 From The Conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vanita Srivastava. There's incredible activism happening, even in the moments where this seems despairing. We rise up, we resist, and that is happening too. So I want to make sure that we support and uplift those who are fighting in Tennessee and those who are fighting in Alabama and Arkansas and Louisiana and all throughout the states. This year we've seen an aggressive push to implement anti-trans legislation in the United States. There are currently more than 400 active anti-trans bills across the country. Some legislation denies gender-affirming care to youth and criminalizes those healthcare providers that attempt to do so. Gender bills block trans students from participating in sports, and still others have banned books with trans content. These bills have at least two things in common. They all aim to make being trans harder in an already hostile society, and they are all being spearheaded by the far right. Where is all this anti-trans sentiment coming from? And what do things look like in Canada? Are we a safe haven, or are we following some of the same trends? Cyrus Marcus Ware is on the pod today to help us answer those questions, as well as to get a better understanding of trans histories and the importance of documenting the lived experiences of trans people. A trans man himself, he is an artist, activist and assistant professor in the School of Arts at McMaster University. Cyrus, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. As I mentioned, we've been watching a rapid rise in anti-trans legislation and rhetoric across the United States. What do you attribute that to? There's been a string of uprisings that have really pushed the dial and had us moving towards more justice, more liberation, more freedom, more access for all people to get to thrive. We were winning. And then we saw the uprisings of 2020, which were incredibly successful in getting people to challenge their assumptions about the usefulness of policing in their communities and to really question why their governments were putting so much money into policing rather than into community supports and services. So we saw some incredible progress happening towards justice. And of course, when that happens, the right reacts and tries to regain some ground in some of the ways that Republicans, in particular in the States, but here in Canada, conservative government officials have used their powers to try to regain some of their grounds. So we're in a moment right now where we're seeing a real push for anti-trans legislation, anti-queer content and book bans and book challenges. And all of these kind of really old school tactics from the right that attempt to destabilize the incredible successes of activism and of the uprisings that we've seen. I understand a little bit more, as you say, it's pushback. It's actually a reaction to the success of the uprising that we're seeing here. And because sometimes when we're in these moments, I think, oh, my goodness, they're going to win. This is so tough right now. How do some of these changes that are being implemented? How does that impact trans folks, especially trans folks living in those places impacted by these new legislations? The anti-trans legislation that we're seeing in the States is resulting in a direct criminalization of racialized, disabled, deaf and mad queer trans people. This is who's being dramatically affected by this legislation. We're seeing it affecting kids, but not having access to sports, to bathrooms in their schools, to transaffirming health care. When they do have supportive parents, the parents being criminalized just for supporting their children. So we're seeing these sort of dramatic effects on community. And what we're also seeing is an incredible amount of resistance, an incredible amount of community building and an incredible amount of support networks out of desperation and out of a desire to make sure that we all survive this. We're seeing networks of people saying, can you come to Canada? Can you come here? Not to say that Canada is great. There are a lot of problems with transphobia here, too, right? Nothing is guaranteed. If we can look at the situation in the States as an example, very quickly, things can change. Four hundred pieces of legislation so much can change so quickly so we can't get complacent here and say, oh, things are so much better in Canada. However, creating the conditions where people who are in a dramatically desperate situation, say in Tennessee, which is my homeless state. Oh, Tennessee is your home state. Yeah, my dad's family is all from Memphis, Tennessee, and we're I'm very interested and implicated in what's happening here to make sure that we survive this. How does it feel then? How does it feel for you as a trans man on this side of the border watching what's happening south of the border? One of the things that has always been a big question mark for me in my life is will I stay in Toronto or will I move back to Memphis? And I've always wondered that there are moments where I'm like, no, you know, there are so many things I love about being here in Canada and I love about being here in Northern Turtle Island. And I'm so thankful to get to live in these territories. But there's homesickness. And so I do think all my whole family is down there and it would be wonderful to go back and it would be amazing to get to be in Memphis. And I'm really inspired by some of the incredible activism that has come out of Memphis. Now we see these legislation and these the drag bans