A Pride Too Proud: Challenging the Myth of Queer Progress
Part 1: The transphobic and homophobic Other
BY KHADIJAH KANJI
Photo by George Becker/Pexels.
As pandemic-related physical distancing measures roll on into summer, Pride seasons across the country will feel a lot different than in years past. What we can count on being quite the same, however, is that Pride will be no less, well, proud.
Like every year, Pride will operate as a space (even an online one) for 2SLGBTQ+ folks to showcase their non-normative genders and sexualities. But, as usual, Pride will also be an opportunity for politicians and corporations to proclaim their commitment to this mosaic of gender and sexual diversity. In other words, Pride will serve its parallel function of narrating Canada as a good place to be queer. Everyone these days, it seems, is proud to have Pride.
There is perhaps no one more useful for confirming this nationalist narrative than the “LGBTQ+ refugee”—someone who has achieved refugee status in Canada based on a SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity)-related claim of persecution. This time of year usually marks an uptick in LGBTQ+ refugee stories in Canadian mainstream media: “Five LGBTQ refugees describe why they came to Canada;” “Drag queen fled Iran, finding both freedom and a stage in Vancouver;” “How Canada has been secretly giving asylum to gay people in Chechnya fleeing persecution;” “Canada: A safer haven for LGBT refugees;” read some of the headlines.”
This media content reflects a dominant discourse, one that positions the “good” of Canada (i.e. a “progressive” country accepting of sexual, gender and racial diversity) in binary contrast to the “bad” of elsewhere (i.e. places so extremely intolerant, from which refuge must be sought).
As a social worker and researcher who has worked with LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum-seekers, I’m concerned with the erasures required to uphold this simplistic binary. These erasures both reflect and reproduce the very politics that oppress us, as queers, and as otherwise-marginalized people, in Canada and around the world.
A COLONIAL HISTORY
The historical roots of modern-day transphobia and homophobia in the so-called developing world lie in European colonialism, and particularly in the colonial projects of the British. Indeed, “queering” colonized populations was one mechanism of colonial domination.
Specifically, by applying onto their subjugated populations myths of widespread sexual and gender perversion, colonizers effectively dehumanized their subjects, and rendered domination of them to be both natural, and an act of altruistic “civilizing.” Legal codification supported this mission.
In a report for Human Rights Watch, Alok Gupta details the introduction of anti-sodomy legislation in India. As he describes, “It was … the first colonial ‘sodomy law’ integrated into a penal code … Its influence stretched across Asia, the Pacific islands, and Africa, almost everywhere the British imperial flag flew.”
And this colonial legacy remains. In a 2014 study, researchers Han & Mahoney found a positive correlation between having a British colonial origin, and a law criminalizing same-gender sexual relations: “57 percent of states with such a law have a British colonial origin. Almost 70 percent of states with a British colonial origin continue to criminalize homosexual conduct.”
It is these imported forms of gender and sexual regulation that non-Western queers contend with today—and, sometimes, seek refuge from in Canada. Meanwhile, the Europeans who exported it have largely overcome its most punishing features.
A NEO-COLONIAL PRESENT
Just as historical colonialism informs the global landscape of sexuality and gender even after its official end, the global economic power imbalances established through Western colonial reign have similarly endured—so that the material excesses of the West are still financed through the material exploitation of the non-West.
A 2017 report from several NGOs, for example, calculated that sub-Saharan Africa is actually a net creditor to the rest of the world: while approximately $161 billion enters the continent annually via loans, remittances and aid, $203 billion also leaves each year through dodged taxes, repatriated profits, illegal logging/fishing/ trade in wildlife, and damages from climate change.
Of course, none of this debt is collectible because our global economy hasn’t been organized to recognize this form of theft. This is precisely how the Global North vs. Global South economic apartheid endures in entirely legal ways—a dynamic from which Canada benefits.
But what does this have to do with global transphobia and homophobia? A 2014 study by CityLab, based on data from a 2012 Gallup World Poll, found that intolerant attitudes towards gays and lesbians are inversely correlated with economic development. And logically so, since material deprivation breeds division and strife between those made to vie over meagre resources. More fundamentally (and obviously), queers are housed in bodies—and those bodies have material needs. When material deprivation is not only an aggravating factor for transphobia/homophobia but persists as a source of violence beyond transphobia/homophobia, it is arbitrary to limit our concern with LGBTQ+ wellbeing to the persecution of queers as queers.
Yes, queers are oppressed by legal persecution and interpersonal violence due to their gender/ sexuality; they are also oppressed when denied the basic means of existence. Actualizing our gender and sexual identity is a moot point if we can’t eat.
