To: Prime Minister and Liberal Party Leader Justin Trudeau
From: Claudia Prewett
Date: November 25, 2018
Re: Transgender Representation in Government and the Liberal Party
The Issue and Its Significance
Great strides have been made in recent years to increase the representation of women, visible minorities, and those identifying as gay in politics. However, a community that is often left out, with its own sets of issues that could be tackled by government representation, is the transgender community. Transgender people represent approximately 5.3% of the population of Canada (Bozinoff, 2012). They are more likely than other demographics to be the victims of violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and cyberbullying (Bauer & Scheim, 2015; Green, 2018), and have no representatives in the House of Commons. Though much progress has been made on the representation of other subcategories under the LGBTQ umbrella, with gay and lesbian Members of Parliament, Premiers, and Cabinet Ministers, the transgender community has, unfortunately, slipped through the proverbial parliamentary cracks. This lack of focus is glaring, and has led to informational gaps about transgender people in Canada, as well as lack of action on issues concerning the transgender community (Green, 2018). The reality is that a transgender individual has never been elected to the House of Commons. As much as cisgender politicians may try, they will never fully be able to bring the nuance gained from lived experience to the House in the way a transgender Member of Parliament could. It has been shown in research that representation, both descriptive and substantive (Pitkin, 1967) is essential to forming an identity and feeling like one is part of a national community (Hines & Santos, 2017). I believe that Parliament would be bettered for a diversification of voices and a broader inclusion of gender identity within its ranks. Transgender people represent a unique subcategory of the question of gender in politics, and to overlook the community as a whole is doing a disservice to both transgender people and the overall inclusiveness of government. Thusly, a concerted effort must be made to bring the voices of transgender people to Parliament as representatives, to speak to the unique issues their community faces: lack of resources in healthcare, high rates of violence and discrimination, and statistical erasure. In this memo I will review these issues, and propose solutions to aid in resolving the lack of transgender representation in the House of Commons.
Background and Context
To begin addressing these issues, I must first acknowledge my own status as a cisgender woman, meaning I identify with the gender assigned to me at birth. Though I have tried to do my research on this topic as diligently as possible to compensate for my own lack of lived experience, it remains a possibility that there are things I have overlooked, as I am not a transgender person and my voice can never stand as a substitute for a transgender person’s. The main reason I am writing this memo, as a cisgender person, is that I identify as bisexual, and it frustrates and angers me how much focus is placed on the issues of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people when it comes to addressing LGBTQ issues, with little focus on the issues experienced solely by the transgender community both inside the LGBTQ community and externally. For the purposes of this memo, I am defining “transgender” as people who experience a different gender identity from their sex at birth, and “cisgender” as those whose gender identity and expression align with their sex at birth (Bauer, Scheim, Deutsch, & Massarella, 2014; Bowers & Whitley, 2018). This distinction in definition is important, as some use “transgender” as an umbrella term for all deviance from traditional gender norms including people such as cisgender drag queens (MacDonald, 2017), which is also why I am choosing not to use the controversial asterisk or refer to the transgender community as the “trans* community (Trans Student Educational Resource, 2018)”. Throughout this memo, I will be referring solely to those who experience gender according to the definition above provided by Bauer et al. when using the word “transgender”.