and anti-trans bills. And it's creating the conditions where it's no longer safe for me to consider living in Memphis. I don't think I could safely live in Memphis. I couldn't live in a state where I wouldn't be able to access hormones, where I wouldn't be able to access family supports, where my child might be criminalized just because she has a trans father. This is the now a dangerous situation for me, even to go home and visit family. I'm thinking, what are the implications of me using particular restrooms? How can I make sure that I keep myself safe? Yeah, journey down to somewhere that should be home. So it's quite concerning. Yeah, I'm sorry. So I'm really interested in making sure that these things get overturned to make sure that we fight for trans people in Tennessee, that we fight for drag performers in Tennessee, that we fight for gender non-conforming people all across the Southern United States to make sure that the entire United States, but I'm thinking about the South here. And there's incredible activism happening. So I want us to remember that too, that even in the moments where if this seems despairing, we rise up, we resist. And that is happening too. So I want to make sure that we support and uplift those who are fighting in Tennessee and those who are fighting in Alabama and Arkansas and Louisiana and all throughout the States. What is life like in comparison in Canada for trans folks? On the surface, on paper, there's a very good story. There's a very good news story that you could tell. You could talk about the way that Toby Spill and the incredible work of Sherry DeNovo and Susan Gapka and Monica Forrester to make sure that we get gender identity protection and the Canadian human rights charter. So there's some great things that have happened here. And also there is still so much transphobia, so much discrimination. We have a really conservative party that is very against trans rights and trans justice, and that's part of why trans services were delisted from OHIP in 1998 because of a conservative premiere. There are some very conservative ideologies and certainly some of the voices that we hear coming out of some of the more conservative pockets in Northern Turtle Island. There is a real problem and there is still a lot of danger. The reality for people here in Northern Turtle Island is not a safe place. The murder and missing Indigenous women and girls has been amended to say and to spirit to recognize how many to spirit people are going missing and disappearing. There's still a lot of danger because I did interviews with trans women of color and many of them talked about feeling safer walking at 2 a.m. in the city streets than at 2 p.m. because there was less chance of running into people, so less chance of a transphobic attack or transphobic violence or transphobic comments. And so I was like, what are we doing in a world in our communities? We think things are so much better here and trans women of color are choosing to walk through the streets at 2 a.m. because that's the only safe time for them to traverse the city. Like this is a problem. So we still have a lot of work to do here to make sure that trans people, gender nonconforming people, non-binary people, two-spirit people and gender queer people have what they need to be supported in order to truly thrive. We still don't have a world where we're guaranteeing that trans people get to live long enough to become elders. Yeah, the trans post study that came out of Ontario and now they're just finishing the Canadian study. There are some real disparities in terms of longevity of life for trans people. The high prevalence of trans folks who have considered or attempted or completed suicide. There are so many economic injustices that face trans people where they're overeducated and underemployed. So the conditions are still not there. We still have a lot of work to do, even as we can say, at least we're not looking at some of the legislation that we're seeing in Tennessee or in Florida. You've been working in trans justice in Canada for over two decades now. So thank you for sharing some of the long view there with us. I'm wondering what you think about the requests by activists to the Canadian government to allow refugee claims from trans and non-binary folks from places like the UK and the US. What do you think of that request? It's so interesting to me for decades, there have been attempts for folks who are living in the United States who are not experiencing safety because of being trans, because of being queer, because of being black. They have come here to Canada to claim refugee status. And then they've been told, what are you talking about? US is a safe country because we're more interested in maintaining trade and maintaining an alliance with the United States. And there's political implications to accepting refugees from the States. That says something politically. It says that United States is not a safe country for particular communities. So politically doing this would make a dramatic statement that I think we actually do need to make the US is not a safe country for so many communities. We need to create space for people to come here in the same way that we have for folks fleeing violence from mostly white war countries. And we need to do that for queer and trans people in the States and for drag performance and folks. We also have to be doing that in concert with supporting indigenous resurgence and supporting land back. That's actually part of this conversation. It can't be removed from this conversation because, of