In March 2018, undergraduate students at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), a renowned French political science university, published a spreadsheet polling the race and gender composition of their curriculum, which also claims to offer “a world-class” education. They found that only 3.45% of the authors they were assigned were racialized, and 15.45% were women. Contacted by The McGill Daily, the authors of the spreadsheet told us that they “wanted to show who really owned freedom of speech, and to whom it was denied at a systemic level.” Their results show that white male authors and thinkers still dominate their university program — while their university is ranked one of the best in the world in political science.

Polling of race and gender in a sample of 12 McGill political science classes (the amount required for a major) finds similarly damning results. Of the 300 authors polled, 86% are white, and one per cent is Indigenous, with three Indigenous men and a single Indigenous woman. When broken down per class, those numbers show that most syllabi are overwhelmingly (>75%) composed of white male thinkers with two of them including exclusively white male authors.

To engage with decolonial and antiracist thought, students have to go out of their way to find classes, mostly outside the department.

Beyond the four Indigenous authors polled, no other author in the syllabi engages with Turtle Island’s (North America) history of colonialism with a decolonial lens. Similarly, only four authors of the 300 taught in class are Black, and none of the non-Black authors engages with theories around Black liberation or anti-Blackness in Canada. This leaves students with little to no understanding of how Canadian politics have been, and continue to be, shaped by colonialism and racism. To engage with decolonial and antiracist thought, students have to go out of their way to find classes, mostly outside the department.

The political science program aims to teach students “how groups of people govern themselves, how policies are made, and how we can improve our government policies at the local, state, national and international levels” but continues to ignore key ways in which politics work (racism, colonialism, sexism) and key thinkers working on improving government policies surrounding matters of equality. McGill is the alma mater of many key players in Canada’s political landscape, including the current prime minister, as well as many cabinet ministers, MPs, senators, and Supreme Court justices. By excluding Indigenous and Black peoples from having any weight in the education of Canada’s future politicians, McGill hinders decolonial and antiracist thought from being present in governance. This situation contributes to Canada’s persistent ignorance of Indigenous and Black people’s realities, struggles, and thinkers.

Current political science programs perpetuate canons almost exclusively made up of white male authors. These statistics show that what is considered the “best” education for a politician in the West is taught through a canon still heavily limited to white and/or men’s writings. All professors have to consider how the idea of a canon itself has been conceived and what views this has excluded — more specifically Black, Indigenous, people of colour (BIPOC), and women. It is not enough to pepper classes with “diversity,” or to create separate classes to teach decolonial or antiracist thought. Antiracist and decolonial theory should be fully integrated in all syllabi as a core concern so as to make them not marginal and secondary but central. Such change would help in recognizing how important racism and colonialism have been in shaping governments and nations, especially on Turtle Island.

Antiracist and decolonial theory should be fully integrated in all syllabi as a core concern so as to make them not marginal and secondary but central.

Students need to be empowered with policy mechanisms to question the representation of our syllabi. A solution could be drawn from procedures that already exist at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). There, professors have to strike a deal with their students to decide on the weight, number and due dates of their assignments during the first two weeks of each class. We should have a procedure for students to object to the unjust exclusion of authors from marginalized groups or ideas pertaining to those groups’ struggles. For example, students could flag a class to an equity office like the Social Equity and Diversity Education Office (SEDE); professors would then have to justify the exclusion of certain authors, and amend their syllabi to reflect a more inclusive view of politics. Beyond tedious procedures to urge all professors to integrate antiracist and decolonial theory, professors should proactively make those changes and offer to change readings at the beginning of the semester under such concerns.

We should feel concerned by the poor education given to students around core political dynamics in this country and the world. What McGill and Sciences Po (and countless other universities) mean by “excellence” or “world- class” education remains biased in terms of identities of race and gender. As long as students are exposed to slanted perspectives on politics, politicians will have skewed visions of politics and will hinder the possibility of a just society.

If you wish to go further and teach yourself what is lacking in your degree, here are some academic resources by BIPOC community organizers you can start with:
• Black History Month Library

• Decolonization Reading List
(Turtle Island)
• Postcolonial theory syllabus

The post White Man Science appeared first on The McGill Daily.

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Vivek Shraya knocked on the door at 9:23AM. “A woman of her word,” I thought. “What a change from all these Montreal flakes.” Soon enough, the interview team found itself in a living room made up exclusively of women and femmes of colour, plants, couches, two tables, tea cups, and timid sun rays. Vivek Shraya is a multidisciplinary and widely acclaimed artist who recently released the  best-selling book I’m Afraid of Men, which delves into “how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl — and how we might reimagine gender for the twenty-first century.” We invited Malek Yalaoui to interview Vivek. Malek is a friend, but also a force to be reckoned with. She is a queer femme of colour, a Chai Chats Podcast host, and co-founder of SistersInMotion MTL, an annual showcase of spoken word performances by and for BIPOC women and femmes.

Malek Yalaoui (MY): How did art come into your life?

Vivek Shraya (VS): I started writing music first. I used to sing at my religious organization when I was a teenager. They used to get me to do speeches — it’s so cute, a young person giving a speech, right? So I started including pop songs in my speeches at my religious organization and then this uncle came up to me — not my uncle, like Indian uncle or whatever — he was like “that song you wrote was so beautiful” and I was like “oh, I didn’t write it” and then I was like, oh writing songs! And that’s what inspired me to write my own music. Looking back, if I were going to project a narrative on what inspired me to write songs, music was a way of gaining not popularity, but support. In school, where I was being harassed all the time, in my religious organization, singing was what made me feel special, which I didn’t have every other day of the week. People would be like “we drove all the way from wherever to come hear you sing.” Music was a way for me to channel my feelings of isolation and loneliness in a way that I couldn’t convey anywhere else. That’s where I started my artistic journey. Music was my first artistic career path but it didn’t really pan out, and I still needed to be creative. So I ended up writing what would become my first book, God Loves Hair, which I ended up self-publishing. It was sort of an accident in a way, I worked very hard on it but I had no ambition of being ‘a writer,’ but life is wild in that way… For me, the lesson is about being open to the muse and where…

MY: … where the life is.

VS: Exactly.

MY: That’s so amazing too that you got the support from your community first, because that’s not something I often hear!

VS: I think a lot has to do with North American masculinity being very different than this sort of religious Hindu/Indian masculinity I was around. So me being a dancer, prancing, faggy boy in the context of my religious organization was like “oh you’re like Krishna.” It actually made me almost holier in a weird way whereas every other day at school I was the worst human, the worst boy, because I wasn’t acting like I should be. It was two extreme ends of a spectrum to be completely abnormal and completely special under two different lenses.

“You read all this stuff and say, ‘oh, you got spit on, oh it’s so terrible,’ and then I wanted it to say, ‘yeah, and imagine if I didn’t have to tell you these things for you to care.’”

