The bad faith “debate” about trans human rights

Recently, the National Post published a discussion that I engaged in with Jonathan Kay.

I participated in that because it was an opportunity to provide a counterpoint for readers who don’t often see one. It was a chance to challenge some of the distortions and misinformation that have been circulating about trans people and their legal protections. If you read predominantly far right media right now, you would believe that wealthy, well-funded and all-powerful “TRAs” (trans rights activists) somehow control the government (one popular conspiracy theory claims that it is a pharmaceutical company plot) and are forcing some completely unfounded ideology and social engineering on destitute and helpless schools, governments, churches, workplaces and Canadian society as a whole. So it’s worth it for those readers to encounter a discussion that is rational, measured, and provides a glimpse of the reality outside of their own tunnel vision. I doubt many minds were changed, but at least an effort was made for the sake readers who are either still open to considering information outside the range of their predisposed views, or don’t encounter any better information in their travels.

It was framed as a debate, and debates about trans human rights are always a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t proposition. If you participate in a debate, it gives the appearance of legitimacy to the idea that human rights should be debatable, and that opposition to them is an equally valid side. On the other hand, if you don’t, the debate still steamrolls on without you having any voice in it, and not only is your perspective unrepresented, it can even be characterized however your opponent chooses to portray it, without challenge.

It is worth mentioning, however, that the discussion that I had with Jonathan Kay is not “the debate” that gender critical figures are trying to have. I want to be clear that the discussion with Kay, via the Post was conducted in good faith — I don’t want to imply otherwise. The gender critical version of the debate gets framed a specific way, and it’s important to recognize this, and understand why the debate that gender critical speakers are pushing for is one that is inherently flawed and intended to be conducted in bad faith. And forgive me, because I have to generalize here: obviously, not everyone who takes issue with trans people thinks alike, but there are some general similarities, and the debate that most are trying to have has generally developed these relatively consistent rules.

From a gender critical perspective, the debate must be held within certain parameters. This is sometimes accomplished by defining terms at the beginning, but it can just as easily be accomplished by assuming those parameters at the beginning and very consistently and firmly policing anyone who deviates from them, as well as reframing anything that is said to the contrary so that it can be subsumed back into the original parameters.

“Sex ≠ Gender”

The first premise for the GC debate is that sex and gender are two different things. This statement is true, and any misinformed perspective usually begins with a kernel of truth. Sex and gender are two different things, and this is a point that trans folk have long made, when explaining why their anatomy does not define them. But for gender critical speakers, distinguishing sex from gender does the opposite, providing the opportunity to ignore both gender and gender identity, so that trans people can be once again defined according to their genital status (“sex”) at birth.

Gender critical speakers try to claim the moral authority on this point to assert that by extension. when it comes to human rights and accommodations in gendered spaces, physical sex is the only measure that matters. It’s sometimes phrased as though it’s a question of whether “sex is real,” but the intended undertone is that gender and gender identity are not, and are therefore not worthy of consideration. In reality, trans people don’t question whether sex is “real,” but whether one’s biology is their destiny, and whether one’s sex defines absolutely everything about them.

Making physical sex the sole benchmark is somewhat fallacious, given that (at least ideally) we don’t actually see the physical sex of the people we encounter, and instead assume their sex based on their gender presentation — but the folks making that argument are hoping that you don’t think too long on that. This foundation is used a bit duplicitously, though: when the subject of post-operative trans women comes up, the benchmark suddenly moves to chromosomes, socialization or reproductive capability, so that regardless of their apparently all-important anatomy, trans women can still be still essentialized as “males.” Likewise, the argument is made that segregation in gendered spaces is a matter of safety… but when the subject turns to accommodation in general (non-gendered) spaces and fears for safety can no longer be exploited, the imperative to verbally essentialize trans women as “males” (even to the point of harassment and abuse) and consider sex as the only worthy point of consideration is still viewed as being of paramount importance, and uncompromisable. Using “sex” as the one and only measure of value is actually a veiled proxy for considering cis (non-trans) status as the one and only measure of womanhood (it should be noted that gender critical people also abhor the term “cis,” because if the Latin oppositive “cis” is ever accepted as a corollary to “trans,” then it might legitimize the idea that trans people exist — so in gender critical thought, “cis” too must be considered a slur, and the words “normal,” “real,” “natal” or — most often — “biological” should be used instead).

The next extension of that initial premise is that there are only two sexes. This statement is true-ish in an overly general sense, but ignores the complexity of the science on the topic, and fails to consider intersex persons who have established medical conditions which cause developmental variances in their chromosomes, genitals or gonads. Any mention of intersex in the gender critical debate is usually met with a quick twist of pretzel logic to claim that these are merely exceptions that prove the rule, and then proceed once again under the premise that there are only two sexes — thus quickly evading the possibility that trans people (especially those who are compelled to transition between sexes, but not necessarily only them) vary in simply less visible ways than currently recognized intersex conditions, and deserve the same consideration.

Erasing Gender and Identity From Human Rights

The second major premise is that gender should be dismissed as being nothing more than a collection of outdated roles and stereotypes. This is incredibly reductive (deliberately so): gender can include them, but is not only them. Gender is the meaning that we find for ourselves inwardly and how we express it outwardly: this is usually based on our sex, but this meaning can also be chosen antithetically to what is expected based on sex — in short, it’s about who we are and how we decide to present that to the world, whether in accordance with stereotypes, despite them, or regardless of them.

As in the first point, there is a kernel of truth here too, namely, that gender roles and stereotypes are problematic. This is why “gender critical” became the new term preferred by trans-exclusionary feminists (who had previously self-identified as “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” until they’d heard the acronym “TERF” in anger enough to decide that it should be considered a slur): certainly, there is a lot about gender roles and stereotypes to be critical of. On this point, gender critical thinkers and trans people should theoretically be in agreement, given that the latter challenge, question, traverse and defy those roles and stereotypes more than anyone. But there is duplicity in how gender critical people apply their argument here, too: whenever trans people happen to be in alignment with traditional stereotypes, they’re accused of reinforcing them; but when they challenge or deviate from those stereotypes, they’re mocked for being visibly trans, for how they look, and for visibly failing (by that person’s individual assessment) to meet those same expected stereotypes.

By extension of this second premise, then, gender identity is said to simply not exist, according to gender critical feminism. The collective weight of medical evidence in dealing with trans people says otherwise, but this is quickly dismissed as the medical establishment (at best) humouring trans people out of a misguided sense of sympathy, or (at worst) being in on the “gender ideology” conspiracy to reshape and destroy society. By defining gender identity as mental illness, a delusion, or even a destructive ideology, trans people then become entirely irrelevant to the debate that gender critical people want to have, and it becomes completely appropriate to dismiss them, their life experiences, and their needs from consideration. The gender critical debate, then, is entirely about us, but doesn’t involve us, as they assert that we can’t be trusted to have anything of value to contribute.

These are the starting points of the gender critical “debate,” and they are hallmarks of a debate in bad faith. From these parameters, trans women can only be considered to be “men,” and therefore everything that predatory men do can be ascribed to them, by default.  From these parameters, allowing trans women into a gendered space is automatically phrased as though those spaces are being opened up to “men” — even though that is not what is actually happening. There is no argument that can be made within these parameters that will lead to any acknowledgement that trans people exist, let alone that they should have rights or be accommodated in society in any way. This is by design: the easiest way to win a debate is to control the framing of it, so that it becomes impossible to come to any other conclusion than the one that you had allowed at the outset.

Human rights should not be up for debate in the first place… but when the debate is framed so asymmetrically, it becomes absolutely toxic.

In the discussion that I had with Jonathan Kay, it was on the condition that legitimacy issues (who I am or whether trans women are women, for example) would not be the focus of that dialogue. It is telling that he considered that “not realistic,” because the debate as he’s been hearing it has been taking place within the constraints above, and his thinking remained clearly influenced by these premises.

Many of the apparent “problems” of trans inclusion have already been considered over the past decade or more, and have been in the process of being updated based on real life experience, medical evidence, legal practicalities, and the duty to accommodate in a balanced way that considers context. By changing the parameters of the so-called “debate,” opponents hope to reset this all back to zero in a way that centers fears about trans people, and dismisses the voices of trans folk, solutions that have already been arrived at, nuances that we as a society have already learned to deal with, the context of any given situation, and any evidence that supports inclusion. It is, in a way, a means to reverse everything that has happened in the past several years, simply by insisting that it should be so and denying the validity of anything or anyone that says otherwise. It also provides a reset on language so that those who refuse to accept the existence of trans people have a sometimes-stealth / sometimes-duplicitous language with which they can be hostile, without incurring the wrath of the public at large (although we see from the complaints about infringements on freedom of speech that this doesn’t always work).

The worst part of it all is that the entire bad faith gender critical “debate” threatens to divide feminism against itself at a time when Canadian religious conservatives are attempting to reboot abortion criminalization and American religious conservatives are eagerly awaiting the overturning of Roe v Wade. It allows traditionally misogynistic personalities and organizations — ranging from the Heritage Foundation to Tucker Carlson — to deflectively posture as feminists or allies at a time when the so-called “populist” nationalism they tout is threatening to erase feminist awareness from higher education and push women back toward those very same stifling gender roles and limitations that women are still struggling to break. In the UK, it has even been used to locate and recruit gay and lesbian transphobes in order to turn them against that nation’s primary LGBTQ+ rights advocacy organization, and undercut, defund or even destroy it. Beyond that, it has also managed to turn up some transphobic lesbian, gay and feminist personalities willing to validate religious conservative talking points about “gender ideology,” without realizing that “gender ideology” is veiled code that in many uses also encompasses LGBTQ+ rights, feminism and many other aspects of social justice.

There are so incredibly many things that trans feminism and general feminism can and should agree on, and yet gender critical efforts seem to discard all of that, in order to pretend that the single most important challenge facing women today is whether trans women should be accepted as women. This absolutist, sort-of-fundamentalist and all-consuming focus is as troubling as it is self-defeating.

(This commentary also appears at rabble.ca. Image: Adobe Stock)

The Conscience Chronicles

UPDATE: As this was being readied for posting, the Standing Committee on Private Bills and Private Members’ Public Bills voted to recommend that Bill 207 not move forward in its current form, meaning that the bill will not be proceeding to the floor. I have elected to post this anyway, given the possibility that the proposal might be resurrected and amended at a later date.