course, this continues to be occupied territory. So any decisions about who's coming should be made in conversation with indigenous communities who are working around resurgence. Listening to you talk, I'm sure that you have stories from the last couple of decades and you write about the history of the queer and trans movements in Toronto. What's the official record like in the whatever official history books that we have about queer organizing and what's been missing from that story? Like what can you tell us that's missing from the official record? I mean, there's definitely been a lot of work done to chronicle and document early queer organizing here in Canada, largely by white archives, by what was formerly known as Canadian lesbian gay archives. Now the archives with a queue, another similar initiatives across the country, and they've largely left out anyone who wasn't a white gay man. So there's a lot of gaps in our queer archives in terms of trans content, in terms of definitely deaf, met and disabled content, racialized content, black content. So there's a narrative that's been created about queer history and queer justice trajectory that has left out the significant stories of racialized queer and trans people here. And that's part of why my work and my scholarship has largely been to try to reinsert our stories into the archive, to archive the unarchivable as well, to think about places like Blockorama that has been around for 20 plus years, that has been this meeting place and space for queer and trans, black and African diaspora communities for literally a couple of decades now. 25, I think it's 25 years this year. 25 years this year, exactly. Like this is a significant group in organizing space. And like, how do you document that experience of being there? You know what? We should probably just stop for a minute and explain what Blocko is, because maybe people don't know. Blockorama is organized by Blackness, yes, which is this community-based committee that works with Pride Toronto. And it's been organizing since 1998. And the first Blocko was in 1999. And it was first started as a small like Blocko Caribbean style Blocko party, Block Party on the edge of a parking lot that wasn't being used by Pride. It was a day of DJs and it grew to this massive thing where it's now the longest running stage at Pride Toronto's festival, which happens at the end of June and is a big, queer celebration that attracts like two million people. Oh, I'm already starting to think, how can I get into Blocko? Because the lineup is so long. It takes place over 11 hours on Pride Sunday. It's the longest running stage at Pride. It was the first stage to have ASL and Black ASL. It was the first stage to be fully accessible. It's now the largest stage at Pride. It's not taken over the entire parking lot. And the trick to getting into Blocko is to come early, which, of course, nobody wants to, but that's what you've got to do. You've got to come early and they have great performers on early in the day. But you've got to come early because if you come at five, you're going to be in a lineup at Jarvis and keeping in mind the Blocko stage is at Young and Wellesley, so that's quite a journey. So it's quite a lineup. But once you get in there, wow, I mean, there's food vendors. There's community marketplace tables. We've been partnering with Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention since the beginning. So they always have a table woman's, half a woman's hands. There's 11 hours of programming with drag performers and DJs and headliners. And there's been incredible headliners in the last five or six years, including like on Vogue and Destra and just some really incredible folks. I took my kids to that one, to Destra. Oh, Destra, that was so great. And then she took the Pride flag and waved it. And it was like in every Caribbean newspaper was like, oh, my God, Destra is holding a Pride flag and that was at Blocko. So a really special place. Where is the stories of Blocko in a lot of these archives? In the narrative of queer history and organizing, where does Blocko lie? It's such a significant thing. But if you were to look just at some of the documentary film that's been made about organizing here in Canada or if you were to go to the archives, you wouldn't see us there. You wouldn't see the Blocko history. So that is something that's starting to change. And I'm thinking of the incredible work of Courtney McFarland, who's been doing some curating through the archives with a cue to try to bring some early Black queer organizing history to the front. And I'm thinking about some of the trans content that needs to be there because Monica Forrester, a Black queer and trans organizer who has been a sex worker activist for 30 plus years, has been doing street based outreach in the city of Tagurando for 30 plus years, works tirelessly. Her story is often left out. So the story that we do here is about a group of white gay men who were attacked at the bathhouses in 1981. And of course, the reality is that wasn't just white gay men at the bathhouses. There was an entire group of people who were called the foundins found in the bathhouses that night. And there was actually a significant group of East Asian gay men who were at the bathhouse that night so much so that gay Asians of Toronto actually did some incredible court support around some of these East Asian men who were found in and they used the police officer's racism against himself by standing together with the foundins so that then when the police officer was asked, can