—Vivek Shraya

On “Exceptional Men”

MY: In the book, you said you regretted telling Nick [Vivek’s ex-boyfriend] that he wasn’t special but that you also regretted all the times you told him that he was. Is Nick exceptional? Is looking at Nick outside the construct of him as a man the only way to understand him in all his human complexity and contradictions?

VS: For me it’s tied to that conversation about the “good man” or “the exception.” I think throughout my life, any time I’ve encountered a man that was nice to me I’ve been like, “oh he’s different.” It often doesn’t require much for that to happen — totally low bar. It’s like oh he’s sensitive, he’s nice to his mom, he knows some social justice speech, whatever it is.

MY: But Nick actually did do a lot of incredible support work.

VS: Exactly. In fairness, Nick was quite lovely but at the same time I don’t know that thinking of men as exceptions serves us, because I think what happens then is that we don’t allow them to fuck up. And when they do fuck up, it’s devastating, it’s like, “I thought you were an exception” whereas if I just treated Nick like a human that was completely fallible that was doing amazing things but was capable of doing things that weren’t so amazing, it would’ve been a different kind of pain, I wouldn’t be “grieving the exception.” I feel that for me that has been the consistent theme in my relationship with men, where I’m not just grieving potentially some fucked-up things they’ve done but just grieving the fact that “another one! Not another one!” I’d rather be engaging with one form of pain as opposed to thinking of men as an exception. I just don’t think that’s useful. Also, I just don’t think that it’s something that women or gender non-conforming people get to have access to, no one is ever like “she’s an exception,” it doesn’t go both ways. So why is it that we can believe in a “good man” or a “better man” when we don’t equate women or gender non-conforming people with the similar terms? So for me I’d like to get away from this bar, period, and see what happens when men are seen as people that are capable of good and bad and not necessarily even use that language of good and bad.

MY: You wrote about reimagining forms of masculinity that don’t arouse fear, but then also about blurring gender boundaries, and sort of how do we do both, are these even useful categories?

VS: It’s difficult, because realistically I don’t imagine a world where we’re all going to embrace gender nonconformity. I think people are very attached to the gender binary. It’s like trying to speak to reality and optimism simultaneously. And so from a realistic perspective, I propose some ideas about how we might reimagine masculinity. And number one is moving away from this “good man” idea. And second, you know, for me it’s really important for men to be thinking about how to be able to honour femininity. And that being the central part of the work. And by honouring femininity, really what’s underneath that is being able to understand and unpack misogyny, and understanding the ways that misogyny is inherent in so many forms of harassment, but also ideas. I think a lot of men, especially in 2018, think that they’re sensitive, think that they’re good listeners, think that because they hold the door open for women that they are “good men” and that they don’t have misogynistic ideas. But then I hear the same guys who say “I listen to her, and I’m nice to her, but she doesn’t want to date me.” And I’m like, wait a second, so you listened, and you were good  to somebody, so what? That’s a weird entitlement. And I think that that entitlement to women and desire is a form of misogyny. Its like, “how dare you not want me after I spent an hour listening to you or half an hour listening to you.” And that’s just one idea, or one example. And I bring this up as an example because I, too, as a male, walked around like “I LOVE WOMEN, I’m not capable of misogyny, I don’t have misogynistic ideas,” but when challenged by friends I was like “oh shit yeah there it is, of course.”

MY: And we all do!

VS: Yeah of course. So to answer your question, I think that I have a surface proposition in terms of thinking about gender, but simultaneously at the end I’m sort of like in an ideal world, I would love for us to move beyond masculinity and femininity altogether. What would it be like to abandon those terms, what would it be like to embrace gender creativity. So that’s me at my most hopeful, but I don’t know that that’s super realistic.

On Time, Transness, and Potential

MY: I wonder for you personally, do you feel that you’ve realized your potential, or do you see it as still on the horizon, or do you think that that’s possible in the world that we live in?

VS: I mean, I know I’m old, but I hope that there’s still more potential.

MY: I mean The Queers think anyone over 30 is old!

VS: It’s true — I’m already an elder! I mean truthfully it’s something I’ve struggled so much about in my thirties. Like in your twenties people are like “oh, so and so has so much potential,” but then in your thirties no one talks about the potential you have anymore — you’re just you. Which is kind of scary in a way. So thinking a bit broader than I’m sure what you’re asking, I also think about all the people I’ve been in 37 years: I hope I haven’t realized my full potential. Like I hope there’s still more, I’m curious what my gender will look like ten years from now, if I’m still around. It’s so hard for me to imagine a future as a queer, trans, racialized body, and so, I don’t know. I hope that I haven’t, and I don’t know what that looks like, but that’s what’s exciting about life. Like I always felt that trans-ness was like a boat that I missed when I was 25, kind of like ecstasy. Like I didn’t do ecstasy, and I didn’t come out as trans, so I guess that’s it.

MY: As in, “I missed the window?”

VS: And you know ten years after I’m like “oh, here I am.” So, for me it’s been exciting to be like, “oh, you can come into these identities and realities later” and it’s complicated because you do feel this feeling of lost time. At the same time, I look at who I am in the mirror and I’m like “can’t believe we made it.” And isn’t that nice, you know?

On Internalized Misogyny and Racism

MY: You were talking about some misogynistic ideas we all had, and that you had. And I wanted to ask you: you had written about your childhood, and the ways in which you once felt entitled to Brown women’s bodies and their labour. How was your experience writing about this?

VS: What I share in the book, is that when I’m in grade two I decide I really want to know what it’s like to have a kiss. And I don’t know where I’m going to get a kiss from, so I imagine I’m going to make Manpreet kiss me. That was one of the hardest parts of the book to talk about — because first of all, transness and queerness are already equated with weird childhood perversion or predatory behaviour. But for me, it was really important as an example to talk about — isn’t it really disturbing to think about how even as a young boy I had already learned that I was entitled to a young girl’s body? And where did I learn that? That was the point of that example, and owning it as well. I don’t think I would have ever done that to a white girl. I think I understood that here is a girl, with a long braid and sideburns —

MY: It’s like, “I’m low on the totem pole, but this is someone who is just a tiny bit lower.”

“I don’t know that thinking of men as exceptions serves us, because I think what happens then is that we don’t allow them to fuck up. And when they do fuck up, it’s devastating, it’s like ‘I thought you were an exception.’”

—Vivek Shraya

VS: Exactly. So even though I was clearly an outcast, clearly a nerd, here was someone who was, like you said, lower socially even though those hierarchies were already being formed. I knew she was vulnerable. And again, I didn’t have this language — but it’s disturbing to think about the ways that I understood that — how I deliberately chose a Brown girl from my class, as opposed to a blonde white girl.

MY: Right, and we get those messages from birth.
It’s just unconscious…

VS: Totally. I re-watched this Bollywood film that I used to really like as a kid called “Chandni”, for the first time since I was a child. And I’m not blaming Bollywood, but it was just strange to see this man, who is literally trying to make an advance on a woman and he just starts grabbing her — and she starts running. But he keeps grabbing her, and it’s just this joke. And I was like, “oh, well here’s an example of where I might have learned this behaviour.” Again, we see it in so many forms and I’m not saying it’s that particular film, but I’m sure it was part of it.

