Oshawa Community Galvanized By Hateful Propaganda

The past week in Oshawa has certainly been a whirlwind of activity in the LGBTQ community. A flurry of news, gatherings, and support unfolded throughout the week.

Here are some facts to set the stage:

On Saturday, March 31st PFLAG Durham Region held an event to raise funds for a Youth Leadership Camp this summer. The event had sold-out quickly and the hall was packed. The mayors of Oshawa, Whitby and Clarington were present, along with several councillors and many others from the local political and business communities. This added to the already bustling room filled with members of the local LGBTQ community and their friends and families.

The Youth Leadership Camp builds self-esteem, coping and leadership skills in our LGBTQ youth and their allies who live in this world that can still be so hostile towards them. The youth for whom this camp is held hear hateful slurs at school from students and even teachers about them or their parents. They suffer physical harassment. They are afraid to use the bathrooms or phys-ed change-rooms. They are told that their feelings are wrong, that they can choose to be “normal”. Within the LGBTQ youth community, suicide is 5 times as likely to be seen as a solution compared to the total population.

At the event, Amy England, an Oshawa city councillor performed on-stage dressed as Bruno Mars and lip-sync’d to “Just the Way You Are” – a song with an inspiring message of self-acceptance.

On Monday April 9th the Oshawa Central newspaper published a front-page headline and two stories that may have been intended to push Councillor England into resigning. However they contained so much hateful language, misinformation, and fear mongering that the LGBTQ community became outraged and galvanized a show of support around her.

Within 24h over social media, we organized enough people to pack the audience at the Oshawa City Council meeting with people showing support for Councillor England. A city council meeting that normally draws 20-30 people drew in I estimate around 150 people that night (I counted heads on a video I took of the room before council began).

Attempts to engage Joe Ingino, the publisher of the Oshawa Central, were met with name calling and flippant responses. My spouse wrote in to express her concerns, and received the following response:

“AND IF YOU CLICK YOUR HEALS THREE TIMES REAL HARD YOU WILL BACK IN KANSAS... ARE YOU INSANE. THE NORMAL POPULATION OF THIS WORLD... WOULD DIFFER WITH YOUR DELUSIONS...”

For the record, my spouse is neither insane nor delusional. However this response is mostly indicative of Mr. Ingino’s engagement with the LGBTQ community over the past week. Inflammatory at least, and even the odd threatening remark.

OK, on to my opinions ☺

It has been a tremendously busy week for me, and I wanted to take the time to organize my thoughts around this whole situation. Several things have been bothering me about it beyond the obvious. But let’s start with the obvious.

First there’s the immediate irony of the situation. Councillor Diamond said it best at the city council meeting, but I will repeat the sentiment here. This camp directly helps our youth deal with the hatred they see in the media, and it is the media that attacked the camp fundraiser, calling it a “freak convention” and claiming it promotes “alternative lifestyles”. This situation is a shining example of why we need to be doing this.

PFLAG as an organization exists to support everyone, both within the LGBTQ spectrum and those who struggle to accept people that identify as such. If you attend a sharing meeting you will find a nonjudgmental community full of people who have struggled their way through to acceptance, or are somewhere along that path. If you really want to kick a hornets’ nest, try telling a PFLAG Mom that she and her child are freaks and delusional. That’s right, stand right there between mamma bear and her cub…

I am so impressed with how well the LGBTQ community in Oshawa has handled itself. Our impromptu meetings the past week have been supportive to those who have felt threatened, and productive in focusing on peaceful and positive responses.

The next point that bothered me throughout the week is something that I still find is a broad misconception.

In the articles, and in much of Mr. Ingino’s social media correspondence, the popular myth that sexual orientation and gender identity are psychological disorders. This is often closely followed by the myth that as such they can be cured through psychological reparative therapy.

This is a politically charged and polarizing issue that has lead to a complicated and difficult to navigate landscape of academic vs. quacademic research, opinion from both sides and personal anecdotes. Research is also strongly influenced by reluctance to direct funding to politically charged topics.

It doesn’t take a lot of effort on Google to find seemingly compelling materials for either side. Thankfully the medical community doesn’t use Google.

Homosexuality was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM (Diagnostic and Statistics Manual) in 1975 for the simple reason that scientists realized that it shouldn’t be there. The 5th edition of the DSM will also remove Gender Identity Disorder again for the simple reason that it isn’t a pathology, and it shouldn’t be there.

The view that people in the LGBTQ spectrum are there because of a psychological disorder is simply out-dated. Science has moved on, as it always does, and uncovered new truths.

No amount of “promotion” will cause someone to suddenly identify within the LGBTQ spectrum. Identifying within this spectrum isn’t a “lifestyle”. Claiming that the fundraiser “promotes alternative lifestyles” is misleading and perpetuates the myth.

We need to get better at educating the public, and funding the research.

And finally, this has raised more confusion around the public’s already murky understanding of what transgender is and is not.

I don’t want to get into the transgender umbrella issues, let’s just pretend that everyone in the trans community agrees that the term “transgender” identifies all of us with a gender identity or expression that may vary occasionally or permanently from what our birth certificate says. If you believe transsexual should not be considered transgender, please indulge me for a moment.

A “drag king” falls under the transgender umbrella. A drag king may have been born female but performs as a male. This is not related to their gender identity, this is gender expression. A drag king may identify anywhere along the sexuality or gender identity spectrum.

Councillor England for one evening, for the first time in her life, performed as a drag king, and had fun doing it. It doesn’t mean anything about her sexuality, or her gender identity.

The controversial paper outright claimed that this performance was something that brought shame to the community, to the point where Councillor England had no choice but to resign. That somehow she had betrayed the trust in her elected position. That somehow, fully clothed and emulating Bruno Mars likened her to a stripper. That somehow, taking a donation from someone’s mouth with her teeth – which she did twice in good sport – was a “gesture that resembled an intimate kiss”.

One of the articles even goes to say she was “pretending to be a transgender person”, and “attempts to parody a sensitive lifestyle” right before it likens her to a “cheap crack hooker” in need of “some mental health care”.

I’m really getting tired of the word “lifestyle”, it implies choice which, never mind common sense, the science dispels. Parody? She’s imitating Bruno Mars, not making fun of trans people. Pretending to be transgender? To borrow a meme, one does not simply pretend to be transgender.

Next week we are holding a rally at Oshawa City Hall on Wednesday at 7:00pm. If you’re on Facebook, please join the event here.

We will show again and again, that love, not hatred is what drives this community. Neither we nor our allies are freaks. We are unwilling to accept hateful rhetoric in the media. And finally we are unwilling to engage in hurtful name-calling nor subject ourselves to this as has happened when some of us have attempted to engage Mr. Ingino over the past week.

If you want to read more about what's been going on this week, and other people's perspectives, please visit http://www.nohate.ca/