With definitions and disclaimers out of the way, the first issue prominent in the transgender community that could be addressed by the federal government relates to healthcare. Transgender people face much discrimination at the hands of healthcare professionals, from individual microaggressions such as misgendering to systematic problems such as lack of training for nurses on transgender healthcare. This results in transgender people having to act as “advocates and educators while also being patients (Benaway, 2018),” meaning they are providing the education that their healthcare professionals are lacking, oftentimes while in great pain (Bauer, Scheim, Deutsch, & Massarella, 2014). This is clearly an undue burden on transgender people, and one not often faced by the cisgender community. As a direct result of these common negative experiences, 25% of transgender people living in Ontario avoid using emergency services such as ambulances and emergency rooms (Bauer, Scheim, Deutsch, & Massarella, 2014). Furthermore, research conducted by the same advocacy group, Trans PULSE Project, found that of transgender individuals who did access the healthcare system, 33% of them reported “a past-year unmet health care need in excess of the 10.7% expected based on the age-standardized Ontario population (Giblon & Bauer, 2017).” This indicates a disparity between the quality of healthcare received by transgender Canadians in comparison to cisgender individuals. Individual accounts of healthcare discrimination are harrowing, with one individual, Gwen Benaway, writing in an opinion piece for the Globe and Mail that, in her experience, “being a trans woman in a hospital is dangerous, a violent collusion of prejudice, ignorance and vulnerability (Benaway 2018).”
The violence and discrimination experienced disproportionately by the transgender community is a terrible and well-documented phenomenon (Stotzer, 2009). Research has shown that transgender men and women are “at high risk for physical and sexual violence, as well as suicidal ideation and suicide attempt (Testa et al., 20 Over 370 transgender individuals were murdered worldwide in 2017 because of their gender identity, and vigils are held every year to memorialize them (CBC News, 2017). These acts are, to be frank, hate crimes against transgender people. It is important to note that Canada is actually a world leader when it comes to legislation surrounding the treatment of transgender rights. In 2016, the Liberal government introduced House Bill C-16, which amended the Canadian Human Rights Act to include gender identity and expression to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination (House of Commons, 2016). This bill received Royal assent in 2017, and became the law, meaning that employers cannot discriminate against transgender people, and that the murders of transgender people are now classified as hate crimes in the Criminal Code of Canada. Though this legislation is a step in the right direction, it is not the end of the story, and the backlash to it has been swift. In the most infamous example, a YouTube video, Prof. Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto stated that he would not use the preferred pronouns of transgender students and faculty (Winsa, 2017). The video seems to have since been taken down, however, Peterson’s equating using a “created” pronoun like ze and zir to refer to a transgender student upon request with “[compelled] use of a particular kind of ideological language (Winsa, 2017)” is representative of a pervasive and damaging pattern of argument that crops up often in conversations around respecting the rights of transgender people. On the topic of violence, it must be noted that transgender sex workers are more likely to be victims of violence or murdered. In a study of transgender sex workers in Vancouver’s East Side, it was found that they were very likely to experience violence at the hands of clients and potential clients “as a result of clients’ misreading or discovering one’s gender identity (Lyons et al., 2015). These incidents go unreported to police more often than not due to history and fear of victimization or re-victimization by officers (Lyons et al., 2015), and this disheartening trend carries over to the larger transgender community as well, with overall reporting of sexual violence to the police by transgender people being as low as 9% (Stotzer, 2009).
Finally, the last area I want to touch on where transgender individuals experience unique problems to other marginalized groups is in relation to statistical erasure. Statistics Canada published a report over the summer on the violent victimization -defined as physical assault, sexual assault, or robbery- of “lesbians, gays and bisexuals in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2018).” The exclusion of transgender people from this report is glaring, and has been noticed by transgender activists. In a cursory search I did of the Statistics Canada website, the term “transgender” appears in barely any articles, and there is no data solely about transgender people and their experiences, or official statistics on how many people identify as transgender. In the 2016 Census, transgender, non-binary, and intersex people were asked to select whether they were male or female or leave the question blank, with no other options or follow-up questions (Statistics Canada, 2017). The reason for this absence is that Statistics Canada has historically lacked the terminology and standardization necessary to include transgender and non-binary people in their analysis, but this has led to informational gaps (Green, 2018). The report was done by self-report survey, and could easily have included a question about gender identity on the survey. The exclusion of transgender people from these surveys and datasets has consequences: according to Elizabeth Saewyc, a researcher who has conducted studies about Canadian transgender teens, “not having data from the past will make it difficult to map data trends in the future… It’s very important that we as Canadians are monitoring and understanding whether this is getting better (Green, 2018)”. Without this data, there is no way to know whether any advancement made by Parliament is actually working to curb violence against the transgender community.