MY: Towards the end of the book you start to talk about how you’re afraid of women as well. You had some really powerful examples in the book of women who either emboldened or defended the men who harmed you, the girl who giggles when you’re wearing  the blue jacket, the one who passes on your high school crush’s threat, the one who tells you it’s a compliment when you’re groped. And the ones who, you wrote, “have internalized their experiences of misogyny so deeply, that they make me their punching bag.” How do you think we can begin to hold women accountable for the ways in which we participate in and defend mens’ violence, what do you see as the road to healing and reconciliation between women?

VS: I have a trans friend I really look up to on Twitter — who I think, actually used to live in Montreal – Morgan Page. She has this Twitter rule “I’ll never drag another trans woman on Twitter,” and for me that has been so crucial in my own thinking about visibility as a trans body and online interactions. But I think that applies to all marginalized groups. It’s a tricky part of the book because there’s this idea that women just don’t get along like “oh, they’re always catfighting.” And it’s like, no, that’s not the issue, this has been enforced on us, this is how men maintain their power by having us tear each other apart. So for me the work is, in those moments where I feel “competitive” with another woman, or when someone is putting me in competition with another woman: how do I challenge that feeling? For me at the core of the book actually, so much of it is how to challenge thought and feeling, because I think that most people assume that they are good people because they’ve never pushed someone or used “faggot” as a word or something. But the truth is so much of the work that needs to be done is challenging the inside stuff that’s happening, and for women it’s so easy for us, because we’re so trained to rip each other apart. And I’ve experienced this as a girl, in the queer community, in the Brown community – it’s not specific to girls, right. This is the nature of how oppression works: we end up having conflict with each other because where else are we going to direct it? So a part of it is really spending time with those moments when you feel petty and direct that towards another woman and wondering why I feel this way. What is this woman ‘taking’ from me? How might I turn this feeling into actual support, and nurturing? Or how might I have a conversation with this woman directly, one-on-one as opposed to “cancelling” them or tweeting about them online? I think that’s the work, it’s really investing in the one-on-one, in the work of internal processing.

On Disposability

MY: I feel like there’s been so many instances in which I have either said something dumb and ignorant, which is very possible for me to do…

VS: Which happens. It happens for all of us.

MY: … or have been perceived as saying something oppressive which wasn’t actually or whatever. And then it was like — it’s over, you’re done, I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to say hello to you, I don’t want see you in any space that I’m in.

VS: (sarcastic) …That doesn’t sound familiar… (laughs)

MY: And it’s literally like, wait, but could we just continue the conversation for maybe three minutes after I said the wrong thing? And I understand in a way because people are dealing with a lot of violence and trauma, so maybe you don’t have the capacity for that right now, but I just don’t know how we move forward — we’re eating each other…

VS: I really don’t think that intimacy can be built without conflict. I think most people are just like, “I don’t like conflict, I shy away from conflict.” I appreciate that but for us to get to the next level, we need to talk this through. I feel like it’s so easy, especially in larger cities. This was my experience in Toronto a lot: you do something fucked up, which happens, and then you never know what you said, what you did, sometimes you don’t even know what it is or how it was perceived, and then suddenly people aren’t talking to you anymore, and you’re just like… “okay…”

MY: And if you have any kind of platform now they want to take your platform from you — my life’s work is done because I said something in a bar or…?

VS: Yeah! And I’m like blah blah blah all the time! You can’t control everything that comes out of your mouth. The reality is we’re all going to fuck up in our communities, it doesn’t matter how woke, how political —

MY: Because we have this stuff inside and it’s going to come out, and that’s the opportunity to deal with it.

VS: Yes, and also you can’t control how people are hearing what you’re saying. So you could be saying something that’s very harmless but you don’t know how that individual might hear you. For me it’s like, let’s have it out. Let’s have the conversation. If I said something, yes, of course I want to be held accountable, but not online, not publicly. Can we have this one-on-one, and also can we just have it, period? As opposed to being just like, “bye!” I feel like that’s the work, I get why people don’t want to do it. The thing is, there are lines right? If it’s a white man who’s done something, I’m like, “I don’t have the capacity for it, bye!”

MY: My experience has actually been that it’s the opposite, and it all comes back to who we see as disposable — if a woman of colour, a femme of colour, a trans woman of colour fucks up, she’s done —

VS: Exactly!

MY: But a white man can do the same thing, for a decade and nobody’s called him out! So it’s like, why aren’t we cancelling the white men?

VS: Exactly.

On Sisterhood

MY: About sisterhood, S-I-S not C-I-S (VS laughs). Do you believe in sisterhood? What do you think is the importance of sisterhood?

VS: Maybe this is a little second wave [feminism] (laughs) but I really believe in sisterhood. As much as I’ve definitely called out women in this book, at the end of the day, I would not have come out as trans had it not been partly because of women who “saw” me. Actually, my friend Alanna one day showed up at dinner, she brought me, it sounds so superficial but she brought me these beautiful, coloured eyeliner and she was like “I don’t know I just had a feeling that you’d like these so just have fun with them” and it was then that we just started talking about makeup more. I feel like she “saw” something, embraced it, and she loved me. I feel like I’ve had that kind of generosity from women as well, so I absolutely believe in sisterhood, I just think we have work to do… And the only way to “dismantle the patriarchy” is actually by holding each other up, and finding ways to have conflict respectfully and lovingly.

“I’m Coming for Everyone, Including Myself”

MY: You write: “why is my humanity only seen or cared about when I share the ways in which I’ve been victimized and violated,” and you share so much of that in this book — so I’m wondering why you made that choice. Ultimately, why did you write this book?

VS: (laughs) I asked myself that question so much during the writing process. I felt like a lot of the conversations around masculinity were a little one-dimensional, especially the ones that had been happening the last few years. They had usually been by cis white women, cis white straight women, so what that meant was that a lot of queer men, or gay men, get to be off the hook, get a pass, so to speak. Racialized men, some of them have gotten a pass, trans men have gotten a pass, women have gotten a pass, and I’m like no no no, we’re all a part of this. So for me that was a big part of the impetus for I’m Afraid of Men — let’s broaden this conversation and talk about how we’re all a part of it. I’m coming for everyone, including myself. Certainly the white man is a large issue, but it’s so much more complicated than that, so that was a big part of why I wrote the book.

“Me being a dancer, prancing, faggy boy in the context of my religious organization was like ‘oh you’re like Krishna.’ It actually made me almost holier in a weird way, whereas every other day at school I was the worst human, the worst boy, because I wasn’t acting like I should be.”

—Vivek Shraya

On Trauma Porn

MY: I’m Afraid of Men is written in the second person, why is that?

