Dispatches from the Left

Do no harm

Welcome back to Dispatches from the Left! 

Winter is making its last stand across parts of the province, and hopefully it’s COVID’s last stand, too. Although variant numbers are alarming and ICUs have been pushed past the brink, more residents are getting vaccinated by the day. Keep taking care of each other, and let’s hope we’re almost at the finish line.

Kathy Cassidy via Flickr

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Regina City Council fumbles the ball on trans rights  

But they can still pick it back up. On Wednesday, Regina city council’s Community Wellness Committee heard from delegates about a proposed “conversion therapy” ban in the city (this ban would stand on its own, separate from the proposed federal ban, Bill C-6, which is a copy of Bill C-8, which died when Parliament was prorogued last year. It would be similar to bans in Saskatoon, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and others). Kent Peterson of Queen City for All was the first to speak on the matter, calling conversion therapy a “cancer in our community” that is “inflicted on children and vulnerable adults.” Peterson added that conversion therapy is “always violent, abusive, manipulative, and based on deep-seated hatred.” (At this time Councillor Terina Shaw said she saw a “red flag” at the word “always” and played the old hit “I have talked to people who have had a positive impact from this repellent practice”). Council also heard from leaders of faith group who spoke to the debt the church owes to 2SLQBTQ people after untold years of queerphobia. 

But the meeting also took a troubling turn, and the councillors seemed unable to meet the challenge laid before them. One delegate brought up Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, the idea that transness is a “social contagion” and that children and teens will begin identifying as transgender when members of their peer group do, and that these youth will then get medical treatments that they don’t need and will end up regretting. ROGD is more moral panic than good science, and has been debunked more than once. The delegate, who cited that 80-90 per cent of teens who experience gender dysphoria will come through it “resolved” (what?) noted that he had not actually read the study he was referencing himself. No councillor challenged this. Another delegate misgendered a transgender youth and erroneously said that the father of that youth was in jail for misgendering their child, when in fact the man was in prison for repeatedly and egregiously violating court orders relating to the child. Again, no councillor challenged this. Cat Haines, a past chair of TransSask and a queer and trans researcher, educator, and academic, said in a Facebook post that “the opportunity and platform that was given to the organized and mobilized anti-trans right in Regina today will have material impacts for trans people down the line from now.” Rather than discussing conversion therapy, “we opened the door to a discussion about the legitimacy of trans health and affirmative care.”

Clyde C. via Flickr

The rank, institutional and social transphobia that’s afflicting the UK and the US hasn’t made it to Canada yet (although transphobia is certainly alive and well here), which is not to say that we should pat ourselves on the backs, but rather that we need to be vigilant in stamping out any and all instances of it. In the US and UK, transphobia has become such an accepted facet of the culture that it’s seeped into legislation and media coverage, robbing trans people, and in particular trans youth, of their human rights. Transphobia is particularly malignant because it’s not just associated with the far-right and fundamentalism. In the UK transphobia has made strange bedfellows with feminism, with TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who are, confusingly, neither radical nor feminist) making sickening arguments that trans people threaten the gains that women have made in the workplace, athletics, and virtually every other field, that non-binary people don’t actually exist and that claiming to be non-binary harms gender non-conforming cis people, that trans men are just confused lesbians, suffering from internalised misogyny, and that providing trans youth with non-permanent hormone blockers is somehow more cruel than forcing them to go through irreversible puberty. By cloaking their rhetoric in the language of human rights and “parental rights,” transphobes have helped bring in legislation that prevents trans youth from receiving gender-affirming care and creates cumbersome and expensive barriers to having your gender marker changed on your identification. Thanks to the government and media friendliness to transphobes, transphobic hate crimes in the UK have quadrupled since 2015. America has seen rates of violence against trans people reach record levels. To think it couldn’t happen here is the same folly as thinking COVID-19 couldn’t happen here. 

Now it’s doubtful that city council as a whole holds animosity towards trans youth, or wants to cause them harm in any way. What more likely happened is more benign (but still insidious). They simply didn’t know that what they were seeing was transphobic. That’s a problem. If council is unable to identify transphobic arguments, they’re not going to be able to make the kind of thoughtful, respectful, evidence-based decisions they need to ensure Regina is a city that’s safe and affirming for trans people. Fortunately, there’s robust literature and a community of talented, thoughtful trans advocates that can help them identify transphobia and prevent any further platforming of hate.

Sask Party chooses harm with new budget  

On April 6, the Sask Party released their new budget - the second of the pandemic. The deficit has swelled to a record $2.6 billion, with more deficits expected until at least 2025. Fortunately this doesn’t matter because deficits aren’t real, they’re just bogeymen for Boomers and the Sask Party Youth Caucus. But what is real is the harm caused by the province’s refusal to fund Prairie Harm Reduction. The organization had asked for $1.4 million (less than the province spent funding community rinks and veterans’ clubs) to keep it running 24/7. The site is currently only open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Friday, and much of their human resources has to be spent on fundraising efforts, instead of the life-saving work that is their mandate. The province refused. 

Bruce Dean via Flickr

Most readers of the Sask Dispatch are going to be familiar with the facts. That 2020 was the deadliest year for drug toxicity deaths in Saskatchewan on record. That 2021 is on track to outpace that. That the dead are beloved mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, cousins, friends. That harm reduction sites save lives. You know this - and the Sask Party knows this. They just refuse to do anything. 

The province has bragged up their $453 million investment in mental health and addictions services as an explanation for why they don’t feel the need to fund PHR’s relatively paltry ask. But they’ve made a choice here. And it’s not a choice to allocate funds elsewhere, or a choice to invest in other evidence-based community responses. It’s a choice to refuse to set a precedent for funding community-based responses to social problems, regardless of whether those responses save lives. They aren’t funding PHR because they don’t want to. They do not believe that they have any obligation to the poor or to drug users or to vulnerable people of any kind, and funding PHR would send the message that they do have that obligation. If they fund PHR, how can they justify not funding a site in Regina, in Prince Albert, in any other Saskatchewan city? How can they justify not funding homeless shelters? It’s an ideological choice - like so many of their choices. And it’s going to kill people. 

Saskatoon Police Service hopes to provide 24/7 terror from the sky

For years the SPS has hassled people in Saskatoon from the sky, flying low over the city’s poorest neighbourhoods between the hours of 10 p.m. and 12 p.m. (so, you know, bedtime), stalking people with an infrared camera. The service claims the Air Support Unit (ASU) has lowered crime rates by 10 per cent (they don’t provide any links on their site to confirm this, but cops never lie so let’s just take that at face value). In 2020, the ASU responded to 1,941 calls, leading to 251 arrests (That’s 12 per cent of calls, and while I wouldn’t want to see more arrests, it seems to me like this is an unusually poor ROI). Now, however, they feel they aren’t bothering people enough, and they want financial resources to keep a plane in the sky 24-hours a day.  

Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr

Essentially what SPS is asking for is millions of dollars to let their officers screw around with expensive toys and harass poor and racialized people in Saskatoon from above. This says nothing of the environmental impact of having a literal jet cruising around 24/7, nor the psychological impact on Saskatoon residents who will be constantly surveilled from the sky. The SPS annual report only came out on April 15, so it’s too soon to tell what kind of organizing will be done in response to this absurd ask, but hopefully there’s a robust response from Saskatoon residents.

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