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At a first casual glance, the stated premise of Alberta’s Bill 207, Conscience Rights (Health Care Providers) Protection Act, might sound reasonable: most people wouldn’t expect medical professionals who object to procedures like abortion to be required to perform them.

In practice, Alberta’s College of Physicians and Surgeons already allows medical professionals to opt out of medical procedures that they have a religious objection to (a status quo that is at times problematic), so long as they provide any referral or direction to comprehensive information needed, ensuring that their patient still receives care in a timely manner. Bill 207 removes the obligation to refer and / or ensure patient care — using the reasoning that providing a referral is sort of like participating in the procedure. Regardless of any urgency or medical appropriateness of care in any given situation, this change allows refusals to increase the time delay to accessing care (regardless of any urgency), put the burden of medical care back on the patient, and be a kind of barrier and discouragement, if not more. Indeed, it can be like making someone start over from scratch. Proponents of the bill say that because medical care is still available elsewhere, it isn’t really being denied, which is technically true… but the time, emotional and informational barriers cannot be discounted.

But while those advancing the bill claim it is only codifying that status quo in law, there are more things that Bill 207 does, many of which have received little attention by media.

The bill extends conscience rights to health care organizations, as well. While religious care organizations have already asserted conscience objections in many ways already, this codifies it in law. It also allows organizations to assert their conscience-based decisions over those of their facilities, staff and resources. By way of example, Covenant Health (Canada’s largest Catholic health care provider) owns 16 health care facilities throughout the province, including two major hospitals in Edmonton; its affiliate Covenant Care owns another seven assisted living and long-term care facilities. In some rural areas of Alberta, all or most facilities are religious-owned.

In short, this moves Alberta down a landscape in which anyone in the chain of service provision — from facility administration to lab technician and pharmacist — can create a roadblock to services, without consequence. This becomes even more concerning when one realizes the potential for administrative staff, clergy or even outside groups to apply pressure to doctors and clinics to deny services that they might not otherwise have initially had objections to.

In fact, by the text of the law, it is left entirely up to the health care provider or religious health care organization to determine if their conscientious beliefs would be infringed, and there really is no appeal process to see if there is some agreeable compromise. No record is kept, leaving no way to follow up to ascertain if the patient has ever received the care they needed or sought. Gathering statistics about patients denied care in order to inspect what consequences the law has had becomes impossible, as demonstrated elsewhere.

By the text of the law, if a regulatory body receives a complaint about denial of care having to do with conscience, the complaint must be discarded (there is a caveat that complaints or portions thereof that are not conscience-related are not discarded). They are not allowed to investigate or question the decision:

5(1)  On receiving a complaint in accordance with section 55(1) of the Health Professions Act, the subject matter of which is a health care provider’s decision not to provide a health care service based on their conscientious beliefs, the complaints director for the regulatory body that received the complaint must immediately

(a) dismiss the complaint, and

(b) provide notice of the dismissal to the complainant.

It also specifies that by law, “a health care provider’s decision to not provide a health care service based on their conscientious beliefs is not to be considered as unprofessional conduct,” and providers and / or organizations are immediately shielded from legal liability.

There is also an amendment to Section 7(1) of the Alberta Human Rights Act, to immediately shield any employee from termination or discrimination based on their conscientious beliefs. This amendment is not restricted in any way to the medical profession, and could conceivably provide a shield for harassment and abuse of one’s co-workers or customers because of one’s religious or conscientious beliefs.

The bill’s proponent, MLA Dan Williams, has promised a number of amendments to Bill 207, but in those proposed changes, none of these points is substantively changed. One of his proposals — to restore a duty to assist “if not providing the health care service would result in an imminent risk of death” — isn’t altogether reassuring about the thought that was put into the bill in the first place… but even with that change, there is no clarification on whether or how the legal shield and barriers to reporting and investigation might be changed in the event of a patient’s death (especially in cases in which it was not thought that there would be an “imminent risk”).

There are many hypothetical situations that one can suggest could arise as a result of this legislation. But this is not uncharted territory. It is very easy to look at places where “conscience” exemptions have been implemented or attempted — or where medical personnel or organizations have attempted to assert their conscience rights — and see how it has affected medical care for patients.

“I was nervous and excited about the consult for my first intrauterine device (IUD) at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. After a brief conversation, Dr. Case (a pseudonym) asked me to get off the exam table and follow her to her office for a ‘chat.’ But in her office, when the door was safely shut, my excitement slowly started to fade. ‘Well, first things first, this is a Catholic hospital,’ she said in a mock whisper…”

Evann Normandin, writing at Rewire this past May, described what happened to her when hospital policy prevented her from getting an IUD. She left with a referral… and shaming. Although referrals don’t come with the added expense of multiple visits in Alberta, like south of the border, the expense of time and transportation remain, and can pale in comparison to the emotional cost of the refusal itself:

“… On my way out of the labyrinthian building, I scrunched up the unofficial paper in my hand. The ripped edges felt sharp against my skin. In the Uber ride home, after paying transportation to and from my apartment to a world-class hospital and forking over a $50 copay for unsolicited advice about my vagina, I cried…”

At Huffington Post, Ace Ratcliff described her fight with doctors over her need for a hysterectomy:

“My illness’ severity [hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome] led me to the conclusion early on that childbirth would irreparably damage my already broken body and would never be the right choice for me. My joints dislocate painfully and at random. I have difficulty swallowing food. I bruise like an overripe peach. I faint if I have to stand for too long. Wounds take much longer to heal on me than on a normal human.

“… Somehow, my personal autonomy, my health and my comfort didn’t rate high enough to outrank the desires of my future, then-nonexistent partner. And nothing I said could change my doctors’ minds [about a surgical hysterectomy], not the stories about my frequently dislocating hips, my mom’s complicated pregnancies or the increased rate of miscarriage and preterm labor for EDS patients…”

In another instance, the hospital’s policies would have allowed the removal of a dislodged IUD, but the doctor thought the policies wouldn’t, and refused care. The patient was sent home, limited in her options by her insurance company (not applicable in Alberta, but limits on options can occur because of other factors, such as rural accessibility), and she ultimately had to file suit:

“Her doctor confirmed the IUD was dislodged and had to be removed. But the doctor said she would be unable to remove the IUD, citing Catholic restrictions followed by Mercy Hospital and Medical Center and providers within its system.

“… It felt heartbreaking,” Jones told Rewire. “It felt like they were telling me that I had done something wrong, that I had made a mistake and therefore they were not going to help me; that they stigmatized me, saying that I was doing something wrong, when I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m doing something that’s well within my legal rights…”

Something that Bill 207 does not address at all is any duty of physicians to discuss every option available to a patient. If referring is equated to participating in an objected-to procedure or medication, then one might tacitly assume that providing comprehensive information on that procedure or medication can be denied. Withholding medical information can have serious consequences:

“… a woman was traveling across the Midwest when she developed abdominal pain. She and her husband went to the nearest hospital, where she was diagnosed with a potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy. The doctors recommended immediate surgery to remove the fallopian tube containing the misplaced embryo, a procedure that would reduce by half her future chances of conceiving a child. They failed to mention that a simple injection of Methotrexate could solve the problem, leaving her fertility intact. (In fact, at a secular hospital she found on her smart phone, it subsequently did.) Why the omission? The Catholic hospital where she got diagnosed was subject to the “Ethical and Religious Directives” of the Catholic bishops, which state, “In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion…'”

In fact, denial of comprehensive information is a recurring issue when medical conscience exemptions are asserted.

Of course, some of these examples focus on the emotional impact, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t serious physical consequences potentially at stake:

“After about 10 hours, the patient’s temperature soared to 102 or 103 degrees, Ralph recalled in an interview with Rewire in June, a few months after the incident. Ralph and her team gave the patient medication to induce labor. But Ralph could not administer mifepristone, which the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) considers part of the most effective drug regimen for such cases. The Catholic hospital didn’t carry the drug, which is commonly used for medication abortions—a failure Ralph believes was religiously motivated and needlessly prolonged her patient’s labor.

“… For more than 24 hours, the patient labored through painful contractions. She bled heavily, requiring at least one blood transfusion. Her lips and face lost their color. Finally, she delivered a fetus that had no hope of survival…”

The full extent of Bill 207’s reach isn’t understood either, until you realize that “medical provider” covers a wide range, as noted in an Edmonton Journal editorial:

“The list is long and includes emergency, primary and critical care paramedics; midwives, chiropractors, podiatrists, psychologists and psychiatrists; lab, respiratory, ultrasound and X-ray technologists; pharmacists, physiotherapists and physical therapists; opticians and optometrists; dieticians and nutritionists; anesthesiologists, surgeons, and social workers; audiologists, dental professionals and speech-language pathologists…”

The inclusion of pharmacists in that list raises the question about access to birth control, an issue that has already surfaced in Alberta and elsewhere in Canada:

“Joan Chand’oiseau of Calgary recently posted a photo on Facebook of a sign on her physician’s office door that read, ‘Please be informed that the physician on duty today will not prescribe the birth control pill…’”

It also raises questions about access to hormone therapy for trans patients, or the possibility of throwing in a bit of public humiliation for good measure:

“‘Sir, we canceled your prescription because we couldn’t figure out why a man would need female hormones,’ said the voice. ‘You’ll have to have your doctor call us to confirm this is correct because it doesn’t make any sense…'”

Indeed, trans health is just as likely to be impacted as reproductive health, and doesn’t even have to be about transition-related medical concerns. Trans people regularly report what they’ve nicknamed ‘Trans Broken Arm Syndrome‘ — that is, the refusal of care for basic health services just because they’re trans. And it does indeed happen in Canada:

“According to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan’s charge of unprofessional conduct and the penalty presentation, the incident took place on Jan. 5, 2016, when Anderson saw a patient for “reasons related to bronchitis” — something completely unrelated to the patient’s transition to male from female.”According to the documents, the disciplinary hearing committee found it ‘probable’ that Anderson ‘launched into an unsolicited running commentary’ regarding transitioning. Anderson made statements ‘which were insensitive and unrelated to the reasons for which the patient requested your medical services,’ according to the charges against Anderson…”

It should also be asked what conscience protections might do to protect the still-persistent practices of reparative therapy in Alberta (albeit with coded language). But that aside, denial of basic care is something that all LGBTQ+ people have had to worry about, sometimes even with lethal effect in situations that didn’t initially seem to pose an “imminent risk”:

“Refusing to treat patients can be be deadly, as was the case in 1995, when Tyra Hunter, a transgender woman, lost her life after emergency medical technicians refused to assist her at the scene of a car accident. According to the Center for American Progress, had Hunter received care, her chances of surviving were 86 percent — she should have lived…”

Medical assistance in dying is another area in which medical access is an issue, and in this instance, access is even more seriously limited. It is estimated that the aforementioned Covenant Health (and affiliates) oversee up to 90% of the long-term care beds in parts of Alberta, and regardless of whether long-term care patients are healthy enough to be moved, doing so is sometimes necessary just have questions answered, because of facility policies:

“Covenant Health stated in May of 2016 that it has an ‘ethical and moral opposition to medical assistance in dying’ and that the organization’s ‘unequivocal position to not provide or explicitly refer’ must be recognized. Functionally, this means that any assessment of capacity, any answering of technical questions, and the act of assistance in dying itself would require a transfer away from a Covenant facility.