VS: There’s this current fascination with people’s suffering, especially marginalized bodies — I think the word is trauma porn. After starting to write it all in first person, it just started to feel really gross that the reader would be able to just put the book down. I’ve just disclosed all this stuff that’s so personal, and you get to just be in and out of it? How do I keep the reader here with me? If I’m going to be accountable to these stories and talking about it, how do I keep the reader accountable to me? How do I create more of a relationship as opposed to a passive one? By changing all of those stories to second person by saying “you,”, “I see you,” “you do this,” “you said this,” it felt like a way to put the reader in the hot seat. If I’m going to do this work, you’re going to sit here with me, and you’re going to try it. And even if it’s clearly not you, the hope is to get you to think about your own complicity. If not in that specific interaction, but other interactions of your life where you may have been a bystander or someone who engages with this kind of activity. I used to work at a college in Toronto where I did anti-homophobia workshops and there I found that the only way to get many people mobilized was by telling them about how gender non-conforming people would pee in their pants, as opposed to going to the washroom. And suddenly everyone was like, “Oh my god, that’s terrible!”

MY: “Well if you’re suffering, then you deserve rights!”

VS: Exactly! But if I was just like “Transphobia, it exists — misogyny, it exists,” people would be like “yeah, sure, whatever.” So I worried that I was sort of engaging in this practice, that a lot of oppression is based on disclosing personal hardship to solicit allyship from the oppressor. So here I am doing that, but how do I navigate it? For me it was by naming it. “Okay, I’ve done this work now, but you’ve made me do this work in a lot of ways. The only way I know how to mobilize you and to get you to care about me and my trans brothers and sisters is by me doing this, so can we challenge this? Can we find a way for this to not have to happen?” Because I think we all know this, but I wanted it to be part of the book – you read all this stuff and say “oh, you got spit on, oh it’s so terrible,” and then I wanted it to say “yeah, and imagine if I didn’t have to tell you these things for you to care.”

Conclusion

MY: I wanted to ask if there’s anything that you wish you would be asked.

VS: Oh, that’s so nice. Well I’m curious, did you think it was like 101 when you were reading? Were you like, “oh yeah, been there done that?”

MY: No, I didn’t think it was 101.

VS: That has been my biggest fear in terms of my communities, I feel people have been doing this kind of work around gender and unpacking gender in smarter and more nuanced ways for years and years and years. So there’s been a part of me that’s like, “oh, no, my people think this book is like very very basic.”

MY: That’s not what I thought at all.

VS: Okay. I’m not fishing for compliments, either.

MY: No but I just want to say: I actually didn’t take gender studies in school or whatever, as part of that like coming to myself later in life — I just thought I was in college to find a way to make a lot of money and get a good job. I didn’t understand that you could explore ideas in university! I actually don’t have that theoretical background at all; I haven’t read Judith Butler, or whatever, but I have learned a lot in the context of community spaces. But sometimes it has felt like “these are the ideas, and you need to get on board, or you’re a homophobic, transmisogynist, piece of shit.” And so I’m just like, okay, “tell me what I need to believe,” just to get the good stamp, you know. And there’s very little patience for actually exploring. Like I’m not saying that I’m not there — but just, can we walk through it a little more? I feel this book was so generous and so patient with walking me through it all in a very accessible and step-by-step way to understanding “oh, the gender binary is destroying all of us.” I felt like I had the time to sort of steep in your ideas, to get there on my own, as opposed to “here are all of the things you need to believe to be able to ‘count’ as a legitimate person.”

VS: Well thank you, thanks, that’s great. And thank you so much for all of these questions. I really appreciate having a conversation with another Brown girl about this. It’s been strange because you realize how much of mainstream media is white men, and so its funny when they’re like (gravely) “I’m Afraid of Men, what is this book about?” and its like “ahhhhh! you’re scaring me!” So thank you so much to all of you, I really appreciate this opportunity.

MY: Can I give you a hug?

VS: Yes! Please!

The interview has been edited for clarity.

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The consultative forum passed the nomination of Members at Large for the Board of Directors and the Auditor for the Fiscal Year of 2019 for Legislative Council to consider. Executives faced questions about spending incurred by the aftermath of SSMU’s Halloween party at MacDonald Campus. Following students vomiting and trashing the buses on the way to the event, the bus company decided to not provide return trips. There is a clause in the bus company’s contract allowing them to refuse service if their buses are damaged. SSMU then told students to take cabs or Ubers, and that they would be reimbursed by SSMU for the trip. The cost of reimbursement was estimated by SSMU executives at the GA to be around $10,000. VP Internal Matthew MacLaughlin justified the cost by arguing that they could not let everyone pay for the misbehavior of some.
Current SSMU President, Tre Mansdoerfer, also presented a “blacklist” initiative which would bar students who have demonstrated harmful behaviour from participating at SSMU events.

During the question period, questions were raised regarding the newly deregulated international tuition for international students. VP University Affairs, Jacob Shapiro, responded that SSMU advocated for international tuitions not to be raised for current students, but that they would be raised incrementally for future students.
SSMU executives reported on their first semester, and on the new division of tasks since the resignation of former VP External Marina Cupido.
All their individual reports are available at ssmu.ca/ governance/general-assembly/ general-assembly-2018-2019.

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Athena Holmes (they/them) is a performing artist with two personas: Ms. Holmes, a roots, blues and jazz singer-songwriter, and BiG SiSSY, a drag performer from another planet. BiG SiSSY is from Black Star Planet, and her show is an Afrofuturist rock-opera. The McGill Daily sat down with Athena to chat about personas, performance, race, gender, black supremacy, and healing.

On Their Personas

The McGill Daily (MD): Were your projects born at the same time, or one after the other? Were there any events in your artistic career or life that inspired your personas?

Athena Holmes (AH): They were not born at the same time. Ms. Holmes is my singer-songwriter project which I’ve been doing since I started playing music. [Ms Holmes] is for my own songs and ideas, or if I get a commission to write, I’ll write under that name. BiG SiSSY… I’m not sure what the catalyst for that starting was. I had seen some performances where people were doing things that made me really uncomfortable. I had to ask myself, “why does this make you uncomfortable? Is there actually anything wrong with what this person is doing? Why do you think they should be doing it differently?” I had to question my own judgments about what I thought was permissible on stage, or what I thought was the right way to act. I wanted an outlet where I could push my own boundaries as a performer in terms of what I thought was “okay” or “going too far,” and push myself outside of my comfort zone. As an artist, I try to push myself outside of my boundaries in life in general, but [BiG SiSSY] is sort of a safe environment where I can experiment and see what comes out.

MD: So, would you say that BiG SiSSY is yourself or an alter ego?

AH: It is an alter ego, but it is definitely a lot of me. I asked my friends who have seen BiG SiSSY, “what astrological sign do you think BiG SiSSY is?” and they were like, “well, obviously a Scorpio,” and I’m a Scorpio, too.

MD: How would an encounter between BiG SiSSY and Ms. Holmes unfold? Would they ever meet? If so, how?

