We Are Not Safe Till We Are Free

Redreaming Queer & Trans Safety

*Text of keynote address delivered to the Enchanté Network Conference Together For Change: Radically Safe Futures on 19 Sept 2024

Hello everyone, and good evening. Thank you so much for your presence here, and for all that you are doing, seen and unseen, to work towards a better future for queer and trans people. I’d like to especially thank the Enchanté Network and particularly for the massive amount of work they have put into putting on this gathering, which is crucial to the future of queer and trans rights advocacy in the nation state of so-called Canada.

Somatic Gratitude Practice

As I turn our attention towards this week’s theme of radically safe futures, I’d also like to acknowledge that the land we are gathered on today is Treaty 7 Territory, Mohkinsstis, and the traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsuut’ina, the îethka Nakoda Nations, and the Otipemisiwak Métis Government. Because transphobia and homophobia are inextricably tied to the project of colonization and none of us are free till all of us are free.

I’d like as well to acknowledge the labor of the many unseen people that makes events like this one possible: The invisibilized labor of working class people, racialized and migrant workers, workers who are undervalued and exploited here in Mohkinsstis, on Turtle Island aka North America, and across the globe so that the business interests of the capitalist elite and the lifestyles of the middle and upper classes in the Global North can be maintained at great cost to human dignity and environmental sustainability.

Because homophobia and transphobia do not occur in a vacuum, isolated from the ravages of class warfare and exploitation. Indeed, many conservative politicians and opportunists have found great profit in stirring up fear and hatred of people like us as a distraction from the real issues of poverty, exploitation, and the destruction of the social welfare networks across the continent. None of us are free till all of us are free.

And I’d like to acknowledge that this week, an unprecedented and deeply disturbing act of terror has further exacerbated the political violence that is destabilizing our world. I am referring to the Israeli military’s remote detonation of over 2000 electronic pagers in Lebanon, resulting in mass casualties across the country, including the death of at least one child. This most recent act of Israeli military aggression follows nearly a year of ceaseless attacks on the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, resulting in near-total destruction of schools, hospitals, universities, homes, and other crucial infrastructure in Gaza, as well as the deaths of over 40,000 Palestinian people. This horrifying political violence, ruled genocide by the United Nations International Court of Justice, has been materially and vocally supported by many governments of the Global North, including that of the United States of America and our own here in Canada.

I want to be clear that I know that sharing these thoughts and words in public invites some risk into the space: For me and for all of you. The risk of discomfort and disagreement between us, perhaps. The risk of confusion about why I’m talking about anti-capitalism and global conflict at conference focused specifically on queer and trans people here in Canada. This risk of being emotionally triggered. The risk of backlash and censure. From a certain perspective, it might be less risky – that is, it might be safer – not to do so. To be silent.

And yet I believe it is a risk we must take for the sake of better and radically safer future: For us, queer and trans people in Canada, currently living through the most heated moral panic levelled against us in my lifetime. For queer and trans Black and Brown children, living in fear of police brutality perpetrated against their families. For queer and trans migrant children living in fear of enforced separation and deportation. For queer and trans people worrying not only about homophobia and transphobia but about how they will support themselves in an economy devastated by the excesses of billionaires and corrupt politicians. For the queer and trans people of Congo and Sudan. For the queer and trans people of Gaza, one of whom wrote in an anonymous online post to his beloved, “Younus, I will kiss you in heaven,” as the bombs began once again to fall. For them, for us, for everyone, I think that all of us who still believe in justice must be willing to engage with meaningful risks.

Are you with me?

Somatic Mutual Connection Practice

For it is crucial that we as activists and advocates for queer and trans human rights maintain a perspective firmly grounded in solidarity with the many other human rights struggles that surround us on every scale, from local to global. To paraphrase the famous words of the Queensland Aboriginal Activist Collective, “Your freedom is bound up with mine, so let us work together.” None of us are free till all of us are free. And we are not safe till we are free.

Here I would like to highlight the primary argument I wish to offer to this gathering of activists and advocates, and to our extended networks of community. As we prepare to step forward into a future profoundly shaped by both crisis and opportunity, we must radically reimagine what the meaning of safety in our vision of a better world for queer and trans people. For safety in dominant culture terms has almost always meant protecting the interests of the powerful and maintaining the status quo. As we advocate for safety, we need to ask ourselves, safety for who? What does safety really look like?

I submit that a vibrant, life-giving queer and trans rights movement must define safety not as the absence of discomfort or even the absence of risk, but as the presence of our social values. That is to say, safety as freedom. Safety as care. And safety as solidarity across difference.

I have been involved in queer and trans community building for nearly twenty years, since I was a fourteen-year-old high school student in the Gay-Straight Alliance at my high school. Being a keener, I wrote the GSA newsletter in secret in the middle of the night on the family computer while my parents and siblings were sleeping. I made every headline all-caps in the rainbow WordArt font, and I thought myself the pinnacle of editorial design.

In the first issue of that badly formatted newsletter which nobody read, I wrote about the importance of safe spaces, which I defined as “places where you can tell people you’re LGBTQ without having to worry about being punished for it.” I still believe, with all my heart, in the essence of that definition. I know that still today, there are huge numbers of queer and trans people who do not have access to such places, who are punished for who they are every day. I know how important safety is.