“… The case of Ian Shearer, an 84-year-old Calgary man living in Vancouver with palliative heart and kidney disease and severe chronic pain, brought attention to how transfers can do harm. Shearer was denied a request for medical assistance in dying from St. Paul’s Hospital, a Catholic facility near where he lived and where he’d been admitted for care. On the day he chose to die, his ambulance was delayed three hours and his medications were withheld to allow him to confirm consent. The ordeal, last August, was described by his daughter as ‘unnecessary… excruciating suffering…'”

Obviously, the out-of-province and out-of-country examples won’t exactly mirror what would happen in Alberta, because of circumstantial differences in things like medical coverage, but what this demonstrates is the extent to which individuals might be willing to abuse a conscience protection, and the twists of logic involved. From the firing of doctors for not adhering to an organization’s conscience policies, to the chilling effect on medical care caused by activism from anti-abortion groups against clinics just for hiring doctors who’ve performed abortions elsewhere in the past, to medical residents who openly vowed to give the wrong medications to specific groups of people, to some some truly backwards beliefs about medical interventions…

“Throughout the conference’s diverse and highly academic presentations, one discernible theme emerged, namely, that “brain death” has been invented to harvest viable organs from still-living people. Only when a person’s heart stops beating and their breathing ceases for a determinate amount of time can it be said that death has truly occurred…”

… the politics surrounding medical conscience exemptions raises a broad range of concerns.

It is likely that Alberta’s Bill 207 would not survive a legal challenge. Indeed, the same day that the bill was introduced in the Alberta Legislature, a similar policy was overturned in the U.S. Likewise, a ruling in Ontario last May affirmed patients’ rights to referrals when care is denied.

But getting there could be another long, legally costly process, with very real human collateral damage caused along the way.

Photo: Adobe Stock

(crossposted to rabble.ca)

“Unthinkable”

American religious conservatives have a problem.

Riding high on their partnerships with the Trump administration and the perception of being political kingmakers, they need to be sure that they will be able to sustain their momentum for years to come. And with the newly-stacked U.S. Supreme Court making the overturn of Roe v Wade a seeming inevitability (as well as putting the overturn of marriage equality within sight), they are now looking for what to do in a “post-Roe” world to retain their energy, power, and dizzying levels of funding. And in the discussions they have about that dilemma, their solution, often, is to work toward a world in which they have made abortion “unthinkable.”

“I’m not suggesting that the proposed laws are unimportant—on the contrary, pass more of them! I only wish to remind us that our goal is to make abortion unthinkable as well as illegal. And that means our work has only just begun…” –  John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, Breakpoint

When I speak about American conservatives, of course, I don’t mean to suggest that there is some central plan or hive mind. It doesn’t work that way. Even getting U.S. Evangelicals and Catholic fundamentalists onto the same page can be a challenge sometimes, and the religious nationalist industrial complex is made up of an infinite number of organizations all vying for dollars in the same fundraising pool. But there does seem to be a fairly cohesive and organic process in which talking points filter out and take shape – and “unthinkable” appears to be one such trend in linguistic spin.

The origin of this particular incarnation of the talking point (it has been mused about many times before, but not with this degree of viral spread and consistency) appears to have been January’s Evangelicals for Life conference, in which the senior vice president of Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) U.S. legal division Kristen Waggoner encouraged attendees, using the phrase. Waggoner’s encouragement came about a week after Robin Marty’s Handbook for a Post-Roe America was published, and progressive news outlets were discussing how to respond to the possibility of a patchwork or even nationwide ban on abortion. The possibility that the left might evolve to cope with a changing legal landscape – as far as EFL attendees were concerned – needed to be thought out and prepared for.

So when Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament Sam Oosterhoff tells an anti-abortion rally in Toronto that he pledges to make abortion “unthinkable in our lifetime,” it’s helpful to look at religious conservative media for clues as to what he might mean by that, and where his influences are coming from.

“New Hampshire Right to Life’s position is clear, she said. ‘We would want to put restrictions on abortions and make it unthinkable and illegal…’” – Concord Monitor

I could go at some length about how promoters of the sensationalistic and Planned Parenthood -defaming movie Unplanned seized on the phrase during their publicity tour, or how it’s turning up on Fox News, or how it came up during anti-abortion rhetoric pertaining to legislation in New York and Georgia as well as a legal ruling in Louisiana, or how it spread widely enough that even a perceived-left website like Vox gave it oxygen – but that only establishes that there is definitely a narrative. I’d much rather look at what religious conservatives are getting at, when they use the phrase.

“Every answer to why abortion is viewed as still ‘needed’ stems from a deeper-seeded issue which we could be fighting against… we need to combat the issues which give abortion supporters reasons to think it is the better ‘option.’ Abortion needs to stop being an excuse for not addressing the larger issues at hand…” – Paul Collier

If anti-abortion groups wanted to turn their attention toward addressing poverty, it would probably be a welcome development. Sadly, you won’t find a whisper of that, and doing so would probably frighten the megadonors with whom they collaborate to form the Republican / Conservative political base. But getting religious conservatives to speak candidly about specific objectives isn’t always easy. Afraid that too much transparency might allow opponents to organize effectively against them, they often restrict their public musings to dog whistle terms (of which “unthinkable” is arguably one), and stay effectively mum about which political candidates they’ve managed to get nominated as candidates in an election. But in venues seen as relatively safe and exclusive, or from pundits who are seen as less prominent, sometimes you’ll find some elaboration.

One such pundit is The Federalist’s Georgi Boorman, who actually proposed a 6-point plan. Chief among these is to “Improve Reproductive Education” – but you won’t find her making any mention of contraception (elsewhere, Boorman reveals herself to be not a fan of The Pill), condoms or family planning. There’s no direct mention of sex education in schools, either, even though it would clearly be the necessary vehicle for what she has in mind. The “reproductive education” that she speaks of is predominantly “to educate women on the dangers of” abortion (by which she means the usual far right claims about health dangers of the practice), a fetishization of the stages of fetal development, and more fearmongering about the current medical process (i.e. she cites “the horrid conditions of abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s facility” as a typical example… it’s far from it).

The remainder of Georgi Boorman’s suggestions include more criminalization (elsewhere, she openly supports the death sentence for women who abort) and the vague “celebrate life” mantra, as well as increasing support for adoption (“especially cross-racial,” she adds, stealthily riffing on anti-abortion groups’ efforts to portray the procedure as a kind of racist genocide perpetrated by leftists) and – of course – ramping up funding for anti-abortion fake pregnancy centres.

On these points, her proposals are within the purview of those of Abby Johnson, whose own proposals are steeped in proselytizing and expanding anti-abortion pregnancy counseling centers into additional areas that beatify motherhood, but do not provide any hints of information about contraception or family planning (other than, perhaps, the “rhythm method”). But Boorman also adds a notable comment about “support[ing] fatherhood”:

“… what if fathers were asked to step up as parents and providers, instead of being written off as unqualified sperm donors? What if our culture demanded it? … Millions of fathers have been robbed of this opportunity since Roe, and our welfare system has enabled this by disincentivizing marriage and fatherhood obligations. … Instead of affirming mothers’ unilateral decisions by default, we should encourage fathers’ involvement (including marriage)…”

When religious conservatives frame opposition to gay and trans human rights as “protecting marriage,” LGBTQ+ organizations and spokespeople often quip about the hypocrisy in their seeming lack of worry about divorce and cohabitation. But the fact of the matter is that anti- groups have never stopped tilting at those particular windmills, either. An outright ban on divorce is only touted by the most extreme among them, but “disincentivizing” and creating an institutional system that heavily favours marriage come up often, and the idea of restricting divorce or making it difficult retains some level of popularity.

Other religious conservatives are more ambitious. Around the same time that Kristen Waggoner was proposing that abortion be made unthinkable, the Heritage Foundation hosted Sue Ellen Browder, who claims that “the sexual revolution hijacked the women’s movement” to make abortion and contraception priorities. This, too, is not a new argument, but it is gaining new popularity with organizations seeking to keep the money rolling in after an overturn of Roe. And with anti-trans, anti-sex work and anti-porn feminists partnering with religious conservatives like never before, there appears to be a sense that they have an opportunity to co-opt womens’ rights, which can then be used as a shield against accusations of homophobia, Islamophobia and puritanism, while at the same time purging it of reproductive rights advocacy and sex positivity, maintaining a subordinated role for women in administrative areas, and asserting the doctrine of complementarianism (a teaching used both to mandate motherhood as a woman’s integral life goal, and to invalidate LGBTQ+ peoples’ rights to live their lives as they need to).

“The battle against feminism is better fought by women because the public has been convinced that men are not qualified to speak about issues that affect the fairer sex…” – John Horvat II

On this point, James V. Schall suggests that religious conservatives need to target the entirety of the sexual revolution: “The path, when spelled out, is a direct line from divorce, contraception, and abortion to single-sex ‘marriage,’ in-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, and designer babies and now to a refusal to continue to increase and multiply with transgenderism, population decline, and, ultimately euthanasia… If we were to eliminate abortion, we must freely stop committing the sins that initiate disordered conceptions… Without this conversion, we will continue on the same path on which we now are traveling…”The Federalist’s Cullen Herout (which, admit it, must be a pseudonym) agrees at least on the point about contraception, saying “… if the goal really is to make abortion unthinkable, that cannot and will not happen without a large-scale shift in our cultural attitude toward human sexuality and contraception…”

So the next time your local political representative muses about making abortion “unthinkable,” it’s only reasonable to press them to elaborate. Because there clearly is more to that statement – and while religious conservatives obviously don’t think in total homogeneity, there’s enough like-mindedness to view this sort of dog whistle with alarm.