AH: They do meet! They’re both in me!

MD: What would they say to each other?

AH: I think they would write music together; they would probably write a song! It would probably be about smashing the patriarchy or destroying capitalism.

MD: Would Ms. Holmes feel uncomfortable?

AH: No! I’m still down to say the things that I say through BiG SiSSY in my other projects, but I would just say it in a more polite way.

“There is a bit of dissociation that happens when I look out into the crowd, looking specifically for black faces, and I don’t see them.” – Athena Holmes

On Race, Gender and Performance

MD: What is the relationship between your gender and your personas, or between identity and performance?

AH: As somebody who’s been raised or perceived as female and as being “pretty,” I’ve often felt like I was performing my gender. Equally, being a singer with a fairly clean-toned voice, I’ve been performing an idealized version of myself for mostly white audiences. Whenever people find out I’m a musician, they would remark, “oh, you sing jazz, right?” I know that’s what you want, I know you want me up on stage, in an evening gown, singing jazz… That’s how you want me. And I’ve never been interested in acting the way people wanted to perceive me.

I also wanted to perform as BiG SiSSY to understand gender better and to turn it into a source of freedom, as it didn’t use to be. I felt like society has told me, “you have these feminine traits that we find sexy, and you should show them off.” So, with BiG SiSSY, I just go at it at full force: my ass is hanging, and everything is on display – my hair is long, I’m hyper-feminized, and hypersexual. In a way, I do like to present my gender like that, but only when I want to. When I do it as BiG SiSSY, I’m in control and it also feels like a bit of a “fuck you, you want me to look pretty — well, how’s this?” But when I uphold these feminine stereotypes, it’s not for you; it’s not for the male gaze, because usually by the end of it people are slightly grossed out, which is nice.

MD: Do you recall any performance where you felt like your message was perceived the wrong way, or people weren’t understanding what you were trying to convey?

AH: As BiG SiSSY, I always feel great after the shows. I did do a show recently where I performed ‘Black Supremacist’ [a segment in BiG SiSSY’s performance], and I looked around and there were no Black people. The audience was very supportive of the performance, but I was kind of like, “what? What is this now?” Black folks have long been considered or used as entertainment for white folks. When I perform for mostly white audiences, it’s challenging, because I can’t help but feel the weight of that. Even though I’m doing the work for me, it’s a complicated dynamic.

“I like to present my gender [the way people expect me to], but only when I want to. When I do it as BiG SiSSY, I’m in control and it also feels like a bit of a “fuck you, you want me to look pretty — well, how’s this?” But when I uphold these feminine stereotypes, it’s not for you; it’s not for the male gaze, because usually by the end of it people are slightly grossed out, which is nice.” – Athena Holmes

I also remember doing one performance where I had this video playing in the background of a Black preacher exorcizing a white woman. The sound of their voices was quite violent — she was speaking in tongues and everything. I wanted it to be representing an exorcism of the white devil specifically. Then, it cut to a song by Sister Souljah, and I went down on my knee with my fist up and I had somebody pass a hat, so that everybody could give me money.

On Black Supremacy

MD: BiG SiSSY is a self-proclaimed Black supremacist. What’s the first thing you would do after a Black supremacist revolution?

AH: A Black supremacist revolution? That sounds like heaven. I would want to have a party or celebrate in whatever way we would celebrate. If there was a Black supremacist revolution, it would bring a lot of people with similar ideas and compassionate hearts, energy and creativity together, and I would just want to be with them.

MD: What would a Black supremacist society look like?

AH: I wouldn’t want it to look anything like a white supremacist society. In my utopic vision, it wouldn’t be a system of domination, even though Blackness would be ‘reigning supreme,’ so to speak. I feel like it would be more like an acknowledgement and a celebration of Blackness, and people not being afraid of it and instead actually embracing it and putting themselves outside of their comfort zone as a means of learning. There would be so much warmth and community, and more respect for children and elders. I feel like there would be a lot of laughing too, a lot of laughing at white people if they were mad about something, because then their power would’ve been stripped.

“I’ve often felt like I was performing my gender and performing an idealized version of myself for mostly white audiences for a long time.” – Athena Holmes

On Healing

MD: What do you dream of?

AH: I think I dream of healing a lot. Because I think, again, under the white supremacist capitalist society that we live in, there is so much suffering, and a lot of it is unnecessary. As the oldest child in my family, I always wanted to bring people together to have real conversations and to initiate healing. I’m sure that to some extent, this bleeds into my performances too, in the way that I engage with audiences and how I invoke certain emotions that I think should be brought up. Hopefully, it’s a step towards healing. With BiG SiSSY, I don’t necessarily try to say anything in any kind of pretty, flowery way. I think it can be really cathartic to not have to be eloquent and to say exactly what you’re feeling, and especially to be able to do so in a public space.

The interview has been edited for clarity.

Catch BiG SiSSY performing at Hyper Real: Black History Kick-Off Party at the VAV Gallery on November 15 at 9 p.m.!

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On Monday October 22, Divest McGill staged a protest in front of the James administration building from 1 to 2 PM (see live and short video on our Facebook page). The protest happened while the Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR) held a meeting inside. CAMSR is an ethics board that reports to the Board of Governors, the highest authority at McGill. Principal Suzanne Fortier sits on the board.

Divest McGill is pressuring CAMSR to reconsider its statement that the fossil fuels industry’s activities do not cause “grave social injury,” following a report from the UN-backed Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). CAMSR defines grave social injury as “the grave injurious impact which the activities of a legal person is found to have on consumers, employees, or other persons, or on the natural environment [that] violate, or frustrate the enforcement of rules of
domestic or international law intended to protect individuals against deprivation of health, safety, or basic freedoms, or to protect the natural environment.” The IPCC recently concluded that a 1.5°C rise in global temperature could result in extreme increases in dryness, water scarcity, and mass extinction of coral reefs. The report also predicted that this threshold will be crossed sometime between 2030 and 2052. In spring 2013 and again in March 2016, the Board of Governors voted against divestment from fossil fuels. These votes followed reports from CAMSR claiming that there was no compelling evidence that the fossil fuels industry’s activities cause “grave social injury.”

In a message to The Daily, a representative of Divest McGill stated “we keep rallying [and/or] protesting outside of CAMSR’s meetings because they are the ones that can recommend divestment to the Board. While we know that they can hear us, we want them to listen and recognize that they are the only [organization] critical of divestment.”

Divestment from fossil fuel has the longstanding support of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), the PostGraduate Students’ Society (PGSS), the McGill Association of University Teachers (MAUT), the faculties of Arts and Law, and the McGill School of Environment. On September 13 2018, Divest McGill received support from the Senate, who motioned the Principal through the Board of Governors “to divest the endowment from all companies whose primary business is the extraction, distribution, and/or sale of fossil fuels; and from all mutual funds that invest in such companies.”

