Afraid of me?
I ask the question somewhat playfully, but I don’t mean it lightly. Fear has consequences, especially when it becomes attached to a group of people and we start treating them as a threat.
There are some stories you never quite put away.For me, one of them is Amber.
Amber was 21 when she died. Afterward, her mother wrote words I have never forgotten:
“You saved me 21 years ago [when you were born] and gave me a reason to live. I am so sorry I couldn’t save you. I love you more than all the stars in the sky, my beautiful daughter.”
There is no ideology or culture war in those words. There is just a mother mourning her child.
I spoke publicly about Amber in February 2017, at a rally at the Peace Arch protesting the first Trump travel ban. She had died just days after Donald Trump was sworn in as president. She had watched the political winds changing and could no longer imagine a safe future for herself as a transgender woman.
Eight years later, I found myself thinking about her again. Different day, same struggle.
Those of us who have been around this issue for a while know the pattern. Trans people are talked about constantly, but very often we aren't actually being talked to. Instead, we become symbols in somebody else's argument. We are described as an ideology, or as a threat to children, parents, women, sports, biology, or even the natural order of things.
After hearing enough of this, I keep coming back to one question:
What exactly is all this fear trying to protect?
I have a few thoughts, and I’ve arranged them as a three-act play.
Act One: What Fear Protects
If you've read much of what I write, you may be thinking, Oh no, here she goes with Ernest Becker again.
Fair enough.
I do keep coming back to Becker because he helped me understand something about fear that I had sensed for a long time but couldn't quite put into words. We human beings need the world to make sense, so we build stories about who we are, why we're here, how life is supposed to work, what is right and wrong, what makes somebody a good person, and where we belong. Most of us do this without even realizing it.
Years ago, when I was studying at the Vancouver School of Theology, theologian Sallie McFague talked about people who live “outside the circle”—outside whatever a culture has decided is normal, respectable, safe or acceptable.
That image stayed with me because we all have circles. The question is how much room there is inside them.
Some people can encounter someone whose life doesn't fit neatly into what they were taught and simply make a little more room. For others, the boundaries are much harder to move. If you have been taught that there is one proper way to be a man, one proper way to be a woman, one proper kind of family, and one proper understanding of sexuality, gender, faith and morality, then someone who seems perfectly content living outside those boundaries can be unsettling.
Not because that person is actually doing anything to you, but because their existence raises questions about rules you may have assumed were fixed.
I've sometimes called this “Trans Envy.”
I don't mean people secretly want to be transgender. What I mean is that there can be something unsettling about seeing another person step outside rules that you were taught you had no choice but to obey. If your whole life you were told, Stay inside these lines and you'll be safe, good and acceptable, what do you make of somebody who crosses the line and discovers that the sky doesn't fall?
Suddenly, that person becomes a question.
And questions can feel dangerous when your world is built out of brittle answers.
Disgust can get mixed into this too. Human beings have powerful reactions to things that seem strange, unfamiliar or “out of place.” Sometimes those reactions protect us from real danger, but sometimes they simply tell us that something doesn't fit comfortably into the categories we already have.
I sometimes think of fear and disgust as overzealous security guards. They are trying to protect us, but they are not always very good at telling the difference between an actual threat and something that simply makes us uncomfortable.
And that distinction matters. Being made uncomfortable by another person's life is not the same as being harmed by it, and another person's freedom does not automatically diminish my own.
I have come to believe that much of the anger directed toward trans people begins somewhere around there. We may tell ourselves we are defending morality when, at least some of the time, what we are really defending is our own anxiety about a world that no longer fits as neatly into the boxes we inherited.
The trouble begins when that anxiety becomes a story about another group of people, because eventually somebody has to be cast as the threat.
Which brings me to Act Two.
Act Two: The People Cast as the Threat
Let me tell you a very ordinary transgender story.
It involves a bra.
I've never been very good at fastening my bra behind my back, so I do what lots of women do. I fasten it in front and then rotate it around.
One morning I was distracted and apparently forgot step two. I fastened it in front, put my arms through the straps and immediately knew something wasn't right. When I looked down, the hooks were in front and the cups were in the back.
Oops.
There was no gender ideology involved, no political agenda and certainly no attempt to erase biological sex. I had simply managed to put my bra on backwards.