Pitting “identity politics” against class struggle is backwards, and the path to self-defeat

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that one of the first things America’s political left would do during the 2016 election post-mortem is to attack minority groups like trans* people, and “identity politics.” That narrative says Americans decided a potential fascist (when you consider his policy proposals, unilateral rhetoric, media manipulation and stoking of hatred) was a better choice than a continuation of (stalemated) progressive politics, because the latter went too far by, for example, letting trans* folks in.

But it is worth digging down to see what is meant by “identity politics.” Like “political correctness,” it’s a conveniently vague term that can be used to complain about the politics of almost anyone whose struggles one hasn’t experienced firsthand. “Identity politics” is a code for all civil rights — for people of colour, for women, for LGBTQ folks, for immigrants, for Muslims struggling against the continual conflation with terrorists, and more. Beyond Colin Jost’s barbed joke on Saturday Night Live and a columnist in the New York Times, the most-cited instance of blowback was a statement by Bernie Sanders, that “It is not good enough for someone to say, I’m a woman, vote for me.” While perhaps true on the surface (though it seems intended with more nuance than it has been given by those who cite it), the inevitable inverse suggestion that minority groups were too greedy and / or impatient in trying to acquire equal rights risks being, in its way, yet another roundabout step toward white supremacy, whether conscious or not.

It is also looking at the situation entirely backwards. Do not fault people for wanting an equal chance. Fault the chances being sucked away from everyone. Equality is not an unreasonable demand, and nor is wanting it now.

On the contrary, a civil rights perspective is what has been needed. There have been significant flaws in how it has been implemented so far, however. Between the weakness of compromised politicians, the fears of ticking off corporate funders of the organizations and institutions that have taken the issue on, and the subjectivity of corporate-controlled media which either provide or squelch voices on the issue, civil rights only progress toward — but never reach — the point at which they address economic injustice. Meanwhile, privileged people within social movements have too often been satisfied with equality on paper, almost like a placebo, and willing to leave behind their poor and disenfranchised in order to get it.

This is against a backdrop in which economic disparity has stratified wealth — and it is only helped if everyone fights each other over the scraps rather than wondering where it has all gone. Four decades of “trickle down economics” have been more than enough to prove that wealth, instead, has only been bleeding upward.

Civil rights movements have been the right direction. But between opponents and the lack of will (or corporate indebtedness) of proponents, they have been sold out, left standing only partway to justice, among a population that has been allowed to believe that equality has already been accomplished… or is at least so inevitable that it does not require any further effort. Equality has only been permitted to the point where it has not been seen to jeopardize the wealth of the richest, at a time when the greed of the latter has been simultaneously sucking society dry universally.

At this moment, the worst thing the political left can do is to fracture and feed the impulse to blame each other for wanting “too much.” It is time to recognize that political and institutional powers have instead been only willing to offer too little, and to take it only from the less affluent (and in ways that were perfectly designed to sow resentment).

The left is weak because it has been fragmented, atomized, divided into pocket communities with single-issue visions. If it chooses to continue to do so in the face of possible looming fascism, then it is well along the path to self-defeat.

At one time, the left was galvanized by the ideas of unions, collective effort, and sharing the load / sharing the benefit. It is well past time for a call to question individualism and revisit an “everyone together” vision of progress.

BDSM, Gender, Entitlement, and Jian Ghomeshi

Whether anybody wanted the conversation right now or not, it’s become time to have a conversation about BDSM, gender and entitlement.

Over a week ago, Jian Ghomeshi, the then-popular then- CBC commentator, appeared to be coming out of the closet about engaging in what he referred to as “rough sex (forms of BDSM),” and claiming to be fired because of workplace discrimination.  The post read as sincere and from the heart (and badly timed because of his father’s passing), so we wanted to believe him.  For anyone who cares about sex and gender minorities, there was a temptation to circle the wagons and voice support.  There was a lot of discussion about the human right to one’s own sexuality, but then…

“Wait, what was that about allegations…?”

It took a moment before people realized the problem with not first hearing out and supporting the women who had spoken out about him.  Canadians had been taken in by a public relations act that was either advised or coordinated by a top-rated PR firm.  Nevertheless, the realization slowly filtered out that there was more to the story that deserved to be listened to and respected (and which, we learned, had already been voiced in the past, but no one had heeded).

Since then, more women have come forward about violence, sexual harassment or abuse, and more may be forthcoming:

“He did not ask if I was into it. It was never a question. It was shocking to me. The men I have spent time with are loving people,” said [actress Lucy] DeCoutere, who, when she is not acting on the television show, is a captain in the Royal Canadian Air Force in New Brunswick…

“… One of the new women to come forward is a woman in her mid-20s who was a CBC producer in Montreal who dreamed of being on Q. He met her at one of his book signings. Ghomeshi allegedly took her to his hotel room, threw her against the wall and was very “forceful” with her. She said she performed oral sex “to get out of there.” The woman, who still works in the media but not at CBC, said she decided not to complain about his behaviour because she feared he was too powerful…”

“… A CBC employee in her late 20s alleges that in 2007 Ghomeshi was sitting with her and other producers at a story meeting for his radio show Q . After their colleagues stood up and left, she alleges Ghomeshi leaned in close to her and quietly said “I want to hate f— you…“

Lest anyone complain that women should have spoken up sooner or more publicly, there are painful consequences to speaking out about sexual or gender-based violence, and so unfortunately, few women do.  YMCA of Canada reports that of every 1000 sexual assaults, only 3 actually lead to a conviction.  It’s even worse when the person in question is an acclaimed public figure.  Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon urges people to do the math:

“On this side, there’s a successful, well-liked male public figure. And on this one, there’s a likely trail of sexually charged messages. There’s woman who in many situations agreed to go on a date, agreed to go to a private place with a man, maybe even agreed to see him more than once. And awaiting her is a culture of vindictiveness and retaliation that is so terrifying that women who appear in videos about catcalling get rape threats, and women who speak out about feminist issues get doxxed and harassed and murder threats. It’s a culture in which public sentiment can be cruel and law enforcement is often reluctant to assist…”

#IBelieveLucy and #IBelieveWomen. And given that Jian Ghomeshi has seen fit to disclose his perspective and make this a public spectacle, I no longer see any obligation to avoid speculation.

Believing women is the first part of the discussion.  If you believe women, then you must also be prepared to take a harder look at gender, social power exchange, and entitlement.

No Excuse to Abuse, Nor to Assume

Ghomeshi also dragged kink into the mix, by using it as an excuse for his sense of male entitlement. If I know anything about kinky people, it’s that using BDSM as a way to mask abuse is not going to sit well. Fortunately, kinky folks weren’t about to let him claim anti-BDSM discrimination lightly.  Even when they wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, they usually did so conditionally, pending more information.  Some people spoke up about what BDSM is, to provide a standard against which Ghomeshi’s behaviour would be measured when it was learned.

Very quickly, there were problems apparent with Ghomeshi’s account — or at least of his hiding behind ethical BDSM while making his argument.  When a person is significantly younger (which can — but doesn’t always — translate into a difference in maturity level) or perhaps starstruck — situations where they might make decisions they wouldn’t otherwise normally make — consent can become a grey area, well before kink has become a part of the equation.  In BDSM negotiation, there is a responsibility to ensure that there is no undue imbalance.  Certainly, an adult is still capable of consenting if they’re not as old as their potential partner, or if they’re starstruck… but the potential for imbalance creates a greater responsibility to assure clear consent, and that one is receiving it from someone who is fully aware of what they’re getting into.  It was pretty clear that Jian Ghomeshi had not only failed this doubly-due diligence, he was oblivious to it.

I encourage readers not familiar with BDSM to read Andrea Zanin’s discussion of how healthy, consensual BDSM practices are actually supposed to work.  If you’re uncomfortable reading about it, or can only deal with the TL/DR, the keys are that BDSM is supposed to be something that happens between two people who are mutually interested in it, requires clear and thorough negotiation, acknowledges that consent is an ongoing process during which it can be withdrawn at any time, and also calls for aftercare.

“We adjust based on verbal and non-verbal feedback. In some scenes, this feedback loop can become so instantaneous that it’s as if you’re both experiencing the same sensations. For some of us, this kind of deep connection and intense intimacy is the whole point of BDSM play. If someone uses a safeword or withdraws consent in any other way, that’s not a failure or a loss – it’s a sign to stop, check in, and perhaps end the scene. Why? Because the point here is mutual enjoyment, not playing out an agreed-upon scenario to its bitter end...”

It’s worth adding some discussion about power exchange and about gender.  And it’s a hard discussion to have, because there are polarized camps within feminism about BDSM: either it is seen as a reinforcement of gender inequality and inherently harming to women, or else it is seen as a question of a person’s own right to their sexuality, and to pursue what each individual needs within an ethical construct.  I have trouble with seeing it as being “inherently” harming, having known people of all genders and roles who find it to be cathartic (not always, but when / if they’re so inclined), and find that the reinforcement of gender inequality stems from the already-existing social norms, which have shaped how BDSM is received and portrayed — more a symptom than a cause (more on that later).

There are a lot of different practices lumped into BDSM (an acronym meaning bondage & discipline / dominance & submission / sadomasochism), but most of them involve an element of power exchange.  This is the most fascinating aspect, because when one follows the threads and implications, it actually teaches some profound things about social justice.  But for now, the basic understanding is that in most BDSM encounters, it is a question of one person surrendering power within a negotiated framework, while another accepts power and the responsibilities that go with it.  There are two crucial points to this: 1) a person must first have power in order to be able to surrender it (so there must be a start from an equal footing), and 2) an exchange of power can never be assumed, guessed at or taken for granted.  That second point is especially key here.

Syndicated columnist Dan Savage theorized that if Ghomeshi was honestly engaged in BDSM to any degree, there would likely also be women who have had a kinky relationship with him that they consider to have been positive.  He found two so far who were willing to speak anonymously (after verifying their history via texts / emails and verification through friends).  But what they relate — even if the women themselves were fine with what took place — is a picture of someone who would “initiate” with roughness, and interpret how they respond as whether or not they consented.  Which is not how consent or negotiation work:

“… I think I can square the two Ghomeshis.

