me that the conservative right possesses a particularly perverse obsession with controlling kids.

These rhetorical attacks, if anything, obfuscate the depth of fascination conservative lawmakers have with the bodies of children. It’s deeply, deeply disturbing. Always in transphobic rhetoric there is this leering, body-horror spin to the accusations, as though those deriding trans children derive some morbid pleasure in the obsessive scrutiny of said children’s sex organs.

Much of contemporary transphobic rhetoric carries a decidedly sexual bent to it, after all. Some of the greatest scaremongers centre around catastrophizing fears of infertility, as if the most important thing to a child’s wellbeing is whether or not they will be able to one day reproduce. I can tell you, for the record, that concerns about my own fertility were not at the front of my mind when I decided to transition. While I did undergo fertility preservation, and do not regret having done as such, in all honesty I was more concerned that I might try and gut myself with a pair of craft scissors than I was in having kids five, ten, twenty years down the line if I didn’t get on hormones soon. Even in demonizing the supposed evils of sex education, conservatives and religious zealots tacitly reveal that they think about children having sex A LOT. Conservative lawmakers, it would seem, think more about sex than I ever did between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, in spite of mine having a not-inconsiderable testosterone-driven libido and being sexually active for a good part of that time.

Forgive me, then, for being a bit skeptical that those implicitly admitting to having conjured fantasy scenarios of hypothetical underage fornication are those most qualified to be making laws in the best interests of the safety of said children. 

This sort of rhetoric is not new, and it’s always been something against which the queer community has struggled, in spite of how transparently disingenuous it so often is. 

Rather than demonstrate that the scaremongering of the conservative right bears any truth, there is instead a vast body of evidence which demonstrates that religious and political conservatism is directly correlated to higher rates of child abuse. Besides the much-parroted statistic that 40% of police officers commite spousal abuse, states which voted majority Republican in the last U.S. election on average reported more cases of child abuse, and violence against women in conservative political parties remains simultaneously more pervasive and massively under-reported. At the intersections of social conservatism and organized religion, these effects are more often than not compounded.

Homophobes of generations past conjectured that, seeing as they were “unable to reproduce,” homosexuals and members of the queer community must proliferate by impressing homosexuality upon the subsequent generation’s children. This theory—dubbed “social contagion,” in trans and queer studies—has, in recent years, been picked up by some of society’s most ardent transphobes to explain why “all of a sudden” there are trans people “everywhere,” and would seem in large part why the “groomer” label gets tossed around so zealously today. Trans people are certainly not everywhere, let’s be clear, but today we are at least visible in “polite” society.

Trans scholar Julia Serano has debunked the theory at length—in a number of essays she draws the persuasive comparison between the statistical representation of transgender persons and the visibility of left-handed people in society. For centuries, people who intuitively wrote left-handedly were disciplined to write with their right hands, artificially suppressing the apparent number of openly left-handed persons. This, she argues, is an effective analogy to the way in which increased social acceptance of transgender persons—in conjunction with a proliferation of gender-affirming healthcare—have conspired to stop obfuscating the number of people who desire to transition, creating the impression of a sudden boom in the number of transgender persons even if such is not precisely the case.

If you build it, they will come, and if you create the means to transcend the more arbitrary boundaries of sexual difference, trust that certain people will doubtlessly exercise their right to use them. Nonetheless, violent queerphobic and specifically anti-trans hate is at its apex. The number of instances of fatal attacks on trans and gender non-conforoming persons have increased almost every year since the Human Rights Campaign first began documenting them in 2013. Hundreds of bills stripping the rights of queer persons and criminalizing access to hormone replacement therapy have been advanced across the United States, with dozens more put forward each month.

In the course of my writing this article we have quite literally seen things get worse.

On Wednesday, June 28th, a 24-year old man walked into a lecture at the University of Waterloo’s Hagey Hall and stabbed three people, including associate professor of philosophy Katy Fulfer. Police said they suspect the attack was targeted, and specifically hate motivated—the class in question was a Gender Issues lecture. This comes as Waterloo itself is experiencing an uptick in anti-LGBTQ street harassment. 