I tell that silly story because this is the part that gets lost when trans people become political abstractions. My life isn't an ideological position. It is a life, made up mostly of the same ordinary things that fill everyone else's days: getting dressed, going to work, buying groceries, paying bills, loving people, losing people, laughing at myself, worrying about things, getting tired and growing older.
Most of being transgender is actually pretty boring, and I mean that in the best possible way.
Yet somehow, people like me keep getting turned into symbols in somebody else's battle over what the world is supposed to look like.
There is growing scientific evidence that gender dysphoria has biological components involving a complicated mix of genes, hormones and brain development before birth. I find that research fascinating, but I also have mixed feelings whenever I find myself reaching for it in defence of trans people.
Our civil rights should not depend on brain scans or gene clusters. No one should have to prove their humanity in a laboratory. If science eventually gives us a much clearer picture of why some people are transgender, wonderful. But if it never does, I still deserve the same civil rights as everybody else.
So does every trans kid. So did Amber.
And that's where all this stops being theoretical for me.
When politicians and activists say they are “protecting children” from transgender people or transgender “ideology,” I find myself wondering about the transgender children who are listening to all of this. I wonder about the parents who know and love their trans children and suddenly discover that their rights as parents don't seem to count for much in the conversation. And I wonder what it is like for a young person to sit at the dinner table and hear adults discussing people like them as though they are a social problem that needs to be solved.
Amber's mother lost her daughter. Whatever else we argue about, I cannot get past that.
No one should lose their child so that someone else can feel more comfortable in their fear.
Unfortunately, fear doesn't always remain a private feeling. Sometimes it gets translated into public policy.
Act Three: When Fear Gets the Power to Make Laws
This is where the struggle becomes political.
In Alberta and Saskatchewan, provincial governments have passed laws aimed specifically at transgender and gender-diverse people, particularly young people. Both governments have also turned to Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Notwithstanding Clause, to protect some of those laws from Charter challenges.
That should concern all of us, whether we are transgender or not.
Once a government says, in effect, We know this law may violate Charter rights, but we're going ahead anyway, we are no longer simply having a disagreement about policy. We are talking about what those rights actually mean and how dependable they are when the people claiming them happen to be politically unpopular.
The Notwithstanding Clause exists. It is part of our Constitution. I understand that. But when it is used against a small minority with relatively little political power, I think we ought to pay very close attention.
That is why I initiated House of Commons e-Petition 7027.
The petition asked the federal government to consider using constitutional powers available to it when provincial governments pass laws that violate fundamental rights and then use Section 33 to prevent those laws from being properly tested under the Charter.
I knew when I launched it that a petition wasn't going to magically solve the problem. That wasn't the point. I wanted it on the parliamentary record that thousands of Canadians believe Charter rights cannot be treated as optional simply because protecting them has become politically inconvenient.
A Charter that protects only people everybody already likes doesn't amount to much. Minority rights become especially important when a majority, or a government speaking for one, decides that a particular minority is troublesome, frightening or expendable.
Years ago, at that Peace Arch rally where I spoke about Amber, I said something that is still true for me. I did not choose where I was born, my skin colour, my first language, my sexual orientation, or to be transgender. Of all those things, the one thing I did choose was to become Canadian.
I still find it strange, and deeply sad, that the things human beings don't choose are so often the very things used to decide who belongs inside the circle and who gets pushed outside it.
Epilogue: Who Gets to Write the Ending?
So, back to fear.
Fear itself isn't the enemy. We all experience it. I certainly do. Fear tells us that something feels uncertain, that something is changing, or that something we have depended upon may not be as solid as we thought it was.
What matters is what we do with it.
Fear can make our world smaller. It can make us tighten the boundaries around who belongs, look for someone to blame, and convince ourselves that things would settle down if only those troublesome people would stay where we think they belong.
Or fear can make us curious. It can make us ask why something unsettles us and whether the danger we perceive is actually there. It can give us an opportunity to meet people, listen to them and discover that the world may be larger and more complicated than we were taught.
We might even change our minds.
Fear may write the first draft of the script, but we don't have to keep performing it.
I think again about Amber's mother saying that she loved her daughter “more than all the stars in the sky.” When I hear those words, I don't hear an argument. I hear a mother who loved her child and wished desperately that her child had been able to stay.
Maybe that is where all of this finally comes down for me.
We don't have to pretend we aren't afraid. But surely we can decide that making ourselves feel safer is never worth someone else's child.
Note: I wrote about Amber earlier this year, but as I said above, I think about her every day. She would be 30 today.