“The woman with whom I spoke doesn’t live in Toronto. She and Ghomeshi flirted via text and Skype for weeks before finally meeting up to have sex. And in that time—over those long weeks of flirting—a mutual interest in BDSM was established (file under “lucky coincidence”) and she consented to the things Ghomeshi was floating in their texts and chats. The woman who was interviewed on As It Happens, on the other hand, lives in Toronto. Ghomeshi flirted with this woman in person. And instead of telling her what he was into—instead of talking with her about BDSM—Ghomeshi chose to show her what he was into: he grabbed her hair in the car and asked, “Do you like this?” When she hung out with him again, when she came back to his apartment with him, Ghomeshi concluded—erroneously and self-servingly—that the answer to the question he asked her in the car was yes. Yes, she liked it. Yes, she liked it rough.

“I’m not suggesting that this was all a big misunderstanding. I’m not suggesting that Ghomeshi innocently misread the signals of the woman who was interviewed on As It Happens or the women who spoke to the Toronto Star. But the only explanation that reconciles the stories of the now four women who claim they were assaulted by Jian Ghomeshi with the story of the one woman I spoke to today is this: Ghomeshi isn’t a safe, sane, and consensual kinkster. He’s a reckless, abusive, and dangerous one who has traumatized some women and lucked out with others…”

Consent cannot be presumed beforehand.  One does not subject someone to roughness before negotiating the terms of that exchange.  Indeed, it’s almost as though Ghomeshi thought that only sex (that is, the act) needed to be consented to… that the violence was just for free.  And that would indicate a stunning sense of entitlement.

Not Responsibility, But Entitlement

When collected, the accounts of Jian Ghomeshi’s behaviour paint a picture not of ethical, responsible and consensual behaviour, but of a sense of profound entitlement in which he saw no issue with striking a woman first, and then making a judgment for himself whether she was interested in continuing.

Did he not trust women enough to discuss things clearly and honestly with them first?  Did he think himself a better judge of what women want than than the women themselves?  If a woman’s clear, cognizant, continually-negotiated consent (let alone mutual interest!) isn’t important enough to obtain verbally before striking her, that is a stunning and dangerous sense of entitlement.

Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that Ghomeshi thought it was worth debating whether rape culture exists.

When Jian Ghomeshi posted his original message to Facebook, he compared his interests to Fifty Shades of Grey.  This raises the obvious problem with associating an entire sexual minority and subculture with a character who undertakes things like emotional abuse, coercion and stalking.  It also illustrates the need to have more open, honest communication about it.  As long as BDSM is kept under a cloak of secrecy and taboo, it remains possible for it to be poorly characterized by bad fiction — and by extension, allow people with predatory tendencies to use it to rationalize their behaviour.

Entitlement is a very gendered discussion.  While it’s conceivably possible for it to flow the other way, entitlement in practice is by far a male-favouring phenomenon.

Probably fittingly, Fifty Shades of Grey provides an excellent example of this.  One has to wonder how the novels would have been received if they pivoted around a powerful woman with obsessive control issues, manipulating and intimidating a young man.  Even if it had depicted a respectable, ethical dominant woman engaging in a fully consensual and loving relationship, would the novels have been such a commercial success?  When a person starts looking into it, in fact, virtually every BDSM-themed work of fiction that has achieved contemporary mainstream success has centered around a power exchange which has been gendered with a male dominant and female submissive… despite the variety that exists in reality.  The Story of O, Secretary, L’Image, 9 1/2 Weeks, The Night Porter, the Sleeping Beauty books… the only ones that achieved commercial success while deviating from the script were Exit to Eden, and the over-a-century-old Venus in Furs.

In kink circles, power exchange is independent of gender, and there’s no gender which is “naturally-born” to dominate or “meant” to submit.  But the general public isn’t interested in that diversity.  Aside from the fetishistic image of the dominatrix (possibly exactly because the latter is challenging), BDSM is portrayed with male dominance and female submission as the primary palatable gendered permutation.

And that is because it’s familiar.  The manipulation and animalistic sex found in Fifty Shades of Grey is not altogether very different from the rough sex scenes found in mainstream novels and cinema.  But the problem extends beyond mere sex.  It is a power exchange — though not conscious, not consensual, and not negotiated — which runs as an undercurrent throughout our daily lives and throughout our world.

And that is how someone can walk into a meeting and be reportedly confident that his employers will see everything as consensual:

At that meeting, a lawyer for Mr. Ghomeshi presented two people from CBC management with texts, e-mails and photos of the radio host’s sexual encounters. The evidence was intended to demonstrate consent, a point Mr. Ghomeshi would later stress in a statement: “Everything I have done has been consensual.”

But the CBC managers were taken aback, and their views on Mr. Ghomeshi’s conduct changed instantly. What they saw, in their opinions, was far more aggressive and physical than anything they had been led to believe during months of discussions.

So what next?

The positive thing that can come from events like this is that they spur discussion.

One important discussion that has begun centers around why women are afraid to report rape, the need to support women who report, and the institutional barriers to reporting, investigation and conviction of rapists.

Another discussion needs to be about male entitlement, and the privilege that makes it invisible.  Gender-based violence does not happen because of low reporting, disbelief, or institutional barriers.  Those are the end-products of something deeper.  It happens because there is a persistent and unconscious sense of ownership and entitlement that still makes gender-based violence seen as excusable, or “normal enough.”

And although people might not be eager about this thought, Jian Ghomeshi can even be a part of that discussion, too.  Maybe someday, he could become a powerful voice on the topic.  But that will first mean needing to realize, admit and take the time to become absolutely clear about where he failed.  There is no more room for assumptions or skipping details.

(Crossposted to Rabble.ca)

Our destinies are bound together (even if our needs are diverse and sometimes at odds)

Monica Roberts at TransGriot is exploring the future of the trans* movement:

“One of the things I was pondering recently was triggered by me seeing a pic of a five year old trans girl.  I began to ponder what her Trans World that we 2K10’s activists are fighting tooth and nail to shape, would be like 10 to 20 years from now…”

Blogger apparently won’t accept a comment this long, so I’ll post my thoughts here instead:

Any time we try to wax prescient about a social issue and its future, we have to be careful not to forget the pendulum effect of social progress.  We have a period of great strides, then a stage of regression, then more advances.  I believe Dr. King understood this before anyone in human rights movements, when he spoke of the arc of the moral universe being long but bending toward justice: it is glacial, and fraught with forward-then-backward strides, but it eventually inches forward.  The trans* movement is definitely in a forward swing, no doubt about it, but eventually we’ll hit another backward slide before advancing once again.

But it’s also crucial to see our own social movement as part of a much larger picture.  More on that in a moment.

Trans* communities still have a few more years of forward motion, no doubt.  The far-right religious persecution complex is unconvincing, and the longer washroom panic is touted but fails to manifest in actual harm, the faster that tactic evaporates.  If Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism (TERFism) manages to change some of the thinking within feminism, that contraction could come sooner, but I don’t believe it will, unless we play too eagerly into TERF persecution games.  More likely, that contraction will happen because of changing priorities.  Something more urgent will come to the fore, and we’ll once again be seen as a 0.01% -sized minority… and that will trigger the next stagnation or regression.

We also have to keep in mind that social movements have a horrible track record of turning on their own, as the difficulties of earlier generations becomes forgotten.  I see a time coming when youth (not this particular generation of youth, who are fighting pioneering battles of their own, but perhaps the generation that comes after them) start being unable to understand how it could have been so difficult to come out or why people would have waited until their late 30s, 40s, 50s or older to begin transition.  And with we older folks being more ravaged by incongruent hormones (especially for trans women, since testosterone is such a vicious chemical), lookism will become a serious issue, as well as greater inter-movement criticism about socialization (sometimes deserved, sometimes overstated).  There will inevitably be a new quest for the “appropriate face” of the movement, as if such a thing could exist, and increasingly those who pioneered progress for trans* people will become seen as a liability to that.

There is a bright side, though, which is found by looking at the larger picture.  Social progressives have reached a wall.  The corporate, religious and political worlds have merged into an oligarchic monolith that we cannot face any other way.  In order for *any* social movements to progress in the larger scheme of things, there has to be a coming together, and getting away from colonial / umbrella-style thinking so that we can all rediscover what it means to be an alliance: that it’s not an assimilationist melting pot, the borders of which need to be rigidly policed and people either belong or they don’t (we keep trying that and failing), but rather a critical mass of varied and unique individuals who all deserve a voice and (the harder part) who all also need to listen… and who stand together for mutual advancement, equitably.  Feminism, racial justice, environmentalism, labour rights, sexual minority equality (LGBTTIQQA2S, as well as poly people, sex workers and other emerging groups), issues of global climate change, reproductive rights, classism, privacy rights and personal liberties (as opposed to neoliberalism), the rights of the disabled, the rights of youth (as opposed to parental ownership), economic justice… in the near-term, all of our destinies are bound together, even if our objectives differ and sometimes even conflict.  The political left is going to have to decolonize if it is to survive.  It will take time, but the need will be for everyone to have a seat at the table.  We no longer have the luxury of infighting… it’s time to either work this stuff out, or else to put the differences aside.

Those lessons will be hard.  The lesbian and gay establishment is still learning that it cannot speak for trans* people, but rather need to empower them.  Some pockets of feminism, likewise, remain too blinded by dubious data and an ideology that says that all sex work is inherently victimizing to actually listen to sex workers when they speak out about what will either harm or empower them.  It’s seductively easy to slip into patronizing condescension and predisposed belief than to listen to and learn from profound lived experience.

It’s also difficult to get others to care about an issue without ceding “ownership” of the issue.  One can’t say labour rights “is an LGBT issue” in a way that means that LGBT people should be dictating what labour needs — but one must still recognize how the systematic dismantling of labour harms the economically vulnerable (including many LGBT people), and amplifies inequality in a deep and systemic way.  Social movements usually see things as an all-or-nothing endeavor: either we own it, or we don’t have an obligation to care about it.  That has to change.  Incrementalism is a lie and steals fire from true, substantial change.  Individual movements must let go of the “us first” impulse and start seeing “everyone together” as the goal.

In these ways, social movements might almost ever be stumbling recklessly toward unity.