On June 30th, 2023—the last day of Pride Month—the U.S. Supreme Court resolved that a Chrisitan web designer could refuse to serve same-sex couples on the basis of her religious beliefs, a move which critics fear could repeal non-discrimination protections on the basis of homosexuality and gender identity. 

What a world we live in. 

The Overton Window is being subjected to a forcible shift. Conservatism is poisoning the water supply. For that reason I say this, with all the conviction I can muster: for the rest of every pride month to come—just as every pride month before it—I will tolerate no cops, no corporations, and no goddamn Christians.

Permit me if you will, to expound a bit on that, as I’ve quite likely pissed a lot of people off.

If that’s the case, do let me say I’m glad! If you disagree with me on this point, I have nothing for you but contempt and ill-will, and you deserve to feel far more than outraged because a tranny said something mean online about the particular group to which you belong. If you have not stopped reading, however, I’m more than content to justify myself.

Transness is not a social contagion.

Conservatism, however, is.

Politics are themselves ineffable. They are not genetic, they cannot be (biologically) inherited or transmitted. No person possesses an innate predisposition for a certain belief over another.

Rather, politics are the product of negotiation, debate, and consensus. They are discursive. As opposed to being natural, they are instead nurtured in a political subject. Politics are learned and reinforced throughout life—we are not born with them, nor are they ever immutable except by sheer force of will. For this reason it makes far more sense to apply a model of social contagion to the propagation of politics than it is the (altogether slight) increase in the supposed number of transgender persons in the world.

Conservatism persists only through grooming successive generations into its ideological fold. It preys on the minds of the young and the impressionable in service of its own survival. It is parasitic, consumptive, and wholly contingent on the continued belief in it and prescription to its ideals. It cannot exist in a vacuum. 

If only there were some sort of word for that practice…

Conversion therapy is a longstanding socially conservative and religious fundamentalist practice, wherein subjects demonstrating “deviant” social behaviours are institutionalized and indoctrinated with “acceptable” patterns of belief. This has long been levelled against members of the queer community especially, though generally Vacation Bible School, and other such religious institutions as are documented in Jesus Camp (2006) and the like.

In the humanities we like to engage in this little practice called “structural criticism,” which holds that you look not just at the relative morality of the individual, but at their place in the overlapping structures of social hierarchy and their responsibilities therein. It’s for this reason why, despite my deep-seated belief in each person’s autonomy, I find it difficult to abide Chrisitans—even of the queer variety.

Organized religion—predominantly the Christianity’s various North American Protestant denominations, are unequivocally responsible for the architecture of innumerable social structures of hate and indoctrination. Gay Conversion Therapy as we recognize it is inextricable from a specific and insidiously religious bent which conflates homosexuality with “sin” and characterizes all modes of queerness as direct affronts to God. 

The religious right remain some of the most outspoken opponents of queer rights advocacy to this day. I’ve been to innumerable drag defenses, pride parades, protests, walkouts, and other such events where queer people are faced with people actively advocating for the removal of their rights and personhood. Many of said unsavoury types continue bleating about indoctrination despite the bibles in their hands. 

To their credit, many of these events equally showcase a number of bible thumpers of a queer persuasion performing sympathy, though if I’m being honest I could give a rat’s ass about their solidarity. There’s a bitter irony in the world’s oldest doctrinal institution prattling on in public about the supposed indoctrination of children, as if Sunday School has ever given a fair and balanced account of how the world works. 

The church sucks kids in and spits them out broken and hollow, exposing them to rampant sexual abuses all the while, which the diocese nonetheless does their best to cover.

While I would never dream of impugning upon any individual's right to their own means of rationalizing the metaphysical quandary which existence presents, I will unabashedly rail against any of those defending any denomination of institutionalized Christianity. The Church, reprehensible in its documented actions for centuries at this point, has done markedly little to absolve itself of the material harm of its actions.

The Roman Catholic Church’s well-documented transgressions date back generations at this point in time, it being no secret that the culture of sexual repression it enforces is brought to bear by and in large upon vulnerable children. Likewise, Protestant denominations—though often wont to absolve themselves of a historiography’s worth of accrued guilt—were instrumental in the orchestration of the institution of slavery, and to this day remain the largest administrators of gay conversion boarding camps in the United States and worldwide. 