Yet over the past two decades, I have also watched the evolution of the politics of safety within queer and trans movements, and in social movements in general, with increasing concern, primarily because of the way that the idea of “safety” is so often weaponized against life. This dominant culture notion of safety places the fears of the powerful and privileged on a hierarchy above the bodily integrity and autonomy of the marginalized – a dynamic that we see out playing over and over again, in every political arena, to devastating effect.

In simple terms, what this means is that we have been conditioned to think of safety as a zero-sum game of our own rights versus the rights of others. The culture in which we live has taught us that in order to be safe, we must exert our will over others, that the problems of social conflict and risk can only be solved through social control, the rule of law and order, discipline and punishment.

The end goal of this securitarian logic is that we become numb to violence, oppression, and even atrocities so long as they are carried out in the name of safety.  The examples are infinite: If an entire population of civilians abroad must be slaughtered so that the Global North and its ally states can feel “safe,” the logic says, then that is an acceptable price to pay. In May of last year, a Black homeless man named Jordan Neely was strangled to death in the New York City subway by an ex-Marine for the apparent crime of screaming on the subway that he was hungry, and this too was rationalized by many as an acceptable loss for the sake of safety.

As for us, queer and trans people? Well, if we need to be legislated out of public washrooms, competitive sports, public healthcare, public existence so that straight, cisgender people can feel safe, well then, perhaps we too are an acceptable loss.

Why is this disturbing logic of safety so important for us here tonight, queer and trans activists and advocates? Because despite so often being the target of weaponized safety, we are no less susceptible to the way the promise of safety is used to divide us against those who should be our allies, or even against our own community.

For nearly a year now, we have been told that standing against the atrocities in Palestine is not only foolish but counter to our own interests. Warmongers and propagandists would have us believe that primarily Muslim communities like the people of Gaza are so homophobic that we ought to gratefully stand by while they are bombed out of existence. And if we believe them, then we lose forever the possibility of developing the deeper and more powerful coalitions that we need to create real change.

Closer to home, we continue to struggle with increasing rhetoric intended to divide and conquer as well: The so-called “gender critical” movement tells us that cisgender lesbians are under constant threat from the existence of trans women, especially trans lesbians, and therefore trans women should be shut out of queer women’s spaces. They say that gender affirming medicine poses a threat to cis gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth by “turning them trans” and therefore trans and gender variant youth should be denied the right to gender affirming care – as they are right here in Calgary and the rest of the province of Alberta.

They say that children are threatened by any exposure at all to the existence of queer and trans culture, queer and trans stories, queer and trans lives, and so we should simply stop existing. In my own home city of Toronto, a drag story time was shut down because of a bomb threat – somehow it always seems to lead back to this: Bombs, violence, and dehumanization are the weapons people wield in the name of safety and saving the children.

So what I want us to ask ourselves is: What does safety really mean to us? How do we ourselves fall prey to the deceptive logic of securitarianism, trying to create safe spaces that are little more than gated echo chambers rather than vibrant gardens of diversity? Where do we, for example, centre the voices of queer people with access to middle class privilege and education rather than those who are working class, impoverished, homeless? Where do we prioritize the agendas of gay homeowners and business owners wanting to preserve the property values of a neighborhood over the lives of trans sex workers of color trying to earn a living on the streets in that same neighborhood?

Where do we try to create safety by enforcing rules on one another rather than searching for mutual understanding? How do we try to reclaim safety in a dangerous world by enacting our power to punish and exile rather than our capacity to heal and transform?

What is a vision of safety that is creative, rather than destructive? That encourages rather than strangles life? That grows out of a politic not of control and policing but rather freedom, care, and solidarity?

Who do we need to become to bring that world into being?

Somatic heart extension practice

Safety as freedom – the freedom to be who we are and express our truths without the fear of being punished for it.

Safety as care – knowing that we can turn to the people around us for help when we are hurt, harmed, or in need.

Safety as solidarity – responding to fear and scarcity by banding together rather than turning against one another.

When I dream of a radically safe future for queer and trans people, I dream of a strong web of community that is intentionally and purposefully connected to the world around it. We bind ourselves to one another because we know we need each other not only to survive, but to thrive. In this dream of a world, we know that safety cannot be created by building walls and cages, but rather by planting gardens, filling libraries, and creating spaces for healing. We have freed ourselves from the illusion that safety is about locking people away and are grounded in the truth that safety comes from giving people what they need.

And for that to happen, we know that we need to come together in struggle – we know that the billionaires and the politicians and the warmongers cannot control us if we stand as one.

We know that we can convince other communities to come alongside us, because what we offer them is better – a better vision of safety than the one that they have been tricked into believing. The politicians will tell them to vote for laws that protect children by harming other children, and we will tell them to join us in ensuring a future for all children and all families. The warmongers will tell them to solve problems with guns and bombs, and we will show them how to solve problems with words and food and medicine. The capitalists will tell them to survive by hoarding and fighting one another, and we will perfect the art of survival by giving gifts to one another. We will show them that queer and trans communities that blossom with abundance, generosity, kindness, and skill. Because queer people don’t create safety from violence. We create safety from love. We always have and always will.

And I know that together, this room full of people – and all the other rooms full of people, and all the people who struggle with us unseen, fighting for justice – can bring this world of radical, beautiful safety grown from love into being. I know because that world already exists, inside our bodies. All we need to do is start practicing – to start embodying safety in shapes of freedom, care, and solidarity, bound together by love.

Look around you. The future is here.