While the hypocritical recognition of refugees is illogical on moral grounds, it makes perfect sense within the logics of global capitalism.
THE “WELCOMING” OF REFUGEES
While illogical, the distinction between sociolegal and economic sources of oppression is written into the very international legal definition of refugee. While those persecuted for identity are considered bona fide claimants, economic refugees and climate refugees (respectively, those seeking sanctuary from extreme poverty and the effects of climate change) are not. In 2017 alone, for example, Canada deported over 500 “economic migrants” back to Haiti.
Thirty-five percent of Haitians suffer from chronic malnutrition, a full half are malnourished, and food availability and economic prosperity is worsening with the progression of climate change—these conditions are no less life or death than those faced by refugees.
While the hypocritical recognition of refugees is illogical on moral grounds, it makes perfect sense within the logics of global capitalism. The maintenance of Western economic supremacy requires the active production of extreme global poverty and environmental chaos.
For instance, Canada helped to implement a “destructive neoliberal economic restructuring program” in Haiti, following the 2004 coup. Furthermore, Canada contributes more per capita to climate change than any other G20 economy—and while Haiti is responsible for just a fraction of one percent of global carbon emissions, it will suffer from its effects more than almost any other nation. Western states simply can’t afford—either morally or practically—to recognize their own victims as refugees.
Providing haven to those persecuted for their identity, however, is much more palatable. Canada’s so-called multiculturalist framework can easily accommodate all types of superficial difference.
The integration of “different” bodies need not disturb settler-colonial and racialized capitalist relations but can, in fact, fortify them—by populating the nation with settlers, expanding identity-based niche markets, and obscuring racial inequity through the presence of diversity.
Canada’s concern for the well-being of LGBTQ+ refugees, however, is belied by its refusal to relinquish the global economic privileges that, in part, produce them. The definitional violence of restricting the category of refugee translates into enforcement violence—wherein LGBTQ+ asylum claimants (and all claimants) are, it seems, considered “fraudulent until proven refugee.”
The burden on asylum-seekers to prove their queerness has been critiqued as Western-centric, invasive, arbitrary, and traumatic—unlikely to prove anything other than the state’s narrative of Third World transphobic/homophobic backwardness.
Like all asylum-seekers (even children) they can be held in indefinite administrative detention—where they are made disproportionately vulnerable to gendered and sexualized violence. Further, extreme backlogs in processing refugee applications means that “we will have people who will be in Canada for two, three, four or five years, maybe…then at the end [if] they are not refugees, the Canadian government will tell them to go back” (Stéphane Handfield, immigration lawyer).
In effect, asylum-seekers are rendered criminal for acting upon their legal entitlement to access safe haven. These aspects of the refugee system are rarely documented in mainstream media or are written off as administrative hiccups within the larger story of Canadia benevolence. Rarely are they considered characteristic of a state founded upon colonial and racial violence; a violence intermittently offset by limited extensions of racial generosity.
“The maintenance of Western economic supremacy requires the active production of extreme global poverty and environmental chaos.”
A NEO-COLONIAL LENS
If Canada’s refugee system is a story, then we’re clearly missing a few chapters. But what if, additionally, the version we’re reading hasn’t been properly translated? Let’s take one common translation: “Canada receives LGBTQ+ refugees from X country, therefore, that country is intolerant of LGBTQ+ people. Seemingly logical, it reflects some inappropriate assumptions.
Firstly, that the “LGBTQ+” experience is uniform across any one national jurisdiction. Indeed, Canada’s system for assessing refugee applicants reflects this assumption—as reports on the social, political, and legal climate of a claimant’s country of origin are integrated into the evaluation process. But this national lens is only relevant if state law and other country-wide variables are the main source and predictor of LGBTQ+ persecution.
“Queering colonized populations was one mechanism of colonial domination.”
That Barbados “has the harshest penalty for homosexual activity in the Western hemisphere on its books, but overall enjoys a culture of tolerance [for gays/lesbians]” (Maurice Tomlinson, Jamaican lawyer & activist) would refute the notion that law necessarily translates into lived experience. And that there are countries without “anti-homosexual” laws that nonetheless criminalize such behaviour (and vice versa) would challenge the assumption that written law is equivalent to practiced law.
From his research in Barbados, professor of anthropology David Murray argues that “socio-economic position … impacts one’s ability to safeguard against potential [transphobic/homophobic] discrimination and harassment,” suggesting that class (as well as race, ethnicity, language, religion, gender, and a host of other factors that vary within national borders) might play a bigger role in determining experience than the country on one’s passport.