School of Social Work Joins the Fight Against Unpaid Internships

The School of Social Work’s Fall General Assembly (GA) for the 2018-2019 academic year took place on October 24. The GA attendance met quorum, allowing for the proposed motions to be passed and later implemented. The agenda of the GA included many motions, starting with the election of Nour Daoud as the First Year Representative for the 2018- 2019 Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) entering class. A motion to divide the role of VP External Affairs Coordinator into two positions passed, creating the new SSMU Representative position, consequently awarded to the current VP External Affairs Coordinator, Zach Kleiner. The goal of this split is to allow for a more effective fulfillment of responsibilities. Further, this division ensures fully bilingual representation for communications with other universities in the province. Mariana Sosa was elected as the new VP External Affairs Coordinator.

The Social Work Student’s Society (SWSA) then spoke of last years’ mobilization against unpaid internships, leading to a wider discussion on the matter. A motion requesting that Social Work students strike again this semester was put forward. The motion stated that “unpaid field placements are an unjust barrier to access for both potential and current students in the School of Social Work and whose effects are compounded for those living multiple, intersecting marginalizations.” Attendees then voted to strike against unpaid internships for the fall 2018 semester, calling for student participation in a week-long mobilization this November. This move by the School of Social Work aligns them with the UQAM, UdeM and UQTR’s students’ associations, which are already in support of the strike. The latter will take place November 19-23, at various universities across the province.

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Republished from QPIRG’s 2018 School Schmool.

1. BUILDING UP2. PLANNING3. OCCUPYING4. AFTER THE OCCUPATION

HAPPY OCCUPYING!

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Photos by Arno Pedram

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The United States discontinued funding to a United Nations agency that aids Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria on August 31 2018. The U.S. has been a major contributor to the The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for decades; in 2017, the United States donated $350 million to the agency, and was planning to make the same contribution this year. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, offers a multitude of health, educational, and social services to Palestinians. The UNRWA helps attain schooling for over 500,000 children in the area, and grant medical aide to 9 million. The Trump administration also recently cut $200 million in aid to other agencies helping Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. To explain this cut of funding, the U.S. government described the UNRWA as “irredeemably flawed,” and said their business strategy is “unsustainable.” In response to the United State’s decision, the UNRWA stated that “the international […] community, our donors and host countries have consistently praised UNRWA for its achievements and standards.” The U.S. used to supply 30% of its total budget, meaning that the elimination of funding from the U.S. could have disastrous results for millions of Palestinian refugees. In response to the actions of the US., Arab and European countries have promised to continue to defend the UNRWA, and Germany has pledged to increase its aid for the program. In May of this year, President Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to the much disputed city of Jerusalem, a decision critics believe is in line with the funding cut, and an overall shift towards a more pro-Israel stance.

Trans Migrant Sex Worker Vanessa Campos Murdered in France

content warning: death, anti-sex work sentiment, transphobia

Vanesa Campos, a trans Peruvian migrant sex worker, was murdered by seven to eight men while trying to protect a client from being robbed at the Bois de Boulogne (West of Paris, France), the night of August 16. A new protest in honour of Vanesa Campos is scheduled for September 22 2018. 5 men are currently being detained for “organised group murder” and “group thefts with hurt.” Associations, like Acceptess Transgenres (AcceptessT) and STRASS (a French sex worker union), have been protesting the government’s silence, especially that of Marlène Schiappa’s, France’s Secretary of Equality between women and men. They particularly criticize France’s laws on sex work, which penalize clients and push sex workers into precarity. Activists also decry the general treatment of trans people, sex workers, and migrants in French society. On the matter, a representative of STRASS wrote: “our [sex workers’] deaths are normalised. […] A trans woman who dies remains a ‘tranny’.”

Journalists arrested in Myanmar

Two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, are being sentenced to prison for 7 years for the possession of official Myanmar documents. They were investigating the massacre of 10 Rohingya men in the Burmese village of Inn Din. The verdict is being considered a roadblock for the country’s free press and transition to democracy. Multiple governments and International Human Rights groups are calling for the reporters’ immediate release.

The reporters pleaded not guilty to violating Myanmar’s colonial-era Official Secrets Act, which is an offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. They claim that they were framed by the police: the reporters told the court that two police officials handed them the papers at a restaurant in Yangon just prior to their arrest by other officers. Testimony presented by prosecution witnesses was contradictory. Another police witness testified the restaurant meeting was a set-up to block, or punish, the journalists for their reporting on the mass killings of Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine by Burmese military officials.

UN investigators have called for senior Burmese military officials to be prosecuted for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The State Counsellor of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi has remained silent on the issue, and has been criticized for failing to stand up for the free press after having championed the rights of journalists during her own house arrest.

India overturns section 377

The Indian Supreme Court decriminalized the “carnal intercourse” clause under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code on September 6 2018, in what experts are calling a “landmark decision”. While Section 377 still exists, it can no longer be used to punish consensual gay sex. This law originated from the British colonization of India in the mid-1800s, and continued to be used for prosecution, despite Britain decriminalizing homosexuality in 1967. In a public statement, Chief Justice Dipak Misra described the law as being “irrational, indefensible and manifestly arbitrary.”

In 2008, a High Court in New Delhi overturned the law and decriminalized homosexuality. However, in 2013 this order from the New Delhi High Court was brought to the Supreme Court and ruled unconstitutional, reinstating Section 377. The Supreme Court decided to revisit the legality of Section 377 through the lens of privacy; in 2017 the Supreme Court ruled that privacy was an essential human right and that “sexual orientation is an essential attribute of privacy.” Following this decision, the recent revision to Section 377 focused on protecting the privacy of consenting adults. Currently, gay marriage and the adoption of children by same-sex couples is still criminalized, but many LGBTQ+ activists have been invigorated by the recent developments and are hopeful for future change. Dhrubo Jyoti, a queer LGBTQ+ activist, told CNN in an interview that the decriminalization of Section 377 “not just affirms one’s faith in the Constitution, but it also means that the gloom and the despair in this atmosphere of abuse for many of us, hopefully, for a new generation of queer people, it won’t be there.”

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What is PrEP?
Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is a prevention treatment that commonly refers to the drugs taken to prevent HIV transmission. When taken properly, it is 99% effective at preventing the transmission of HIV, more effective than condoms, which are estimated to be around 96% effective. But, unlike condoms, PrEP doesn’t prevent other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The pill is made of emtricitabine and tenofovir, and commercialised under the name “Truvada.” Other generic versions have been available in the US since 2004. The drug can be taken in two ways: either by taking a pill every day or by taking it on demand for a few days surrounding sexual encounters. Common side-effects include nausea, vomiting, fatigue, and dizziness, but in most cases, these minor symptoms resolve themselves over time. To receive a PrEP prescription, one has to be considered “at risk” by a doctor and go through health tests. Once prescribed PrEP, a recipient must meet with their doctor every 3 months for a health check. PrEP was only approved by Health Canada in 2016. PrEP is only now becoming more widely accessible in Canada, although access to PrEP also depends on provincial health regulations.