So as much as things like lookism will surface in later generations for the trans* movement, it will be mitigated by the larger evolution of social movements.  And as much as TERFism might seek to alienate trans* people from the feminist movement and the greater conversation about gender, it will similarly be mitigated by this.  Exclusion will be a lesser factor (eventually).  Learning to look inward and deal with our own biases and challenge ourselves to rise above them will be the next (and probably much harder) step.  And it will be absolutely necessary.

It also won’t be complete or perfect.  Social movements have a horrible record of backlash and subterfuge, mixed with self-sabotage.  So it all might fail.  Oligarchism might siphon off individual movements one at a time and absorb them.  The lesbian and gay establishment are already vulnerable to this, for example, given the classism that infects the hierarchied LGB(T) establishment.  It is here that the lateness of trans* empowerment and the emergence of poly folks, sex workers, asexuals, et al could prove a saving grace, and in which the LGB community’s gradual (stumbling) learning of how to support trans* people without trying to speak for them could provide lessons for changes to come.

But other assimilations could still be on the horizon.  If the energy industry did a public about-face (for whatever motive), for example, it could possibly absorb the movement against global climate change.  If that resulted in substantial reduction to the harm humans do to the planet, that would be great, yet I could see this sort of a time coming: environmentally-conscious alternatives become available and harnessed by the corporate sector, but the change will require wealth, and those who can’t afford to adapt are seen as the real / new menace.  In this way, people who once lobbied against oil and gas become suddenly not able to afford the progress they fought for… one more way to keep the masses turned upon each other.

Each time the co-option of a movement happens, it steals progressives’ fire, and a movement toward critical mass to address oppression on a grander scale could fail.  Society is at a pivotal time.

And as the political world polarizes, militarizes and veers into mass espionage, that could bode badly overall for social movements, which have historically been viewed as radical and threatening.  So the political pressures will be very much against a coming together of progressives.

And the greatest fear of all is that the general public is remarkably and tragically apathetic.  Just getting people to vote is a difficult task (and that’s if they’re allowed to under growing suppression).  If progress is to happen, it needs something to motivate people in a grand way: not just to scare people about how bad things are getting (which there’s already plenty of, and can be demotivating of itself), but to inspire people with a new vision of how things can be.  That vision is still being formulated.

So that’s the lens I look through.

Returning to trans* communities, the science will improve, certainly.  As Monica says, we’ll see advances in surgical options, probably the biggest leaps deriving from cloning.  Surgical advances on genital-specific health care are more challenging for trans* people, though, because it’s not just about a penis or vagina: the surface stuff can almost be done now (not quite for the guys, but the technology is almost there), but a lot of the inner biological infrastructure will take longer.

Additionally, we might discover the biological triggers (I suspect there’s more than one) that contribute to (as opposed to exclusively cause) someone being trans* — and that could be a mixed blessing of its own, depending on what that future generation decides to do with that new information.

The human rights advances will continue in the west, although Asia and Africa will take longer.  If the social-left decolonizing of activism I wrote of earlier happens, this will significantly help in those regions, as much of the anti-LGBT sentiment there has gained traction because the political right figured out how to hijack the language of decolonialism and mask their own colonial aims.  If the left comes together, the deceptive spin will eventually fail, and LGBT people will become properly recognized as the oppressed class rather than as a potential oppressor to fear.

The backlash to that will be that the political, corporate and social right will seek to dismantle the human rights mechanisms themselves: human rights commissions, rights laws, diversity policies… all of that will be framed as no longer relevant (i.e. “racism is over” / “feminists are the real oppressors,” etc.) and an impediment to the nation’s best interests (a slier way of saying corporate and religious interests).  That’s a looming fight we’re just seeing emerge right now.  We’re winning a lot of the battles, but the war is shifting to a new and larger front.

I apologize for that sounding preachy, something that is certainly not helped by referring to the royal “we.”  I know we have our own individual limitations.  We can’t do everything.  Living in rural Alberta now, I’m very conscious about how much less I do and can do than before, so I don’t say any of the above with judgment.  It’s simply my limited, fallible observation.

Push, pull, forward, backward.  And gradually, we’ll get somewhere.  But it will be rocky.

On conscience-based medical exemptions

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is currently reviewing its Human Rights Code policy on conscience-based exemptions for medical professionals, and their effect on access to medical services.

This review was sparked by a number of news reports of doctors in Ontario and Alberta refusing to prescribe birth control because of their religious beliefs. In some of those cases, patients were refused in clinics where there was only one doctor on duty.

Concurrently, south of the border, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favour of a corporation’s right to deny medical insurance to its employees when doing so would violate the owners’ religious beliefs — a case that was specifically about access to contraception. The Hobby Lobby case has been followed by several new attempts to widen the exemption, and calls to extend it to other sectors and in ways that would allow businesses to refuse service to LGBT people.

These events reflect a major shift in the way that conscience rights are being seen and applied in North America.  It is my hope that the experiences of trans* people in Alberta with conscience-based medical exemptions might provide some insights for those considering a conscience policy review in Ontario.

Alberta has had a policy for some time which allows a doctor to refuse to prescribe treatments that violate their religious beliefs in non-emergency situations. However, they are required to state that the refusal is because of their religious beliefs, and to provide a timely referral for patients to someone who will provide care, so that patients still receive service and experience a minimum of undue hardship (although to be fair, having to jump through referral hoops can be considered an undue hardship of itself, especially when one factors in the difficulties in scheduling time off from work and other real life concerns).  Ontario’s policy is similar, though not identical.

Alberta’s policy was created to protect medical professionals from having to participate in any situation that might lead to an abortion.  But in the past year, there has been an upsurge of discussion about the need for a religious or conscience-based exemption in every sector and every practice.  Access to birth control is one of the pivotal issues in play in that discussion, although it is not the only one.

As an advocate for transsexual and transgender people, I’ve needed to assist a great number of people over the years who’ve been denied medical services because they’re trans* under Alberta’s conscience exemption policy.  Sometimes people have even been denied services for things like urinary tract infections, routine checkups and cases of the flu.  To be fair, the conscience exemption is not the only factor: denials are sometimes made by doctors who say they’ve never been trained in trans* health — although this complaint is made not only in regard to trans-specific health concerns, nor does there appear to be a willingness to learn from many of those doing the refusing.

Most often, trans* people who are refused care are also not provided a referral to anyone else.  This exploits the public’s unfamiliarity with this part of the law, and that they’re entitled to a referral.  It is certainly not every medical professional who refuses to assist, but it occurs frequently enough that the trans* community has had to try to keep a list of “trans-friendly” doctors — a list that is constantly plagued by doctors no longer being able to accept new patients, or making changes in their practice or habits.  I’m always happy to add doctors to the list, with the only requirement be that they adhere to the WPATH Standards of Care (which is also the policy of Alberta Health Services).  Two years ago, someone obtained a copy of our records and stormed into the offices of several listed clinics in Calgary, raising a ruckus about doctors’ willingness to treat trans* patients, and this resulted in several requests to be removed from our list.

Although commentators sometimes note theoretical possibilities like a Jehovah’s Witness practitioner denying blood transfusions, I can say from experience that conscience policies already can and do result in people being denied access to the care they need… and are not always given “timely” alternatives.

I am sensitive to a person’s right to opt out of something because their conscience, and not just a religious-based conscience.  However, in practical experience, exemptions tend to be abused, and marginalized people pay the heaviest price.  If there is to be a conscience-based exception to medical care, a province also needs to have a much better way of coordinating timely and accessible care alternatives, and better enforce the responsibility to provide those alternatives.  In Alberta, this is difficult, since there is no centralized means of communicating with medical professionals and provide some forms of training after they’re already in the field, short of making laws — so strengthening things at a policy level proves difficult.

With the recent shift of thinking among the religious right toward making provinces “abortion-free” and denying access to previously uncontroversial things like birth control, this issue will worsen in coming years.  If there is to be a conscience-based exemption to medical care, provinces need to seek a solution to the policy quandaries this creates now.  For example, if a walk-in clinic’s only physician on duty  will not prescribe contraception, then it’s worth investigating what responsibility the clinic should have in providing a doctor who will, and in a manner that suits the patient’s needs, rather than the doctor’s.

Or what responsibility the province is taking upon itself by sanctioning health care exemptions.

(Crossposted to Rabble.ca)

C-36: Conflating sex work with human trafficking

I recently asked whether the vague definition of “sexual services” and definition of the Internet as a public space could be used to make the anti-prostitution Bill C-36 ban pornography.  Regardless of how one feels about porn, such a thing would certainly require a debate, and it’s a question worth asking.

I also looked at the obvious aspects of C-36 that have sparked outrage from sex workers, and occasionally even from abolitionists.

There are further discussions as well — more concrete than speculation, but still under the surface of the legislation itself.

Conflating sex work with human trafficking

Anti-prostitution Bill C-36 explicitly puts sex work on the same footing as human trafficking and conflates the two in law.  Indeed, they have been consciously equated by Peter MacKay and by the bill’s proponents.

The rhetoric used when introducing the bill also does this, through employing a language that claims that people (particularly women) sell themselves or are sold as commodities, rather than simply selling a service.  Under this line of thinking, it is considered impossible that sex workers might retain any personal autonomy.

Human trafficking certainly exists, although not as frequently as it is often claimed (studies that claim high numbers of trafficking incidents often similarly conflate it with sex work). The fact that it happens less often does not mean that we should care less or believe that the occurrences of it are somehow less horrible — but it does justify recognizing when the scope of it has been unjustly stretched beyond what human trafficking actually is.

The UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (or Trafficking Protocol) defines human trafficking as:

“The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs….”

Human trafficking doesn’t always include border migration, and the exploitation isn’t always about the selling and buying of sex, but the consistent elements are that one person ends up controlling another, via unethically-obtained consent or no consent at all, for the purposes of exploitation.

These circumstances sometimes do occur with sex work, but they aren’t inherent to it.  Sex work does not always have elements of coercion, of control, or of vulnerability. Sex work actually includes a variety of trades, including street work, escorting, stripping, lap dancing, professional domination, massage, survival sex, porn, and more, making it difficult to generalize about it in an absolute fashion.

The Harper government (and supportive media) has had to paint sex workers, advocates and organizations as rare outliers, in order to maintain the illusion that sex work is always exploitative. A great many sex workers have a considerable degree of personal autonomy and independence.  However, those who are in exploitative circumstances are always those who are disproportionately visible, because they will justifiably make contact, seek help and make themselves visible. Unfortunately, this means that the dire circumstances experienced by those who do seek escape become interpreted as being representative of sex work as a whole.

