Silencing the Elders

Queer Momentum's Poison

Thursday night, on the eve of Pride weekend in Vancouver, I attended the “Ask a Trans Person Anything” event put on by the Society of Queer Momentum, TransAction Alberta and Fierte Canada Pride. Fae Johnstone of Queer Momentum, and Victoria Bucholtz of TransAction Alberta were the featured speakers. It was, they said, Fae’s 39^th appearance at the cross-country series, and Victoria’s 41^st.

If I were to say I was appalled, that would be an understatement. Heart-shattered is a better term.

I was not shattered by the unctuousness of Fae’s performance as he spooned the snake oil salesman’s stock into the mouths of his audience, nor by the way that Victoria repeatedly crossed the line from misinformation into outright lie territory. What shattered me was the effect on their audience and the significance of that effect.

About 30 people attended, half-filling the small meeting room attached to the majestic St. Andrews Wesley United Church, recently subjected to a two-year renovation project and currently flying two large trans flags on either side of its entrance. Since I frequently have occasion to enter the sanctuary, I know that there is also a massive “queer” flag hanging where another denomination might have a crucified Jesus.

They were Queer Momentum’s people, and Victoria and Fae knew it. Afterall, they had a list of people to be turned away from the door, should they show up. National Post columnist Amy Hamm was on the list, and was duly barred by the night’s bouncer.

When the event began, fifteen minutes late, Fae and Victoria warmed the audience up by bragging about excluding a known transphobe, a person I’m pretty sure Victoria referred to as having been “convicted” of transphobia. This was the first instance of the truth not being good enough for the scarlet-headed drag queen. I question my memory of the word he used because it’s so puzzling – transphobia is not yet a crime in Canada and the person referred to (since neither Fae nor Victoria named Amy, neither will I) has never appeared in a criminal court.

The audience chuckled on demand.

The audience chuckled.

I looked around. I saw a smattering of multi-hued heads above clothing no doubt pulled from the free bins at the local charity shops. A couple of earnest career women in weekend casual wear. And about a dozen white-haired oldies. It was the latter group, what was being done to them, that shattered me.

Loosely bunched on one side of the aisle, they remind me of baby birds, heads tilted up, beaks open to receive their mother’s offering. Or maybe more appropriately of communicants about to receive the body of Christ. Their open, expectant faces spoke to me of lives lived partly in service to the needs of the church. I have no doubt these were regular congregants of the church that provided this meeting room, and that they have given yearly tithes to provide for orphans in India or drought-affected farmers in Africa. They have again and again and again heeded the call for money or labour or time to help those weaker or poorer or hungrier than themselves.

These are the people, of course, that conservative commentators are pleased to accuse of keeping the Liberal party in power, the newly reviled boomers painted as selfishly smug in their million dollar homes, clutching their wealth – derived from the destruction of the planet – to their chests.

Full disclosure – I’m of the same demographic. I know what it’s like to be raised by the generation that survived global war, either as soldiers, or as the bereaved on the homefront, or as immigrants from the battle sites. I know what it’s like to be released, well-fed, well-clothed, well-educated, into a world full of opportunity — so full that we could play with poverty for a few of our early adult years, try out communal living, protest the shoulds and should nots that our elders had imposed out of their own trauma and fear, tear apart old norms to create a looser, freer, happier society.

Boomers were the most potent generation in memory. They had the power of numbers and used that power to initiate all the liberation movements – sexual liberation, women’s liberation, gay liberation, the anti-war movement, the racial justice movement — until the post-war boom settled, when the fountain of money slowed to a dribble, when the new economy of the “trickle down effect” turned the screws.

We aged out of the workforce just in time. And some of us, the successful middle-class of us, live in houses that are relics now of the post-war boom. If we’re lucky we have indexed pensions. We’ve benefited by now, some of us, from a wealth transfer as our own parents died.

Those who have raised families have tried to provide the material that would allow our children to surpass us in wealth, opportunity, success or happiness. We expected our children to outdo us.

Most of all we have experience, experience that would in many cultures be valued. But when we should be listened to, we are patronized, and we are told lies that are so outrageous that we have no experience with which to offer counsel. We are sold a non-existent parallel “reality” and told that’s the new world.

Trans women (men) have no advantage over cis women (women) in sport, Victoria coos in answer to the first audience question. In fact, in many sports, those requiring speed or quick movement, cis women have the advantage. They have less mass, he explains, and so they can move faster. Never mind the actual statistics, available to anybody with an internet connection.

As a resident of Alberta he has in-depth knowledge of what’s happening there under Premier Danielle Smith. They’re doing genital inspections of people’s school-age daughters, he announces dramatically. His audience, these kindly, well-meaning elders, gasp in unison.

Of course they gasp. They know the difference between right and wrong.

While Victoria handles the lies, a boxed set familiar to those of us from all the western countries serviced by ILGA, GLAAD, Egale, Amnesty, etc., Fae mixes things up by ejaculating justifications for the violence of the trans movement.

Mostly such behaviour occurs in the first year or two of transition, when they’re hurting, he asserts. They may be broke, they may not have eaten that day, they’re hungry and mostly they hurt. Everything hurts, he purrs, so of course some of them lash out at the world and even at each other.

Never mind the statistics such as those recently published in the UK, showing more trans identifying men have murdered people over the last 25 years than have been murdered. Or that more than half of all trans-identifying male prisoners have been convicted of violent crime, including rape of both women and children. No, if there’s violence, it’s just juvenile delinquency, something the “transwoman” will grow out of.

This is how our elders, the most potent generation in living memory remember, are silenced and rendered politically useless at best, harmful at worst. I know many of my demographic are fed a false picture of “trans” by our national legacy media, particularly the government-funded CBC. I’ve watched some of the endless stream of sad stories they’ve presented, showing poor teenage males who “just want to pee” in the women’s washroom, so much so that if they can’t they’ll just die.

But last night I saw it and heard it in person. I know that the two pretenders at the front of the room looked into the eyes of those naïve and kindly men and women and fed them poisonous lies. And I know our governments fund them millions of dollars to do that.

Professional beggars of the philanthropic industry have replaced the anti-war protesters, the defenders of AIDS-ravaged gay men, the first abortion providers who went to jail for their work, the anti-nuclear activists, those who would preserve old growth forests and ancient salmon runs.

The courage and drive of the Boomers are replaced by the patter of forked-tongue pseudo-preachers, pretending not just to be the sex they’re not, but also to be oppressed and victimized. Most of all pretending that their sexual licence is a human rights cause, that their misogyny is empowering to women.

And these slick entrepreneurs of nothing are deployed by someone who wants to render the most powerful demographic null and void. Who would want to do that?

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