Secondly, the assumption that LGBTQ+ rights and protections can be assessed as a package deal. Yet Pakistan, which criminalizes sodomy, was one of the first states to recognize a third gender; and Philippines, where same-sex marriage isn’t yet permitted, was able to elect a trans woman to congress in 2016.
That Canada first elected a trans mayor in 2017, and lagged behind Pakistan in recognizing non-binary gender, attests to the uniqueness of gender and sexuality formations around the world—ones that make possible certain progresses while limiting others. These can’t be neatly mapped onto a universal scale of LGBTQ+ intolerant versus LGBTQ+ affirming. None of this negates the need for asylum, nor does it excuse the very real violence that gender and sexual minorities face in refugee-producing countries. It does, however, suggest that we are inadequate at assessing the state of the world beyond our small corner of it—constrained as we are by the non-universal analytical frameworks we have been socialized into. Further, it challenges the notion that the West unequivocally leads queer progress.
Reality “over there” is, like everywhere, complicated, nuanced, and even seemingly contradictory—rarely ever is it just all bad. Sometimes, it can even teach us things.
THE VIOLENCE OF BINARIES
As Sarah Bracke, a sociology professor at Ghent University, writes, “homosexuality has switched sides in the familiar dichotomy: from a sign of uncivilization, homosexuality or at least the ‘tolerance’ … of (certain modes of) it, has become a marker of civilization.”
Just as the supposed gender and sexual “uncivility” of the colonized was used to justify their subjugation, modern White/Western domination is made acceptable based on the “uncivilized” nature of racialized/non-Western populations—now deemed transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, and otherwise intolerant.
Canada’s supposed welcoming of LGBTQ+ refugees does a lot of work towards stabilizing this civilizational binary and justifying the injustice of its global dominance.
Indeed, Canada has the capacity to accept refugees for the same reason that others are in need of refuge — a global system of resource exchange and human migration that deprives the many for the abundance of the few. In the act of processing and accepting asylum-seekers, however, this broader context becomes obscured, distilled into a simplified dichotomous narrative of bad country of origin versus good country of refuge.
Ultimately, this perpetuates a Canadian hegemony that justifies itself on (projected) inclusion but sustains itself through substantive exclusion. In this way, Canada’s refugee system is one mechanism through which refugees—both those that are recognized by law, and those that are not — are constantly produced.
Dr. Leticia Sabsay, professor of gender and contemporary culture at the London School of Economics, points out that “asylum seekers are welcomed … on the basis of non-discrimination against cross-gender identification or sexual orientation … . However, the development of anti-migrant policies … where migrants are by default assumed to be homophobic and have to prove their liberal credentials gives clear account of the othering logic on which integration is based”. In Canada, niqab bans, the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices, and immigrant values tests, for example, reflect the mirror image application of refugee discourse onto immigrant discourse: persecuted refugees are to be welcomed (in theory), while persecutory immigrants are to be regulated, refused entry, or expelled. These racial discourses also serve an invasive and violent foreign policy practice that justifies itself, in part, on the paternalistic need to “civilize” those subject to it.
At the same time, every refugee hearing decision re-affirms the right of Canada to gatekeep a nation made possible by colonial theft. The altruistic act of granting entry to racial, gendered, and sexual Others redirects from the continuous denial of Indigenous sovereignty.
Pinkwashing also glosses over systemic racial, ableist, ageist, gendered, sexual inequities; poverty; growing inequality; inadequate healthcare and social services; factory farm animal abuse; and other practices of denial and oppression that make Canada functional in the way we know it to be.
All in all, Canada’s seemingly 180-degree journey from criminalizing sodomy to welcoming foreign queers has been a small investment, with a big payout—for the nation-state of Canada, that is. In seeking safety and well-being, LGBTQ+ asylum-seekers are forced through a system that will always disadvantage those who look and love like them.
This two-part essay addresses the Global North versus Global South “civilizational” binary, which uses the treatment of LGBTQ+ others as evidence of Western progressiveness in ways that perpetuate unequal global power relations. This first part addresses the myth of Global South transphobia and homophobia. Part two addresses the myth of queer progress in the West. Together, these essays contribute to broadening conversation on systems of gender, sexuality, race, global capitalism, nationalism, immigration, and (neo)colonialism, helping us understand “LGBTQ+ liberation” as freedom from all systems of oppressions.KHADIJAH KANJI (MSW) is the Social Justice Programming Coordinator for an Islamic educational centre, and a board member for a non-profit serving 2SLGBTQ+ youth. She has previously worked in therapy and research, and looks forward to doing more work in this area in the future. Khadijah writes and speaks regularly on issues of race, gender, and sexuality.