Early yesterday morning, Halifax trans performer Elle Noir was shot by two armed thugs in her apartment.
I’ve seen Elle preform, and she’s a really great entertainer. She lives in a bad neighborhood (I used to work two blocks away from where she shot) and I’m not sure I wanted to believe that it was targeted due to her being trans.
She was in surgery part of yesterday, and she’s now awake and feeling fine. She’ll have some scarring on her arm, where the bullets caught her, but she’ll be physically okay.
She also gave CBCNews an account of the story,
“They were yelling, ‘Tranny faggot, open the door, let us in, let us in,’ which leads me to believe they knew who I was. I’m in a second-floor apartment. You know, you have to have a security key to get into the building.
Something in my stomach sank when I read that. This is not just a gay bashing, this is an attempted murder because of her gender.
But police don’t seem to give a shit.
Halifax Regional Police had not interviewed Cochrane as of noon Wednesday. But after speaking with witnesses, investigators doubt her claim that the shooting was a hate crime, said a police spokesman.
“We believe this particular unit at least — while not saying this particular victim — was targeted specifically,” said Const. Brian Palmeter.
“Certainly we don’t believe this was a hate crime based on the information that we have so far … There may have been other reasons at play why this might have occurred.”
That is utter bullshit. They knew where she lived, they know who they were shouting at and they had a shotgun. That’s hatred. That’s bigotry.
While I hope they nail the motherfuckers to the wall, this is just systemic of the broader problem.
Queers think they’re liberated. Case in point is this feature that was run Toronto weekly, The Grid. As @WeDemandYVR put it, rather succinctly, “Be prepared to be amazed at *just* how much privilege one writer can deny.”
Forty years after the Manifesto and the infamous Stonewall Riots in New York City, a new generation of twentysomething urban gays—my generation—has the freedom to live exactly the way we want. We have our university degrees, homes and careers…
…We vacation with our boyfriends in fabulously rustic country homes that belong to our parents, who don’t mind us coming to stay as a couple. Hell, we even marry our boyfriends, if we choose to, on rooftops overlooking Queen West. Our sexual orientation is merely secondary to our place in society. We don’t need to categorize or define ourselves as gay, and who we sleep with—mostly men and, hey, sometimes women—isn’t even much of a topic of conversation anymore. The efforts of Wittman and his peers produced a whole new type of gay. Say hello to the post-modern homo. The post-mo, if you will. [Full story]
What’s scary about this is that the author is not wrong. There is a generation of queers who fit into this mentality - the struggle is over, I’m a straight guy who likes guys. (If we want to get clever about it, the Stra-eer, if you will.)
These fags sit surrounded in privledge. They grew up in the open, accepting parts of Toronto or New York and they know nothing of being low-income, coloured, trans, etc.
And that’s dangerous. When hetero-normative society can co-opt a subsection of a counter-culture, then the remainder becomes alienated and segregated.
A few months ago, I interviewed queer historian Gary Kinsman. I found myself re-listening to the interview yesterday, and he pins down this phenomnon very accurately,
A lot of queer young people still experience what I describe as a hetero-sexist regime of terror. The ideology of fag and dyke in quite profound ways in high schools and on city streets there’s still incredible forms of anti-queer violence that exists. I think it really depends on who you’re talking about. For queer people living in poverty, for many queer people of colour for many trans people, there’s still an awful lot of oppression, exclusion and marginalization…
…For some white middle class gay men - and a lesser number of lesbians -they’ve been able to become an acceptable part of the broader part of the white middle class in our society. So they’ve sort of gotten benefits and rights from ourr liberation movement that are being denied to many other queer people.
[Full interview]
Look no farther than Bill C-389, written by queer New Democrat then-MP Bill Siksay.
[The bill] would add gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds of discrimination to the Canadian Human Rights Act. The private member’s bill would also amend the hate crime and sentencing provisions of the Criminal Code. [Source]
That bill passed in the house, with the support of a few courageous Tories and despite the opposition of a few bigoted Liberals (see the vote results here), but was stalled for months in the senate where it eventually got killed once the election was called. That was Harper’s plan all along.
And where was the outrage? Where was the mobilizing? Beyond some organizing by queer and trans rights groups, nobody really gave a shit. This privileged “post-mo” generation just enjoyed their rights, and felt no need to agitate further.
In a word; the middle-class, white, queer man is now straight.
If you’re trans, you can fight for your own damn rights.
In 2005, the gay marriage debate pulled a broad coalition out to get mad, to push for equality. But now, when a simple bill comes forward about protecting trans folk from hate crimes? A veritable vacuum from the “enlightened” streets in Toronto. Total silence from the straight queers.
There wasn’t even the outrage when the right-wing hate machine came out and attacked the trans community with total impunity;
If the Canadian ‘transgender’ bill passes, children at four and five years of age can expect to tackle ‘gender identity’ issues in kindergarten, says the pro-family group Campaign Life Coalition (CLC). Bill C-389, which seeks to add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the Canada Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code’s hate crimes section, comes up for a final vote in the House of Commons on Wednesday.
Campaign Life Coalition’s Alissa Golob told LifeSiteNews.com that the passage of Bill C-389 will only cement the government agenda to bring the controversial issues into kindergarten classes. [Source]
And then there’s the “Don’t persecute us poor Catholics,”
…For all of the supposed importance of the separation of Church and State in Canada, Bill C-389 would clearly violate this much-vaunted principle by using the law to impose the personal convictions of a small, fervent minority on the rest of the country. It is unclear why the same legal climate which prevents the imposition of explicitly religious dogmas on others should enable these transgendered convictions to be reflected in law. In effect, Bill C-389 is a kind of forced baptism, a gender reassignment surgery imposed, not on the body, but on the legal code.
That the recognition of “gender identity” and “gender expression” will dilute the categories of male and female into non-existence is reason enough to oppose this wrong-headed bill. But another, more urgent reason, should spur our campaign against it: while Bill C-389 is touted as a means of ending discrimination, the great irony in all of this is that it will be a tool, not for increased tolerance, but for persecution and prosecution.
If “gender identity” is a kind of private dogma, Bill C-389 is a mandate for an Inquisition to enforce this particular creed. Supporters of the bill claim that it is a means for a discriminated minority to seek redress for the offences committed against them by bigoted individuals. But, in fact, the bill will only result in the harassment of recognized religious groups by an unrecognized “faith-based” group with the help of the state. [Source]
And the most disgusting of all..
“Imagine a young girl — your daughter or granddaughter — goes into a washroom and finds a man there,” warns Campaign Life Coalition national president Jim Hughes. “How is the young girl to determine whether or not the man in the bathroom is a ‘peeping tom,’ a rapist or a pedophile?”
“What about women who don’t wish to share the restroom with a disturbed male?” asks the conservative lobby group REAL Women. [Source]
That bill would have given Elle Noir recourse for going after her attackers, who have still not been caught. It’s time for the privileged in the gay community (if it still exists anymore) to stand up and demand rights for all, not just rights for “us.”