you point out the people that you found in the bathhouse? They were like, oh, I can't. I remember Richard found telling me that story and talking about how they stood together and knew he's not going to be able to tell us apart. So if you stand together, they're not going to be able to point us out. And that works successfully. Really destabilizing this mythology that it was only white people who were doing the organizing. I'm wondering also about some of the impact of the invisibility in the history books. How does that impact young, especially young trans people today? I was a young trans person. I came out at a very young age. I came out at fourteen and or came out as queer at fourteen and came out as trans in my late teens and early twenties. And I went to the library and I'm a nerd. I was like, oh cool, I'm going to get a book about this. I'm going to read about this is what I'm going to do. Yeah. I mean, I'm thankful that there were some queer books in my library and shut up to librarians were keeping that in this moment where there's so many attempts at book banning and book challenges. But in those books, did I see trans people of color? Did I see queer people of color? Absolutely not. So I thought, oh, I might be the only one where you feel isolated. I know that there's more people out there, but I don't know how to find them. I don't know how to connect with them. I don't know how to contact them. That sense of isolation, that sense of feeling like there's no other black gay people, so there must be something wrong with me or there's no other black trans people, so there must be something wrong with me. Just the idea that even trans people existed. If I had read that at 14, I might have come out sooner. Like, it was just that the absinting creates an impossibility. We can't see ourselves. And I think that moment of seeing yourself reflected is so essential. And I think that when we don't see ourselves reflected, there's an impossibility, you can't imagine a future where we exist. So it's really important to make sure that we're continuing to create spaces where queer youth, trans youth, can come and be around and see themselves reflected, where they can read content and have themselves reflected, where they can go to festivals like La Carama and see themselves reflected, where they can go to the archives with a library like the nerd like I did, go to the library and get up and see themselves reflected so that they know that there's a possibility for themselves. Monica Forester said that they didn't think that they would live past 30. They were so focused on survival. It was really hard to be like, oh, I should save every photo. I should save these flyers. No, of course not. They were focused on surviving. And I think for me, I didn't think I was going to live past 30. So how do we create a different set of conditions for queer and trans youth now so that they can absolutely imagine themselves living past 30 and then be free to do so much more because they know that they're going to have a long life. Wow. It's Pride Month and every year for the past six years, community members have pushed for a safe space at Pride, which includes for many people, no police presence in the official Pride march. Can you explain why that's so important? We don't feel proud when we're surrounded by the entire police and prison road show that the Pride parade had become. By 2016, one BLM stopped the parade and said, look, first of all, here's eight other demands about queer and trans black people at Pride that need to be addressed around access and block O and deaf community members and all these things like that. And one other demand, please stop having police in the parade. That was the only demand that was heard really or remembered, but they actually did list many demands, but the police one was really important because this is not safe. We do not feel safe. Black people are not going to want to come and march in the parade when there is 800 uniformed police officers, prison bailiff trucks, prison guards, marching and police cars. These are the same people who are our torturers. Why would we want to march shoulder to shoulder? When you think about what happened since Trayvon Martin was killed. That's right. People talk about the uprisings as 2020, but actually the uprisings were long before that. Yes, like 2013 when Trayvon Martin was killed and George Zimmerman got off and it kept going because, of course, the death march continued. There were so many police killings, so many police killings. And there was a moment where it was like, why are we celebrating these folks who don't seem to be able to be in community with us? They're killing us. They're brutalizing us. They're criminalizing us. Like, what will it take for you to realize, especially when you think that this movement, the queer and trans movement, the pride movement, grows out of a resistance to police brutality? So why are we celebrating them? So when we marched in 2016 in the Pride parade and stopped the parade and the reaction from the crowd was really negative, a lot of people wanted the parade to continue and didn't get what we were on about. But by 2017, when we marched again, the mood had shifted dramatically. We had come up with these slogans. Maybe we never again have to remind you that we too are queer. We're here in this parade too and we get to be here. Maybe we never again need to remind you not to celebrate our tortures. Maybe we never again need to shut it down for all of us. In that march, people were clapping and cheering and it was a really