Trans Day of Celebration

Hate dealing with red tape? Talk to a transgendered person and you may start to realize how good you actually have it.

Susan Gapka, LGBT representative for the New Democratic Party and a well-known transgender activist, has plenty of stories to tell. Marking the Trans Day of Celebration at Queen’s University, Gapka described her experiences last Thursday afternoon to a small but attentive audience at Wallace Hall in the John Deutsch Centre.

Falling outside conventional gender categories can often turn a seemingly minor matter into a major hassle. When Gapka called CIBC recently to activate her credit card, a bank employee refused to believe the card was in her name. The employee asked her a series of personal questions – what was her mother’s maiden name, how long had she had the card – until finally eliciting a blank response.

“She clearly was asking me a question I couldn’t answer,” said Gapka, “and then she turned it down…she didn’t believe that my voice was Susan Gapka’s voice.”

A self-identified trans woman, Gapka struggled in early years with her sexual identity. Born and raised as a boy but always uncomfortable in the role, she grew up on a military base at a time – the 1960s – when there were few role models for a young person questioning his or her gender identity (with the possible exception of Christine Jorgensen, the first person to have sex reassignment surgery).

As a child, she ran away from home. “I didn’t have a place to talk about not being comfortable with who I was,” said Gapka. “They didn’t have these kinds of events when I was growing up.”

She eventually graduated from York University with a degree in political science. According to a Facebook group promoting her later bid to become Ontario NDP Executive and Federal NDP LGBT Co-chair, “Susan Gapka transitioned on September 28, 1999 to fulfil her lifelong dream of living as a woman while working as a student placement at Toronto City Hall.”

Now the LGBT Director for Toronto Centre NDP Executive, Gapka has been active in issues ranging from same-sex marriage to the relisting of sex reassignment surgery for trans people in Ontario. But on Thursday her focus was putting pressure on the federal and provincial governments as they consider bills specifically banning discrimination against transgendered individuals.

At the federal level, Bill C-389 would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to include gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination (hence the event slogan, “Trans Rights Are Human Rights!”). Currently, the Act only prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted.” C-389 has had one reading in Parliament but its future remains uncertain.

At the provincial level, NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo re-introduced the Trans Rights Bill in November to add “gender identity” to the Ontario Human Rights Code, which does not currently protect transgendered people. Premier Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals appear to have abandoned the issue, but Gapka refused to waver, telling her audience that “the more pressure you put on the government, the more they’ll respond.”

Also speaking at Wallace Hall Thursday was Kingston and the Islands NDP candidate Daniel Beals, who suggested that the local party organization had not done enough to address trans grievances. “It’s a responsibility we haven’t lived up to,” he admitted. While aiming to change that, Beals was pessimistic about the fate of the federal and provincial bills.

“My gut feeling is this could take forever,” he said. “There is…some cooperation going on between the federal Liberals and the federal NDP, as far as there’s some common ground there and they could maybe get that done at some point. If we had a coalition government maybe we could get that done. It bothers me on a provincial level that the provincial Liberals are not addressing it all…part of that may have to do with the fact that provincially the NDP is a lot weaker, and on a federal level the NDP is actually gathering quite a bit of strength, more strength than I think people realize.”

While Gapka said the bills were mainly symbolic, they underlined the importance of official human rights protection. Trans children, she stressed, needed the state to include them and tell landlords, employers, etc. that “it’s wrong to discriminate”.

But the clock is ticking; the provincial government recently cut funds for genital reassignment surgery. Education on Gender Issues committee member Aleta Gruenewald offered a potent summary of what was at stake.

“95% of all trans-identified students don’t feel safe at school, as opposed to one-tenth of straight students,” said Gruenewald. “Trans-identified people continue to be marginalized in all walks of life, from being unable to find a guaranteed safe washroom or walk down the street in safety at night…to being routinely discriminated at the office and in the classroom.

“These issues are…terrible because they mask the tremendous joy and satisfaction that trans-identified individuals can experience simply through expressing their own unique identities. Being trans is so often emphasized in terms of mental illness, in terms of difficulty, in terms of the obstacles that trans people face, and so little about being trans is celebrated. It’s for this reason that despite these hardships, it is nonetheless important, even essential, to dedicate this day to celebration, to joy for the many hard-won achievements of trans-identified individuals.”