PrEP or PEP?
PrEP is a pre-exposure treatment, whereas PEP is a post-exposure emergency treatment you can get within the 72 hours after an encounter you think might have exposed you to HIV. You can request the treatment in hospital emergency rooms. The chances of PEP protecting you from contracting HIV are high if you take it right after exposure, but its efficacy decreases quickly after 72 hours.

In Quebec, a bottle of 30 PrEP pills, which lasts about a month if taking it on a daily basis, more if taken on demand, costs about $85 CAD under the RAMQ coverage. This price has remained the same despite the fact that the price of the medication has been decreasing as more generic versions of the drug are being produced. When PrEP was initially distributed, it cost $830. Generic versions of the drug have driven the cost down to $242. Although the Quebec government pays a quarter on PrEP of what it previously did, PrEP users in the province are paying the same price.

In Montreal, PROTEGES is a program for men who have sex with other men, which allows you to access PrEP for free if you don’t have the means to. The program also offers access to doctors and nurse to prescribe you the drug, follow your health, and have access to a sex therapist for free. The program is trans-inclusive.*

U=U
U=U stands for “Undetectable equals Untransmittable” which is a slogan to remind people that HIV+ people who take antiretroviral therapy (ART), achieve, and maintain an undetectable viral load have no risk of sexually transmitting the virus to someone else.

Prejudice in the doctor’s office
The McGill Daily sent out a survey regarding people’s thoughts on PrEP in Canada. Twelve people on the pill and five people not on the pill responded. According to the respondents, the most common barrier to access was economic (13 out of 17). The other reported barriers of a medical nature (i.e. not being considered “at risk” or not finding a doctor to prescribe it) (7), racism (3), informational barriers (i.e. didn’t know much about the drug) (3), transphobia (3), immigration status (2), health (i.e. side effects) (1), age (i.e. having parents potentially knowing) (1) and serophobia (1). The size of the surveyed population does not allow for broader generalizations, but it does convey certain medical reluctances to administer the drug. These reasons often perpetuate injustice with regards to class, race, gender, and sexuality.

The question of accessibility to PrEP is therefore political. HIV rates are found disproportionally in marginalized communities: of all the people living with HIV, men who have sex with men are the most represented category amongst adults (44%). Moreover, while Indigenous peoples and Black people make up 4% and 3% of the Canadian population, they each represent 21% of the people living with HIV in Canada, totaling 42% of people living with HIV. Those populations are also disproportionately living in poverty depending on whether they are Indigenous, what their race is, on their gender, and on their immigration status, which affects negatively their access to health.

The McGill Daily contacted the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention (ASAAP) to inquire about the awareness of PrEP in South Asian communities in Canada. In response, the Women’s Health Coordinator for ASAAP told the McGill Daily that “the awareness and usage around PrEP in South Asian communities is not nearly as much as what is seen amongst white cis gay men. […] A lack of agency and social mobility continues to be a leading cause for the lack of usage of PrEP amongst South Asian women. Women are also far less likely to inquire about PrEP for fear of stigma associated with being on PrEP. Many women do not even disclose to their doctors that they are sexually active because of how it is perceived in South Asian communities. There is also the misconception that they are not at risk of HIV if they are in ‘monogamous’ long-term relationships.”

HIV, HIV+, HIV- and AIDS
HIV is the abbreviation for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, which can (but not necessarily, especially under treatment) lead to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Everyone has a serological status: HIV positive (HIV+) or negative (HIV-), positive meaning one lives with the virus, while negative means one does not. HIV status can be transmitted but AIDS cannot, as AIDS is not a virus.

Sex workers also face political barriers to accessing PrEP: a 2012 study surveying sex workers found about half of the respondents have experienced anti-sex worker stigma with doctors. The study outlined “whore stigma” as a social phenomenon shaming sex workers “for transgressing gender norms, such as asking fees for sex, satisfying men’s lust and fantasies, being vectors of disease, and being a source of transmission of sexually transmitted infections, including, HIV/AIDS, into mainstream society.” State criminalization of the buying of sex under Bill C-36 fosters this kind of attitude by marginalizing sex workers and by furthering the idea that sex workers are a threat to society’s moral health, endangering them both at work, at the doctor, and in their everyday life.

Some provinces have tried improve access to PrEP among marginalized communities. First Nations and Inuit people with Indian status have technically been able to access PrEP for free in British Columbia (BC) since 2013. However, information about this program was poorly disseminated and as a result only 23 people are benefiting from it. As Métis and non-status Indigenous people are not recognized as Indigenous under the Indian Act, they have been excluded from this program. BC has furthermore made PrEP available to all British Columbians for free as of January 1st, 2018. Despite these efforts, however, PrEP remains inaccessible for many populations. Rural populations especially face serophobia and homophobia. The Daily Xtra reported a lack of access to information about the drug, few doctors willing to prescribe PrEP or do the quarterly check-ups required for taking the drug, and people tearing down posters around HIV prevention.

What is serophobia?
Serophobia is the fear of people living with HIV. It comes in different forms. For example, on dating apps, people sometimes write that they are or are looking for someone “clean” or “healthy” (i.e. HIV negative/STI-free. People living with HIV or with an STI aren’t dirty or unhealthy; you can be healthy while living with HIV. Less stigmatizing formulations such as simply “HIV negative” should be used.

Barebacking, sex-ed, and safe sex affordability
The Daily also surveyed people’s opinions on the drug and what it meant for their habits and their community. Of the people taking PrEP or in the process of getting it, many (7) linked it to reduced anxiety and/or increased feeling of security around having sex. PrEP for some (3) meant more condomless sex but, overall, people seemed to have the same amount of sex, and increased safety for those who had condomless sex regularly previously. Critics of PrEP will say that the drug encourages less safe sex, and many critics blame PrEP for the recent drastic increase in STI rates. Although PrEP might encourage condomless sex for some, it is important to remember that it comes to prevent transmission of HIV for many people who had condomless sex regardless before. Moreover, the relation between PrEP and increased STI prevalence is actually a misconception; a study presented at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections showed that PrEP is actually reducing the rate of other STIs such as chlamydia and gonorrhea by up to 40%. Indeed, people on PrEP have regular 3-month tests that are often paired with STI testing, and have access to more information about safer sex and STIs.

PrEP is redefining safer sex, but not everybody is on board. Respondents to The Daily’s survey on PrEP talked about being potentially perceived as a “bareback whore,” (barebacking, i.e. the practice of condomless sex) while others that weren’t on PrEP noticed a greater insistence for people on the drug to look for barebacking, and expressed the fear that PrEP would lead to the resurgence of other STIs. With PrEP, safer sex comes to be redefined: taking PrEP is a new safer sex practice that comes with a certain protection from HIV and regular checks that also give people access to general STI prevention tools and knowledge. PrEP’s redefinition of safer sex has evolved in a context of misinformation about STIs, a lack of political will, and political backlash to sexual education, akin to the Ontario government’s scrapping of its 2015 sex-ed curriculum to reinstate its 1998 version. A 2010 document from the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN) reported that although sexual health has gotten better in Canada over the years, “the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections among Canadian young people is unacceptably high and poses a significant threat to their current and long-term health and well-being”. In a context of a population poorly educated on safer sex practices, redefinitions can challenge people’s preconceptions and foster tensions.

