Paidika

Okay, it’s the Monday after NYC Pride. Visiting a friend in Kingston, ON, I wasn’t there myself and enjoyed an entirely dry night—the wine stores close early on Sunday nights in moralistic Ontario—but some of you will just be sobering up from a grand fête, as well you should be. We have, after all, a lot to celebrate, particularly in New York. Meanwhile Toronto is just gearing up for its own celebration, to take place this coming weekend.

We need now to think about the way forward: marriage isn’t by any means the end of the road. In Canada, the sad fact of the matter is that far too many GLB folks take that as given: “We can even marry now,” they’re likely to say, when noting how far the cause has come. Don’t get me wrong—marriage equality is important, and much more, I think, for its symbolic value than even for the substantive economic benefits that it guarantees to same-sex couples. But we need to keep a couple of things closely in mind. Two points in particular testify strongly against now adopting a blasé attitude towards the struggle for LGBT advancement in America—aside from the non-trivial point that to be blasé under any circumstance makes you a bit of a cad.

• One is what Katherine Franke, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law, so eloquently pointed out in her New York Times editorial of last Thursday.  Now that marriage is a same-sex option at all, it should not have to be the only option: I for one am very unsure whether I would ever want to get married, and I should be upset if I were ever in a financial situation in which that would prove the most prudent thing to do. And the point is somewhat broader than Franke makes it out to be. Homo- and transphobes are in some sense right when they say that the advancement of LGBT rights degrades the family, or some bullshit like that: that is to say, once one considers that there can be more than one set-up of a family—once “[e]verybody knows that the naked man and woman / are just a shiny artefact of the past,” as Leonard Cohen would have it—then one can consider a set of options for sexual relationships and child-rearing partnerships that is in some sense hardly limited. And why should two-person monogamous sexual unions as better for the people involved in them or the children who benefit from then than other options? That’s not clear.
• The second issue is that there continue to be more urgent—which is not to say more important—issues at hand. We all know that America has no federal legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation; Canada has that, at least, insofar as sexual orientation is included in the Charter as an identity category according to which one cannot discriminate. But gender identity is protected in neither country, and given the Republican majority in the House and the Conservative majority government our chances are frankly non-existent. All this when the Gay and Lesbian Task Force recorded in a landmark survey released in February double the rates of unemployment and homelessness among transgender persons as compared to the general population.

I might strike some as a one-trick pony sounding off so much about employment discrimination, but I doubt that we can see lasting LGBT advancement in a political sense unless we see stability for LGBT persons in an economic sense as well. And I’m convinced that that won’t happen until we have a federal act forbidding employment discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexuality. 

Just some things to think about as we celebrate.