On that note, Gruenewald segued into a PowerPoint presentation profiling famous transgendered individuals, among them:

• Jan Morris (1926-) – British historian, novelist, and Booker Prize nominee, born James Morris.
• Jin Xing (1967-) – Chinese ballerina; one of the few trans women recognized by the Chinese government.
• Billy Tipton (1914-1989) – American jazz pianist and bandleader, born Dorothy Tipton.
• Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992) – African-American drag queen. Co-founder of S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), which provided food, clothing and shelter to trans-identified young people.
• Eddie Izzard (1962-) – English stand-up comedian, actor and transvestite. He has appeared in films such as Ocean’s Eleven, Across The Universe and Valkyrie.
• Murray Hill – American comedian and pioneering drag king.
• Lynn Conway (1938-) – American computer scientist, electrical engineer and trans woman.
• Nelly Fonseca (1922-1963) – Peruvian modernist poet.
• Aya Kamikawa (1968-) – Tokyo municipal official and the first transsexual person to seek elected office in Japan.
• Jamison Green (1948-) – American transgender activist known for his documentary films and autobiographical book Becoming a Visible Man.

After the slideshow, event participants gathered their chairs in a circle for discussion period. One of the main issues raised was the relationship of trans rights groups to other social movements.

“Solidarity shouldn’t just be between ‘sis-gendered’ [feminist] and trans-gendered people,” said Gruenewald. “It should be between every group that feels as if it has been marginalized, and I just think it’s so important to have that connection to the feminist community…and also to really analyze it from an angle of race and social class as well, because you just can’t take it in a vacuum.”

Event organizer Kalanthe Khaiat agreed.

“You want any kind of social rights initiative to be as open as possible,” said Khaiat. “That’s one thing I’m so grateful to feminist thought for, for giving us this idea of intersectionality of oppression. The movements that will be benefiting the most people…are those that recognize that someone can have all these different individual and social identities that are targets of oppression.

“The classic example that gets brought up inside classrooms is the black non-able bodied lesbian woman, who could align herself with the queer movement, could align herself with the civil rights movement, but those are so limiting in their discrete functions. What is needed is a social rights movement that says, ‘okay, we’ve got able-bodiedness, sexuality, physical ethnicity, gender…all are targets of oppression.’ We’re not going to make any progress by just making one of those oppressions stop, because they all stem from a hegemonic structure that says oppression can happen based on difference.”

Gapka made the case for working within the system to effect change. But others suggested that the system itself was part of the problem.

“The whole socioeconomic structure also has to be taken into consideration,” said Gruenewald. “What does the society value? In a capitalistic society with no bottom line, what kind of society are we creating for individuals within [it]? And what sort of messages are we sending to people who we don’t believe to be ‘optimal’ in terms of their ability to produce or engage in work environments? We have this very limited idea of what will be the most beneficial for the company, and the company kind of rules. If an individual in any way deviates from the norm of what they believe will turn the biggest profit, they’re not going to want to deal with that person.

“[In] the most basic normative example, you could hire a woman or a man, but the woman’s likely to get pregnant, then she leaves, then if she’s pregnant and she leaves ‘we’re going to have to pay for maternity leave, we don’t want to deal with that.’ So it’s that kind of putting the corporate interest above the people.”

For Gapka, the struggle for trans rights comes down to very basic issues. She railed against the need to list oneself as male or female on government documents and suggested amending the Vital Statistics Act.

“There’s no reason to have sex designation on any of your legal documents,” said Gapka. “Only on certain ones…OHIP cards. That was a problem for me when people started calling me sir. Can I call you a bigot? That would be wrong for me to say something that was racist, or homophobic, so why are you calling me sir?”

Jon Elmer slams Canadian policy on Israel-Palestine

Originally posted at Kingstonist.com.

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
– Paulo Freire

Canadian politicians have their knickers in a twist over Israeli Apartheid Week.

Ontario MPPs of all parties voted to condemn the international campus event, decrying its organizers for their so-called “hate speech”. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff released an official statement of condemnation in which he claimed that “the activities planned for the week will single out Jewish and Israeli students. They will be made to feel ostracized and even physically threatened in the very place where freedom should be paramount — on a university campus.”