Solutions
All three of these issues could be addressed by the House of Commons, and while bills like Bill C-16 have definitely improved the situation of transgender people, there is clearly more that could and should be done. I believe that the best way to work towards solutions is to increase the amount of transgender representation in Parliament. It has been established in previous research that members of marginalized groups tend to support substantive policy representation relevant to the group’s interest, most often seen with women MP’s and “women’s issues” (Tremblay, 1998), so it stands to reason that a transgender MP would support and push legislation relevant to the transgender community. There are a few ways to ensure that the election of transgender candidates occurs. Given that entry to politics occurs in predictable stages, being self-selection, winning a nomination, winning an election, and becoming a Member of Parliament (Lore, 2018)- an effective strategy would seem to be seeking out transgender individuals to run for office at the self-selection stage.
This brings me to the first reason I have addressed this memo to you, Prime Minister Trudeau: as the leader of the Liberal party, which holds the majority in the House right now and is projected to win government once again in the upcoming 2019 election (Grenier, 2018), your party logically has the most chance of running transgender candidates and winning the seats needed to bring their voices to the House. Furthermore, you and New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh are both in a unique position to bring on more transgender candidates for the upcoming election cycle. Both yourself and Singh have several incumbents retiring before the election in 2019, leaving both of your parties with vacant held ridings. It has been shown that it is in these vacant held ridings that minority candidates have the best chance of winning, as Canadian voters tend to vote for the party over the individual candidate, and a vacant held riding shows that the party likely has strong support in the riding already (Russell, 2015). Because of this, I would encourage the federal Liberals and NDP to consider adopting policies similar to the one currently in use by the British Columbia New Democratic Party: every outgoing incumbent must be replaced by a “female, visible minority, Indigenous, disabled or LGBTQ” candidate (Bramham, 2017). Though this policy has had its missteps, the overall effect has been the election of the BC NDP’s most diverse caucus in the 2017 provincial election (Baldry, 2017). I propose that implementing such a policy in federal political parties would likely result in more candidates who fit those qualifiers stepping up and seeking nomination, including more transgender people.
Even in the current Parliamentary session, with no transgender representatives, there is still more that can be done to improve the three issues laid out above. Each of the issues is under the jurisdiction of a federal Ministry, with the issue of transgender healthcare falling under the Ministry of Health, violence against transgender people falling under the Ministry of Justice, and statistical erasure falling under Statistics Canada, which is in turn a part of the Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development. If each of these ministries were to adopt proactive strategies for dealing with these trans-specific issues, much in the same vein as Bill C-16, we very well could see marked improvements. This brings me to the second reason I have addressed this memo to you, and not to Ministers Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Jody Wilson-Raybould, and Navdeep Bains: as the Prime Minister, it is your responsibility to set the priorities of government and instruct the Cabinet Ministers on their policy objectives (Government of Canada, 2015). By making the issues of transgender people a priority of the federal government, you can ensure that change happens. This, in turn, will likely lead to more transgender individuals seeing a government career as a feasible option for them, as it has been shown that representation of marginalized identities works as a feedback loop: more visibility and institutional resources leads to more representation, which in turn leads to more resources and visibility, and so on (Bowers & Whitley, 2017). Considering your government’s unprecedented decision to increase transparency by releasing mandate letters publicly (Government of Canada, 2015), I will certainly be watching the priorities you set closely, and I suspect I will not be alone.
Overall, Canada has historically been a world leader when it comes to transgender inclusion and the protection of transgender rights, and we ought to build upon that reputation to make this country a place where all can be safe and protected. I trust that you and the Liberal government will be proactive in working towards solutions to the issues raised in this memo, and I look forward to the continuation of progress on this front in Canada.