There may well be identarian factional splits here and there, but generally speaking, were one to follow the money they would find so-called “progressive” congregations are generally fed by the same hand as those telling faggots like me to burn in hell. You yourself might not be “one of the bad ones,” but if you’d like to defend the institution I’m more than happy to invite you over to watch Deliver Us From Evil (2006) `while I make unflinching eye contact with you for the duration of the film.

Within queer spaces and communities, “religious trauma” is often a subject of much discussion. While I think it all too necessary to discuss how organized religion conspires to shame, suppress, and disenfranchise queer people growing up within its institutions, all too often these discussions centre on the personal, and the emotional. In doing so, we ignore the fact that in the nature of the harms effected by the church, and the vast number of victims it creates, these traumas are not individualized so much as they are endemic to the institution. It is how the system is designed to function. While this does not impugn the nature of Faith itself, it means that any attempt to reconcile individualized, spiritual Faith and the structural institution which attempts to socially enforce it is impossible. One does not reflect the other, and any pretension of the Church’s innocence in the matter because you yourself have found a way to live with God is indefensible. 

Be a queer Christian all you like, but I think it’s fucking disgusting that we celebrate Churches in pride parades while children are, too this day, send to evangelical boarding camps to be psychologically re-conditioned for the perceived transgression of being gay. It requires some extreme mental plasticity to reconcile those facts in any moral framework. Quite frankly I don’t know how any queer person in the Church can live with themselves.

The Church and the religious right—as one of the largest voter demographics in the United States—are themselves the architects of a number of hateful pieces of legislation which we see gaining momentum to this day. It is impossible to assess or criticize the current judicial attitude towards transness without first acknowledging the pervasiveness of evangelical conservatism. To this end, not only has the American Christian right directly penned a number of laws repugnant in their contents, they have also irrefutably implicated the police.

With the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and myriad other countries we deem “less important” (and therefore less worth mentioning) experiencing a pronounced backslide into social conservatism—if not the outright public espousing of expressly fascist ideology—the police have become voluntary collaborators in the legislative attack on queerness. In the most pared down job description, a police officer is a person responsible for maintaining the prescribed social order and enforcing governmentally ordained rules—that is to say, “upholding the law.” In service of this task, cops are afforded extreme dispensation to employ force as they personally see fit, and are expected to conform to the ideological standard inscribed in written legislation.

Cops have become unavoidably implicated in the political project of legislating queerness out of existence, as they are, by the terms of their employment, expected to enforce absolutely horrific, verging on dictatorial, exercises in State oversight in the sanctioned outing, removal of quantifiably lifesaving medical intervention, and separation of queer children from their parents. While the government or the police themselves might tell you they’re serving the interests of “safety,” let me tell you, when literal self-declared Nazis are massing hand in hand with church congregations outside a children’s library with no interference from police, they have implicitly picked a side, and by everything I consider moral it is not mine.

While it may be a handful of old, demented, bible thumping white men writing the legislation to take your kids away, the one who’s going to actually do it is a police officer. Cops, social workers, and the sleazy and spineless among the ranks of teachers, medical doctors and psychologists will, at the end of the day, be those primarily responsible for surrendering queer children to the whims of the State.

Never forget that when you fail to meet my eye talking about your criminology degree.

The time for hypotheticals is long past in this respect. If you find yourself in an occupation wherein you might be asked to hand a child over to the state because of that child’s identity or expression and can envision yourself doing such, I would implore you to quit your job and think on your moral fibre.

Amid all this, the third faction—the corporations, and business suits—serve as complicit bystanders. Despite their guise of performing inclusiveness and charitable pride events the world over, corporations remain fundamentally out for themselves and their shareholders, at the end of the day. I’ve detailed before how corporations releasing pride collections or celebrating pride month with a change of social media profiles are just as often sponsoring anti-trans legislation at the very same time. The still-recent fiasco of Dylan Mulvaney’s Bud Light sponsorship shows that corporations are all too willing to make queer influencers their pariahs in a vain bid to have nominally done “something”. 