Disingenously, he added that “criticism of Israeli government policy is legitimate,” while “wholesale condemnation of the State of Israel and the Jewish people is not legitimate. Not now, not ever.”

Iggy’s argument would surely surprise many of the Jews who attended IAW events at Queen’s this week. Now in its sixth year, Israeli Apartheid Week is an annual series of events held in cities and campuses around the globe to educate people on the nature of Israeli apartheid and its brutal military occupation of Palestine. The use of the word “apartheid” draws deliberate parallels to the racist 20^th century South African regime, and the minds behind IAW aim to put similar pressure on the Israeli government by launching Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns worldwide.

The 2010 Israeli Apartheid Week in Kingston was organized by the group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights. Events from Monday to Wednesday at Queen’s included lectures on “Transnational Popular Resistance for Palestine”, “Israeli Apartheid: What’s in a Name”, “The Politics of Divestment: Darfur vs. Israel”, and “The Politics of Local and International Solidarity in Palestine”. On Friday, the Artel hosted the film Slingshot Hip-Hop, a documentary about Palestinian rap music.

On Thursday night, Canadian freelance journalist Jon Elmer spoke at Macintosh-Corry Hall to a diverse audience and put the spotlight on Canada’s support for Israeli apartheid with his presentation “Ghetto Palestine: Canadian Foreign Policy and the Future of the Israel/Palestine conflict.”

Elmer is a veteran reporter who has long focused on the Middle East, reporting from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the al-Aqsa Intifada (2003), after Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip (2005), and during the sanctions period and resultant internal strife (2007). His work has appeared on Al-Jazeera, and he has covered globalization summits and accompanying protests throughout North America.

Elmer held the audience’s attention well past the two and a half hour time limit. He had the refreshing veneer of an unrepentant leftist, willing to go beyond the “safe zone” of conventional wisdom in his denunciation of Canada’s imperialist foreign policy. He challenged NDP candidate Daniel Beals on his party’s lukewarm support for the Palestinian cause and its acquiescence to the Queen’s Park motion condemning Israeli Apartheid Week, as well as chastising the federal NDP for failing on more than three occasions to end Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan.

Beals, for his part, acknowledged a gulf between regional NDP supporters and party leaders, who tend to be more conservative than grassroots activists. He also said there was a constant intra-party debate on the issue of Israel-Palestine among Jewish NDP members.

Elmer’s presentation was densely-packed with information that could be divided into two broad sections. In the first part, he explained the nature of Israeli apartheid and the worldwide movement against it through the BDS strategy. In the second part, he explained Canada’s role supporting Israel in what the Goldstone Report described as possible “crimes against humanity”.

Named after UN Human Rights Council president Richard Goldstone – an internationally respected South African jurist and ardent Zionist – the report unequivocally stated that Israel committed war crimes during its 2008-9 attack on the Gaza Strip through collective punishment of Palestinian civilians and the use of white phosphorus in densely-populated areas (the report also accused Palestinian militants of war crimes for their deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians via rockets and mortars).

The Herzliya Conference, sponsored by Israeli think tank the Institute for Policy and Strategy, is the most prominent stage for the articulation of national policy by Israel’s political leaders. Its most recent report talked about the “delegitimization” of Israel on the world stage following the publication of the Goldstone Report. Israel also believes that the BDS campaign represents a “strategic threat that could become an existential threat” to the Jewish state.

The term “apartheid”, Elmer stressed, was central to simplifying the terms of the debate. The BDS tactic helped end South African apartheid after 40 years, even as many Western countries continued to support the racist government there. The terms of the debate were similar; Nelson Mandela, like Palestinians who resist the Israeli occupation, was also called a “terrorist”.

Ironically, given the controversy surrounding the term “apartheid”, the term was recently used by none other than Israel’s hawkish defence minister Ehud Barak in arguing that Israel’s security would be better served by a peace agreement with the Palestinians. “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel,” said Barak, “it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic.

“If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Explaining the pro-Israel consensus of the Canadian political establishment, Elmer suggested that, as with Canada’s war in Afghanistan, foreign policy towards Israel was based less on tangible material resources or imperial conquest and more on the abstract idea of gaining “a seat at the table” in international discussions.