Worse, using the term “human trafficking” interchangeably with sex work actually confuses the issue significantly, diverting funds and energy away from where it’s needed and toward combating legitimate sex work as well.  This makes it impossible to get clear and realistically comparative data, and reallocates funding away from effective anti-trafficking initiatives.  It undermines the fight against trafficking and tarnishes the organizations that try to do the needed work, making it much harder to address actual human trafficking.  And it has allowed far right moralists who are more interested in controlling peoples’ sexual habits seductively hijack the dialogue that once considered womens’ autonomy and choice to be important.

Under Bill C-36, for example, the emphasis is placed on exit services.  But victims of human trafficking have specific (and often urgent) needs that go far beyond exiting sex work.  These start with citizenship: far too often, the response to a trafficked person in Canada is to rescue them from an exploitative situation, and then deport them to the very same conditions that made them vulnerable to exploitation.  Certainly, without citizenship, access to other social services and the tools they need to begin lives free of exploitation becomes difficult or impossible.

And while sexual exploitation justifiably triggers anger and requires remedy, human trafficking also involves far more than sexual exploitation.  It is believed that there are nearly 21 million trafficked persons, worldwide, according to an estimate by the International Labour Organization.  Of these, 4.5 million are victims of sexual trafficking.  The issue of persons exploited for sexual labour is urgent, yes.  But it does not encompass the whole problem of human trafficking.  The approach of Bill C-36 allows the public to believe that we’ve addressed everything that matters.

The embarrassing fall of Somaly Mam — who resigned after questions were raised about her autobiography, tactics and alleged coaching of shocking stories about sex trafficking — should provide a strong cautionary tale about how we can sometimes react to the issue by willingly disregarding or failing to check key facts.

If sex workers did not have to feel targeted by authorities or ashamed to reveal who they were, they could in fact become key allies in detecting and identifying where and when sexual trafficking occurs.  Besides…

“Kung said the employees were required to share rooms in two five-bedroom homes owned by their boss, Tony Van Den Bosch.

“They had no privacy in the house. The owner would come in and out as he pleased and would enter people’s rooms,” Kung said.

“In addition, Kung said, the workers were asked to pay rent once at the beginning of the month, and an additional $200 “tip” on top of their monthly rent in the middle of the month, for the double-bunked rooms.

“… The employer also regularly asked the workers from Mexico for their passports and would hold them for periods of time, alleged Kung.

“Two of them were fired and sent back to Mexico after raising concerns about their working and living conditions. Two of them actually fled in the middle of the night one night because they were so afraid…”

How is sex work inherently always incontrovertibly equivalent to human trafficking, but the Harper government’s Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program not?

The paternal infantilization of women and the idealized rescue of exit services.

Bill C-36 assumes that everyone engaging in sex work is a victim. By doing so, this government ignores the experiences of people who choose to engage in sex work.  Unless there is direct force or coercion involved (which is procuring, something that was still illegal before this law was introduced), there are two intersecting factors that motivate people to engage in sex work: poverty and opportunity.  The balance between each will vary per person.

While promising to invest money in exit services, the same government fails to address one key driver — poverty — and completely disregards the other as non-existent.

Between driving wages down with anti-union policies, the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program, cuts to the public sector, refusing to address economic and gender disparities…  the Harper government is a major driver of that poverty. If the choice is to earn as much in two weeks working at a McJob as one could earn in a few nights doing sex work, then that’s not really much of a choice, is it?

Certainly, there’s no talk about addressing job opportunities and wages that would provide a reasonable alternative.  Despite the stigmas, danger and even criminalization, sex work is one of the few ways that people might have to escape oppressive economic circumstances.

And by taking away any ability to work in visible spaces or safe spaces, the Harper Conservatives are driving the industry underground, creating vulnerabilities. The only thing that the government is offering is funding for exit programs.  Leave or else.  This bill does everything possible to ensure that exiting sex work is the only option.

The rescue industry

The Conservatives have pledged $20 million toward exit programs and enforcement.  It’s not known how much of that money will go to increased policing costs.

Exit programs are one area where a person really has to wonder how a law is going to be used.  Will law enforcement be used to push people into exit programs?  Will there be coercion or obligation to participate in them?  Will access to assistance or public services be conditional upon participating in an exit program?  If a person does not want to participate in an exit program, will the penalty be charges for things they would not have otherwise been punished for?  Will participation in exit programs be the only way a sex worker can avoid losing custody or visitation of their children?  Will religious institutions (similar to or allied with those who advised the bill, even) be administering these exit programs, and will proselytization be a part of the exit strategy?

Some of these questions sound appalling or absurd, but there are certainly precedents south of the border where these became the consequence of anti-prostitution laws which push exit programs.

A matter of advice

In crafting Bill C-36, there was a clear reliance by the Harper government on the advice of far right religious organizations like REAL Women of Canada and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, and virtually no weight given to the people directly impacted by the legislation.

One of the organizations that stands to benefit from the $20 million that the Harper Conservatives have pledged to invest in exit programs is [free-them], which describes itself as an anti-trafficking organization.  But the organization appears to have a moralist slant that extends beyond that mandate.  When MP Joy Smith (who the organization describes as “Free-Them’s ally in fighting human trafficking”) issued a statement in support of Britain’s mandatory porn opt-in policy, [free-them] was quick to follow up with a similar statement:

“Children need to be protected from pornographic images that over time can desensitize our youth and create a false sense of sexual reality, and even lure children into a situation of exploitation that no child should ever experience. As Prime Minister Cameron clearly states, this regulation is not banning legal pornography, but rather increasing an extra level of security and protection from pornography getting into the hands and viewership of youth and children that should not be exposed to this. As adults, we have a responsibility to the young generations growing up to protect and defend children and youth…”

If it’s difficult to conflate human trafficking with all of sex work, then it’s even harder to equate it with the entirety of pornography.  Exploitation does happen in porn, yes, but in this case, there is also a highly visible contingent of participants who have been obviously not trafficked, and have relative personal autonomy.

The longer one follows the threads of Bill C-36, the clearer it becomes that it is far less about exploitation, and far more about legislating a specific moral vision.  And in the process, the issue of trafficking itself has become hijacked.

Footnote: While I had never set out to become an activist for sex workers’ rights, I’ve come to believe that the freer and more empowered a sex worker is, the less opportunity exists for exploitation, and the more opportunity there is to escape it if it happens. Criminalization achieves the opposite effect.

(crossposted to Rabble.ca.  Concerned about progressive media in Canada? Support rabble.ca)

Bill C-36, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act: an overview

I recently asked whether the vague definition of “sexual services” and definition of the Internet as a public space could be used to make the anti-prostitution Bill C-36 ban pornography somehow.  Regardless of how one feels about porn, such a thing would certainly require a debate, and it’s a question worth asking.

That is, however, speculative.  The bill itself contains many clearer aspects that have sparked outrage from sex workers, and occasionally even from abolitionists, as well (though the objections vary).

The Canadian government’s public consultation on sex work — which sex worker advocates felt had been slanted to try to sell the “Nordic Model” of anti-prostitution law — was reported to have shown that a majority of Canadians want the selling of sex to be legal for the sake of the people who engage in it, but a mix (slight majority) of Canadians support criminalizing the buying of sex.

Apparently Justice Minister Peter MacKay decided that meant that Canadians wanted sex work criminalized in such a way that sex workers wouldn’t always be technically charged, but it would be otherwise made totally impossible to work legally and safely.  Rather than honour the safety concerns raised by the Supreme Court of Canada, the Harper government has actually exacerbated the situation in hopes of forcing sex workers into exit programs.

“The purchase and sale of sex has never been illegal in Canada,” MacKay said explicitly. “That changes today.”

It is, of course, the government’s hope that by completely criminalizing sex work, the Supreme Court of Canada’s argument — that anti-prostitution laws do harm to sex workers by preventing them from working safely — becomes irrelevant.  Courts never concern themselves with whether circumstances are made safe enough to commit a crime.  And that’s why it has decided to criminalize the buying of sex in addition to re-criminalizing everything that was struck down (with a few narrow exemptions for sex workers themselves)… and throw in some new restrictions for good measure.

(It’s alleged that an unpublished Ipsos Reid poll reportedly contradicts this government position, but the results of that poll are being withheld)

Pivot Legal Society has condemned the bill:

“This cynical, dystopic model does not resolve the problems found by the Court in Bedford to be unconstitutional, and adds new ones such as the prohibition on advertising. The Charter rights engaged by this proposed law include life, liberty, security of the person, freedom of expression and equality. Arguably all are breached.

“This is not the “Nordic” approach, nor is it a Canadian variation on the “Nordic” approach. It is an unconstitutional variation of our broken laws that impose more danger, more criminalization, and fewer safe options, contrary to the requirement of the Supreme Court of Canada to address these dangerous and ineffective laws.

“This made in Canada model will lead to continued epidemic of violence against sex workers in Canada…”

What the bill does:

1) Sellers are not criminalized or targeted… except when they are.

It’s claimed that Bill C-36, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act targets buyers of sex but doesn’t target those who sell it.  That is incorrect.  Sex workers can absolutely be charged:

• if they work in the presence of sex workers under 18 years of age — even if they’re under 18, themselves;
• if they work at home where children reside, if it’s asserted that the children are being negatively affected (and what about having to go visit grandma all the time… is that a negative effect?) — more on this in a moment; and
• if they communicate in “a place where persons under the age of 18 can reasonably be expected to be present,” stop traffic, etc. (the penalty for this could be up to five years in prison)

The mixed signals on charging sex workers opens up some ability for law enforcement to use the potential for charges (and the lack of clarity on what is legal) to manipulate people.  This could result in the threatening of charges in order to intimidate a person into incriminating themselves or incriminating others (perhaps even falsely, in order to escape trouble).  This lack of clarity could also be used to scare people into pleading guilty (regardless of whether it’s true) to seeming lesser charges, in order to escape risking more frightening legal possibilities.

Regardless of the exemptions included in the bill, there are still institutional barriers to keep sex workers from receiving assistance from police or communicating with them with confidence.  For example, the search and seizure powers make no exemption for sex workers themselves.  Even if they can’t be charged for advertising their own services, what’s to stop police from seizing their computers and targeting their current and past clients in one fell swoop?  It’s incredibly naive to think that the rapport between law enforcement and sex workers would be improved in any way by this law.

