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The Soapbox: Protecting children means letting them be queer

As we move through Pride Month, Alex Tétreault, former chair of Fierté Sudbury Pride offers a reminder about a major reason Pride is so important: ‘This isn’t about a culture war, it’s not a friendly debate or a difference of opinion. For us, and for every other marginalised population, hate is a matter of life and death’

We’re a couple weeks into Pride Month and hate has already spewed out from every corner of the internet and into the real world. 

There are bans on trans athletes, on gender-affirming care, and on talking about 2SLGBTQ+ issues in classrooms. An entire town in Wisconsin was besieged by bomb threats until a school district dropped an investigation into whether a trans students’ rights were breached. A family friendly drag show in Dallas was met with death threats and a proposed ban on letting youth be anywhere near drag. 

While these far-from-isolated examples come from America, our southern border isn’t nearly as airtight as we might like to think it is. 

Plenty of your friends, co-workers, neighbours, or people with whom you share a roof would be more than happy to have those same things happen here, to us. A lot of people I know are worried and you should be, too.

Of course, this kind of stuff isn’t anything new. As queer people, hate and the ever-present threat of violence are a part of our daily lives. 

We see them in sneering looks from strangers as we try to live our lives. We see them when people disregard our humanity and treat us like monsters. We see them in rhetoric that claims to want to “protect the children” from what they call indoctrination, grooming, and deviancy. We see them in the beliefs and platforms of political candidates and parties. We see them published in the country’s leading newspapers disguised as just asking questions. 

You might not see all of these things. Maybe they’re so mundane that your brain barely registers them, or you’ve never experienced these first hand, but we see them every day and that takes a heavy toll on our well-being and on our sense of safety. None of us want to be the next Matthew Shepard, and we can never be sure that we won’t be.

I could spend hours throwing statistics your way related to the queer experience in Canada, studies about higher rates of suicide and self-harm, about lower wages, about higher rates of substance abuse, about homelessness, about harassment, violence, and hate crimes. 

I could talk about the different ways in which systemic oppressions continue to disadvantage queer people. None of those things will get better by preventing questioning children from learning that queer people exist. It’s only going to keep youth who feel trapped from reaching out. 

It does nothing to help them feel good in their bodies, to better understand themselves, or to prevent them from taking their own lives. All that needless pain and loss, all because a loud minority of ignorant hatemongers seems hell bent on denying these kids the freedom to be themselves.

And fine, people don’t have to like or even tolerate queer people. Ultimately, people are entitled to hate me and my community as much as they please. But they certainly shouldn’t be surprised when we dare challenge them and draw attention to their hate. 

I don’t care about their hysteria over cancel culture or about managing their victim complexes. I care that there should be social consequences for publicly harassing and vilifying vulnerable populations, especially when the lives of the children they’re so obsessed with protecting are at stake. 

We are not the same; they hate us because of who we are, of things that we can’t change about ourselves that ultimately have no bearing on their existence, and we push back because they want to banish us from public life. 

Any attempt to paint this as a “both sides” issue is weak and complacent and does nothing but reinforce the idea that our identities, our lives, are up for debate instead of something each and every one of us should have the power to decide on our own terms, including children.

This Pride Month, and every month after that, my wish is for everyone to do their part to help stop this hate. No matter how much these people might whine or complain or throw a tantrum demanding to be the centre of attention, we’re in no obligation to give them an inch or validate their feelings in any way, because it’s counterproductive to tolerate the intolerant. 

Kids can be mean little sponges, parroting hateful rhetoric they’ve heard or, in the case of queer youth, internalising it and beating themselves up instead of celebrating their uniqueness. 

Having dealt with that myself and still trying to overcome it, we can’t allow children to continue to be traumatised in this way. We need to push for more comprehensive sex education programs in schools, to better educate youth about the world around them, to encourage businesses and organizations to have more inclusive practices, to demand that our elected officials address our issues, and to speak up when others around us spew hate no matter how awkward or uncomfortable it might make us feel. 

We don’t need you to be an expert or to say the right things. More than anything, we just need you to be allies, to listen and to try to do the right thing. Violent anti-queer rhetoric often goes hand in hand with disdain towards women, Indigenous populations, racialized folks, you name it. Even if you think that queerphobia doesn’t impact you or your loved ones directly, those same people would be more than willing to take away your rights. We need to be there for one another, especially because the police rarely intervene except in the most extreme of situations, and even then.

This isn’t about a culture war, it’s not a friendly debate or a difference of opinion. 

For us, and for every other marginalised population, hate is a matter of life and death. None of our rights or protections are guaranteed and it’s so easy for us to backslide, to undo generations of progress. All it takes is one stroke of the pen, cheered on by hatemongers who would love nothing more than to see some of their favourite scapegoats disappear. 

If we leave hate unchallenged, we risk letting this happen. We all need to do better for future generations by leaving them a world that is more accepting, more just, and freer than the one we’ve built for ourselves. 

If simply letting a child find out that someone can have two moms or that their soccer teammate has different pronouns threatens to destroy society as we know it, then maybe its foundations were never all that solid to begin with.

Alex Tétreault is a communicator, community activist, and artist born and raised in Sudbury. He was the chairperson of Fierté Sudbury Pride from 2019 to 2021.


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