different sentiment and it was shortly after that that the membership through an AGM forced pride and said, look, we're voting on this and we're voting that police will not be in pride. Of course, there's been many backroom deals to try to get that decision reversed. And that continues to be a fight. But the movement to get police out of pride rippled. And now there are a police out of pride movements in pride festivals all over North America and indeed beyond. And that's going to increase safety for communities that are targeted by police, communities will fall at home by police. And so I'm thinking of queer and trans people as a pride. Best of all, I'm thinking of Black people. I'm thinking of BIPOCs. I'm thinking of disabled FNAT people, poor people. All the people who get roughed around by the cops who don't want to be going to a festival to march with 800 uniform cops that just doesn't feel safe. You write about how trans people have been at the forefront of many resistance movements, they lay their lives and their bodies on the line to improve life for all kinds of people on all kinds of fronts. So housing, prison reform, health care. So this makes life better for all kinds of communities, including marginalized communities, and in fact, for all of us, how can Canadians better support this work? We definitely need everybody to be on board in supporting trans folks and calling out transphobia. So whether that's in your school system, whether that's in your peer group, whether that's in your family of origin. When you hear people being misgendered, when you hear trans issues being up for debate, as if our lives or existence was up for debate, you can get involved and you can say, hold on a minute. And people are inherently valuable. Trans people have existed since the beginning of time, and I'm not going to let you continue on this. And beside the gender binary is fictitious and was created to control us. So doing that work of gender advocacy, supporting trans women of color, supporting trans women of color, monetarily, financially drop them a new transfer, support their initiatives. There's an incredible group of trans women artists who are making incredible work by their work, support their work, donate and support Trans Pride Toronto, which is actually a group that Monica Forrester started. It sounds like it's part of Pride Toronto, but it's not. It's a totally different group and they do trans advocacy and support and outreach and you can support trans groups that are grassroots, that are doing work on the ground. You can go to your local archives and say, where is your trans content? In your education settings, in your children's schools, making sure that trans content is there, making sure that there are washrooms that everybody can use, making sure that sports are accessible and really questioning some of these pervasive mythologies that like somehow trans kids are trying to invade sports to be better at athletics when really they just want to play volleyball with their friends. And then when there are marches and rallies, not everybody can go to a march and rally, but you can support it, you can share it, you can make donations, you can send them PPE to make it covid safe. You can help with making a banner if you're that kind of artsy person. You can do all sorts of things that support this. I'm not one to say, oh, our solutions are all going to come from government legislation, but you can push for legislation to make sure that trans rights are enshrined and protected. And then of course, I think that we all need to be working towards abolition, I think it's the only way that we're going to have true justice for racialized trans people is if we don't have a police system that's constantly going out and arresting trans women of color, just by the assumption that they're doing sex work just because they're trans women of color, arresting or worse, brutalizing black trans people. So we need to eradicate that in order to create more just conditions on the streets that will make a safer space for trans women of color. Thank you so much for all of your energy and time today. Thank you so much for this great conversation. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. That was such a fun conversation and has me excited about Pride Month. Are you planning on attending any of the events? Let us know which ones and maybe tag us on a photo. We're on Instagram now at Don't Call Me Resilient podcast. And if you want to read more about some of the issues we talked about today, I've dropped some of the readings and films that Cyrus mentioned, as well as other resources in the show notes on theconversation.com. If you like what you heard today, great news, because we'll be back next week. In the meantime, make sure to follow the podcast so you don't miss an episode. And please consider sharing this pod with a friend or a family member or drop a review on whatever podcast app you use. Finally, if you have ideas about news stories that you'd love to hear us cover, we'd love to hear from you. Email us at dcmr at theconversation.com. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab. The lab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Venita Sruvastava. Bokeh Saisi is our producer. Oli Nicholas is our assistant producer and student journalist. Jennifer Morose is our consulting producer. Our audio editor is Remitula Sheikh. Ataka Kaki is our audience development and visual innovation consultant. And Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Baki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.