Could the legislation affect access to social services as well, if those services aren’t specifically exit-related? Or custody of children?  Even if a sex worker cannot be charged for advertising sexual services in a particular situation, might it still violate a lease by being classified as a criminal act?  The implications are uncertain.

2) Communication.

The law against “communicating for the purpose of…” — which put sex workers in unsafe situations by limiting their ability to screen clients and negotiate — is back, and is actually made more restrictive by applying it to “a public place, or in any place open to public view, that is or is next to a place where persons under the age of 18 can reasonably be expected to be present.” That last part is key: a minor doesn’t actually have to be present, there only needs to be an undefined reasonable expectation (and it will be up to the courts how widely that can be interpreted).  Your car could be a public place.

In the case of sex workers who have children, even if their children can be kept unaware of their parent’s pursuits and are never present when they see clients, does their home become a “public place?”

It’s still never safe for buyers to communicate to buy sex, but where does it become safe for a sex worker to communicate to sell sex? If they can only communicate from home and without the use of the Internet or public spaces, well, that certainly complicates things.  Bill C-36 distinguishes itself by targeting indoor sex work so that it becomes impossible to engage in safely, even if you’re the sex worker who is supposed to be exempt from the law.

A bar is still a public place, but it’s not “a place where persons under the age of 18 can reasonably be expected to be present.”  So it’s legal-ish or closer to legal-ish, and the penalties for anyone caught are smaller. So now, the Harper government has made sex workers safer by pushing them into darkened spaces with clients who have been drinking.

But at the same time, there is a disincentive for bar owners to allow sex workers to communicate on their premises, for fear that it could be claimed that the bar or management might be materially benefiting from the presence of sex workers in some way (i.e. increased sales and patronage).  So then there is a constant harassment of anyone in a bar who is suspected of being a sex worker.

By tactical reasoning like this, it becomes a strategic minefield in which people are forced to take more chances, and place themselves in the spaces of people they wouldn’t normally trust, simply because those people are likewise willing to take the risk of associating with them.

Communication can’t be understated.  If one can’t take the time to negotiate clearly, has to speak in code to avoid detection, and has to resort to an imply / infer scenario, then it makes it impossible to screen clients to see how agitated they might be, creates an automatic mutual distrust between workers and dates, and makes it hard to set limits about what types of sexual act one is or isn’t willing to perform.  This was a key issue at the heart of the Superior Court of Ontario and Supreme Court of Canada rulings that originally struck down the three anti-prostitution laws replaced by this bill.

3) The Bawdy-house rules.

The ban on “common bawdy-houses” is back, with the bawdy-house defined as a place “for the practice of acts of indecency, a place that is kept or occupied or resorted to by one or more persons.”

This targets massage parlours (if sex is exchanged) and strip clubs (if sex is exchanged).  Additionally, if a sex worker keeps a separate address to work from, it’s considered a bawdy-house. So now by law, sex workers can only work from their homes.  Because it’s oh so much safer for everyone to know where you live.

Of course, one can imagine the condemnation that’s going to be heaped upon sex working mothers who work under the same roof that their children live under, regardless of whether the kids are ever actually present when anything is happening.  But the law actually pushes them to do that.

Sex workers sometimes share a separate address, or prefer to work in places like massage parlours or strip clubs, so they can work together for mutual safety.  Under this law, that’s not a legal option.

4) What constitutes a material benefit from the sale of sex?

“Living off the avails…” returns as “receiving a material benefit that derives” from the sale of sex. It does provide an exemption (subject to interpretation) for some people who live with sex workers, provided that nothing can be construed as an exploitative situation and no drugs are provided to the sex worker:

“… evidence that a person lives with or is habitually in the company of a person who offers or provides sexual services for consideration is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, proof that the person received a financial or other material benefit from those services…” except “in the context of a legitimate living arrangement with the person from whose sexual services the benefit is derived…”

How that will be interpreted remains to be seen.  It’s not entirely clear if this provision targets assisting arrangements from referrers, drivers, bodyguards, associates and other business partners, if something beneficial (not necessarily cash) is exchanged.  The Justice Minister says it’s up to interpretation of whether the associate is exploitative in any way.  Sometimes, the practical application of something like this is to arrest all, use the law to maximum advantage, and let the courts worry about whether or not a situation is exploitative, after the fact.

Escort agencies, massage parlours (if sex is exchanged) and strip clubs (if sex is exchanged) are all banned by this provision, with a potential sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

5) The new ban on all advertising of sexual services

This bill reaches further than anything previous, by banning all advertising of sexual services.  Anyone who knowingly provides a space in which to advertise (whether in newspapers, online message boards, websites, or any other form of media) can face fines or imprisonment.

Beyond the obvious questions about freedom of speech, this raises other questions.  How much legal responsibility does an Internet service Provider (ISP) shoulder if sexual service advertising is accessed through its networks?  What steps does it need to do to avoid legal action, and how engaged will ISPs need to become in tracking such advertising?  Does this raise questions for other areas of privacy and freedom of speech for Canadians?  When I asked if C-36 might ban porn, one of the lines of reasoning was that the threat of legal action could push ISPs into instituting arbitrary and overly broad content filters, just to be safe.

And finally, is the Internet a public place? MacKay explicitly referred to online advertising, so that would seem to mean that it is interpreted that way in the law.  And while it’s said that sex workers would not be charged for advertising their own services, if the Internet is widely interpreted as a public place “where persons under the age of 18 can reasonably be expected to be present,” that exemption for them might not apply to Internet advertising.

It could almost end up working like entrapment.

Tomorrow: Conflating sex work and human trafficking

(crossposted to Rabble.ca DentedBlueMercedes.  Concerned about progressive media in Canada? Support rabble.ca)

Could anti-prostitution Bill C-36 also ban porn?

One of the concerns that has been raised about Bill C-36 is that “sexual services” is not defined.

Terri Jean Bedford, one of the plaintiffs in the case that overturned the previous anti-prostitution laws, has raised this question a number of times, without receiving an answer.  A professional dominatrix’s job, after all, involves fulfilling a fantasy, and may not include any actual sex acts at all.  Does sex have to happen in order for there to have been a “sexual service?” Where is that line drawn?

It’s because of this vague nature of the terminology that some are asking if the wording could also inadvertently ban advertising and / or paying for sex toys or the services of a sex therapist.  Advertising sexual health services could also come into question.

Is porn a “sexual service?”

Is a sexual service exchanged via pornography?  It could be argued that porn acts as an intermediary, at least, so it might be a question that is subject to the interpretation of whichever judge happens to hear it.

There are people at both ends of the political spectrum who oppose pornography and would be amenable to a ban on it — from the right usually because of concerns about morality, and from the left often because of concerns about the portrayal of women and the possibility that it contributes to rape culture.  There are also opponents at both ends of the political spectrum as well, and for the purposes of this question, it is up to readers how they feel about the prospect of such a ban.  However, people of all political stripes would hopefully agree that such a sweeping form of censorship should at least require a lengthy debate.

Under the original terms of the bill, concerns about advertising sex already treads into the realm of censorship and freedom of speech.  If that is coupled with flawed and vague terminology, it’s reasonable to ask how far beyond the original intent that could be taken.

If the bill could be used to ban porn (and that question might remain entirely speculative until something actually does wind its way through the court system), all it would take is for someone wanting to close their local porn shop to try to sue them for — or push for them to be charged with — advertising sexual services.  There’s no guarantee that anyone would succeed at that, but the possibility that it might is a question worth asking.

Key mechanisms in C-36

There are mechanisms within the bill that would certainly assist such a use of the law.

The bill includes search and seizure powers for materials that are “obscene, a crime comic, child pornography, a voyeuristic recording or an advertisement of sexual services.”  To be fair, all of those items besides “advertisement of sexual services” are already listed in the Criminal Code as materials that can be seized, currently.  But aside from the obviously important proscription of child pornography, none of those other things are characteristically illegal to buy or possess anymore (in the case of voyeuristic recordings, their actionability hinges upon how the recording is obtained), and so we don’t see searches and seizure of pornography, except through some federal departments like the Canada Border Services Agency, which simply confiscates material.  However, this law does ban advertisement of sexual services outright, so there would be greater enforceability.

Additionally, for the purposes of this law at least, the Internet is considered “a public place, or in any place open to public view, that is or is next to a place where persons under the age of 18 can reasonably be expected to be present” — or at least the Harper government sees this phrasing as the best mechanism to include online advertising.

With both the search-and-seizure powers and definition to include online media in the bill, even if it turned out that porn was not legally interpreted as a sexual service, C-36 still provides the structural basis needed to build an anti-porn law, with a minimal amount of effort required.

Soft censorship and stealth

Bill C-36 would allow the Harper Conservatives to institute a ban on porn without appearing to be pro-censorship.  A significant portion of the Conservative base uses freedom of speech as a rallying point, especially when it comes to divisive speech, tabloid-style and gotcha journalism, and hateful (though not necessarily legally hate) speech.  Even calling out hateful speech or non-legal consequences for speech can interpreted as censorship by this contingent.  So if the government wanted to establish a ban, it would probably need to be done by stealth, and look like an accident.

Regardless of how broadly “sexual services” is defined, the ban on advertising could conceivably be used to pressure Internet service providers (ISPs) to institute a content filter system much like MP Joy Smith had been calling for, only months ago.  That is, if ISPs are threatened with the possibility being held legally accountable for any ads obtained through their networks, a content filter then appears to be the path of least resistance.  And no matter how specific ISP programmers might try to be, content filters have a tendency to be arbitrary, overly broad, and filter unintended content, just to be safe.  Even if a solid ban cannot be accomplished, soft censorship would remain possible.

Where persons under the age of 18 can reasonably be expected to be present: the legal tactic

The eerie phrasing of “a place where persons under the age of 18 can reasonably be expected to be present” first raised this question in my mind, because it sounds very much like the legal tactic used in Russia’s law banning all “homosexual propaganda” (that is, anything that portrays LGBT people positively — and I’m not speaking hyperbolically when I say that).  When that law passed, the Canadian and American religious right applauded the move, and began debating ways to bring such a law to North America.  Although it could be a haphazard trek from point A to B, each win that occurs in between provides red meat to key elements of the social Conservative base, and injects legislation into the bedrooms of the nation.