Corporate endorsement is no metric for social acceptance, especially when those same corporations are funding the people legislating you out of existence. When they realize there’s a greater profit to be made elsewhere, they’ll defect to the other side, rest assured of that. No company is coming to save you when the governments, the cops, and the church want you dead. 

The history of queer rights in the past 54 years since the 1969 Stonewall Riots has been one of marginal gains. What this year shows is that all those hard-won protections can be stripped away in an instant.

I think a fundamental reason people are scared to adopt the hardline position is that a lot of people view queerness as something innate, something inside of you—something you are as opposed to something you do. It’s a strong rhetorical position from which to defend yourself. If you can say to a bigot that you’re not a cross-dressing man, just a woman “born in the wrong body” there’s a much higher likelihood of them being sympathetic towards you. The essentializing of queerness is a white-knuckled grasp at legitimacy, a defense mechanism, a line of last defense, if you will.

It's a nice sentiment, but it gets us nowhere.

More than seventy godforsaken years ago Simone De Beauvoir declared that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” and most of you have still not got the fucking message yet.

Queerness is more than just a feeling inside your head or your heart, it is a decisive and radical mode of existing in the world. Queerness is something you do in the streets, in the bedroom, at your school and at the grocery store. It is the way you dress, it is the way you speak, the way you fuck, the way you think, the way you articulate your experience of being alive each and every passing moment.

Queerness ebbs and it flows and it fluctuates in its relative visibility. If we allow ourselves to vanish from view it is tantamount to being walked over. That is the purpose of Pride, after all, to be loud, brash, and abrasive. To take back the streets from those who would make us feel unsafe in them. Queerness is something we do each and every day rather than something we intrinsically "are" insofar as being queer—being well and truly undeniably queer—is a fight each and every day for your right to exist as an idea and as a person.

Queer people, while we all (usually, for the most part) share some sort of nebulous implied connection—a consensus on our cohabiting an imagined community in common—live radically different lives from one another contingent on our relative societal (un)acceptability. 

Transgender people have implicitly understood this for a while. 

The term “passing” is itself a measure, an abstraction, and an invocation of the idea of being socially accepted in your desired gender expression. However, all queer people are subject to a politics of passing insofar as we are every day judged by our proximity to an ineffable imagined social standard.

A flamboyant gay man does not “pass” for the idealized, uniform, monolithic idea of what a “man” is—what we call “hegemonic masculinity” in academic spaces. Even if I, by some miracle, were to “pass” as female (though I myself am skeptical one—even a cis woman—can even do such a thing) I would still fail to attain that idealized, “divine” state of womanhood because I, reader, am a dirty fucking lesbo. Lesbianism is what we in polite society call “sexual deviance,” and believe me I make no apology for my lechery, so I doubt I’ve any hope of making into that charmed inner circle any time soon.

Would you like to know the saddest part of all this? It’s that I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m for all intents and purposes a white, middle-class, university-educated woman. Despite knowing more street harassment in my short transition than many people will know in their lives, I am relatively safe as trannies go, all things considered. I’ve got a mother and a father who love me more than anything in the world, and that is not something I take for granted in this age where schools and parents surveil, punish, and subject their children to horrific coercive legislative, judicial, and allegedly “therapeutic” practices. Given the circumstances, I think I’ve just about had it with Pride month.

I want out.

You heard me right, I want no part in this farce. I’ve a list of several orifices in which you can shove your gay pride Oreos and your rainbow spray-painted cruise missiles. Unless you’re going to buy me a sandwich or pay for my facial feminization surgery, do not fucking dare utter “happy pride” to me. There is no room for celebration when people like me are being judicially legislated out of existence, and when the blood-sucking upper echelon of political scum dress their draconian attacks on the rights and personhood of queer children in the reprehensible veneer of concern for their wellbeing.

You can’t stop at killing the cop in your head. Kill the church, the CEO, and the corporate ideal of pride which you’re clinging to. It’s no use being the good queer when the only good queer to them is one who's dead.

Please direct all relevant hate mail to editors@trentarthur.ca, just know that I reserve the right to contact any publicly listed employer of yours to inform them of your [prefix]phobic tendencies and suggest they advertise in Arthur as recompense! I further will post your name and email on our Instagram story to publicly humiliate you to the greatest extent to which I’m able!