“You can’t really underestimate a seat at the table,” said Elmer. “When important world decisions are made, if you lay your blood and treasure on the line, particularly in service of American political objectives, you’re going to have a seat at that table and you’re going to be able to participate when contracts are given out or political influence is given out. And sometimes you don’t get direct political influence over the territory upon which you are intervening.

“I think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most visible, longest-running, most politically-significant conflicts in the world. Whether that’s just or not is a different story, but it’s a reality, and for Canada to participate in that is seen as strategically important to Canadian interests.”

Canada currently has expeditionary forces deployed in 18 different countries. As Elmer pointed out, these are not all declared combat missions, but often include military “advisors” or attempts to influence elections – traditionally the preserve of CIA-style covert operations, but now openly funded by Western think tanks such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which aim to set up economically compliant pro-Western governments.

The Canadian foreign policy establishment’s cynical attitude towards “democracy” in Palestine was put on display for the world to see after U.S. President George W. Bush pushed for an election there in 2006. When the results handed a resounding victory to Hamas, rather than the pro-Western Fatah, Canada became the first country not to recognize the new government. As Defence Minister Peter MacKay said in a revealing statement, “We can’t be said to be following the Americans if we pre-empt them.”

Following the election, members of Fatah, with American and Israeli support, attempted to stage a coup by ousting members of Hamas from the government (detailed in David Rose’s Vanity Fair article “The Gaza Bombshell”). Hamas regained control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, yet this defence of a democratically-elected government was itself referred to in mainstream Western media as a “coup”.

Canada has since supported prospective Palestinian strongman Salam Fayyad as the head of an “independent” government backed by Israel and the West. With an American education in economics and a tenure at the International Monetary Fund, Fayyad is the preferred vehicle for a neoliberal transformation of Palestine. Elmer compared him unfavourably to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, in that while both are Western puppets, Karzai at least has an Afghan constituency. Fayyad receives $2 billion in funding annually from Canada, the United States and Europe, and the Canadian International Development Agency has lavishly funded a security force that may have been complicit in vast human rights abuses.

Israeli Foreign Minister and protofascist Avigdor Lieberman, who has suggested requiring Israeli Arabs to take a loyalty oath, has declared that Israel “needs more allies” like Canada. Indeed, this country’s unquestioning support of Israel may now even exceed that of the United States. Elmer posited three recent political decisions that help explain Israel’s embrace of the Great White North.

Firstly, Canada backed the postponement of a ceasefire during the 2006 war in Lebanon, allowing Israel to complete its devastation of the country. Secondly, the country has blockaded Hamas and refuses to accept the legitimacy of the 2006 Palestinian elections that swept the Islamist party to power. Finally, Canada has been “at the vanguard” in the isolation of Iran – a country which has not attacked any of its neighbours for centuries and has no nuclear weapons, while Israel regularly utilizes military force internally and externally and has an undeclared stockpile of hundreds of nuclear weapons.

Elmer warned about the consequences of Canada’s blind support for a militaristic Israel that flouts international law.

“The political implications of Canada being allied with Israel this closely are legally clear,” said Elmer. “If Canada is bragging about supporting a security force that’s carrying out widespread human rights abuses, legally in international law before the International Criminal Court, Canada is participating in war crimes.

“If people fund African rebels, the whole world thinks it’s obvious that that’s a war crime,” he continued. “But when we support Palestinian security forces or Afghan security forces carrying out human rights abuses, or Iraqi forces carrying out human rights abuses, or we’re building prisons in Haiti for a corrupt government to have thousands of political prisoners, or whether we’re arresting suspected Taliban insurgents and bagging their heads and sending them off to Bagram Air Base to be raped and tortured or off to Guantanamo, these are crimes under international law.

“So when [Junior Foreign Affairs minister] Peter Kent says…an attack on Israel is an attack on Canada, we can throw up our arms and say that’s appalling, or we can actually say that’s pretty useful political fodder for resisting these programs, because the vast majority of people don’t agree with Peter Kent’s statement. And that gives you an avenue into saying, well, where do we draw the line on our support, and where do Israel’s crimes become our crimes? Where did the Afghan government’s crimes become our crimes?

“International law is crystal clear on this.”