The criminalization of HIV
In many countries, including Canada, people living with HIV are being convicted of serious criminal offences and sentenced to significant time in prison for not disclosing their HIV status — even when there is no transmission and people have taken highly effective precautions that mean the risk of transmission is exceedingly small. In other cases, people are facing more serious, discriminatory charges simply because they have HIV — even when there is no risk of transmission.

PrEP redefines safer sex and helps prevent the transmission of HIV. Nevertheless, PrEP’s redefinition of safer sex, which, although helpful in many ways and to many folks, is still marked by enduring power dynamics of class, race, sexuality, and geography. PrEP, and other methods of practicing safer sex, are only affordable and accessible to a restricted number of people, mapping health inequality further onto dominant power dynamics, from the doctor’s office to the bedroom.

*To learn more about PrEP & get a prescription:
– The Montreal study on PrEP under which you can be prescribed the drug and see a sexologist for free: PROTEGES. You can contact them to set an appointment at proteges@rezosante.fr or (514) 714-8176.
– French Facebook group about PrEP
– Rezo’s page on PrEP

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The basement levels S1 and S2, which include Gerts, the Flat Bike Collective, and the Muslim Students’ Association’s offices, are slated to be the first levels to  reopen at the start of the Fall semester. According to the same plan, floors one and two will reopen in October 2018, with floors three and four, which include most student club offices, the Ballroom, and Midnight Kitchen, scheduled to open  sometime during January 2019. Updates on the closure will be made throughout July.

Currently, most student services’ offices are situated in temporary locations on 3471 Peel Street and 2075 Robert-Bourassa Boulevard, while some services are currently still awaiting accommodation. More information about the location of student services’ offices and the purpose of the renovation can be found on the SSMU page about the building closure.

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Welcome increases in university funding

As reported by La Presse, $1.5 billion will be invested in universities by 2022-2023, which is an overall 11.3% increase from the 2016-2017 university budget year — consequently, McGill’s funding will see a 9.4% increase. The government also promised an additional $9,000 investment per international student (up to 2,500 students) exclusively to francophone universities (which excludes McGill, Concordia, and Bishop), in an effort to internationalize Quebecois education. This added funding would allow these institutions to better compete with Canadian anglophone and American universities.

Deregulation at the expense of international students

Prior to the budget reforms, undergraduate international tuition was regulated by the government (Quebec and out-of-province Canadian fees still are). At the May 16, 2018 Senate meeting, McGill’s principal Suzanne Fortier explained that from the tens of thousands of dollars international students pay, universities used to only receive a couple thousand, and the rest went to the government. Fortier explained that now, all of the international tuition will go directly to the university — “it’s a net gain for us,” she said. Although Fortier celebrated the increased fundings, she did not suggest that fees will be reduced or that the additional funding will go toward scholarship funds for undergraduates. Currently, tuition at McGill goes from almost $17,000 a year for international Arts students, and up to $35,000 a year for international Engineering students. With the new legislation, international tuition fees can be increased even higher, as there are no longer any governmental restrictions that protect international students from inflated tuition costs.

A strategically timed deregulation

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, known for his organizing work during the 2012 “Maple Spring” – a movement which saw Quebec students successfully protest a proposed student tuition hike – and his recent position as co-spokesperson of Quebec Solidaire, tweeted: “Deregulating international tuition fees: unacceptable. Waiting for the end of the term to attack students on the sly: liberals have learned the lessons of 2012” (translated from French). Indeed, as a result of those 2012 Quebec student protests, the Quebec government is well aware of the challenges posed by student organizing and mobilization in the face of proposed tuition increases for Quebecois and Canadian students. Because of the transient reality of being an international student, as well as the precariousness of being in Canada on a student visa, these students are less likely to organize effectively and en masse. Moreover, introducing such a measure at the end of the academic year is the best way to prevent students from challenging policies that directly affect them. Therefore, the government can expect little campus discussion and even less protest.

McGill has a responsibility to its students

International students are vulnerable to the University’s decisions regarding their tuition. It seems probable that, McGill and other Quebecois universities will keep the tuition money that the government had previously been receiving from international students without any benefit to the students themselves, and will, sooner or later, increase their tuition fees. This has been the implied intent of the measure from the beginning — why deregulate tuition fees if not to eventually raise them? [1][2][3]

McGill’s University Mission Statement and Principles states that “McGill University embraces the principles of academic freedom, integrity, responsibility, equity, and inclusiveness.” If McGill wishes to stand by their statement, they have the unique opportunity to commit to inclusivity by making education more affordable to all by committing to use this “net gain” for the benefit of international students.

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The phenomenon is hardly new, yet disclosures have only recently been brought to the attention of newspapers, blogs, and other formal media sources. One of the most well-known articles, “Let’s talk about teachers,”  reported on the subject as early as September of 2015. In the years following the piece’s publication, a series of annual disclosures touching upon gendered and sexual violence in university have been published by the Daily, the CBC, and even professors themselves. (“Let’s talk about grey areas”, “The vicious circle of professor-student relationships”, “McGill professor accused of sexual misconduct”, “Islamic Studies Institute in the spotlight following abuse allegations against professor”, “McGill’s Shame Continues”, “McGill’s dentistry faculty criticized over its handling of sexual assault, harassment allegations”).

The lack of documentation of survivor accounts does not warrant McGill’s silence. If anything, it highlights the difficulty of reporting, disclosing, and engaging with the administration as a survivor on McGill campus. Oftentimes disclosures are made even more difficult, especially in the academic context, due to the constant lack of belief in survivors and their experiences with gendered and sexual violence. Given the overall despondency of the administration, survivors are left with few other places to turn in order to report their experiences, seek accommodations, and alert their peers of possible dangers on campus. When the institutions that are meant to protect students do not, students are pushed to resort to their own tactics to create spaces on campus that will.

The lack of documentation of survivor accounts does not warrant McGill’s silence. If anything, it highlights the difficulty of reporting, disclosing, and engaging with the administration as a survivor on McGill campus.

On April 9, the McGill Daily sent out a survey to collect testimonies from students confirming the existence of these systems of reporting gendered and sexual violence through “word of mouth,” or student to student warnings. Dozens of testimonies flooded the Daily inbox within the span of 48 hours, and many more are still coming. The scale and specificity of this system attests to the degree in which McGill has neglected its students’ outcries, as well as the long history of student solidarity on campus in the face of McGill’s ongoing negligence. Included here are some of these testimonies:

• Courtney Graham, a Political Science student at McGill from 2008 to 2011 described the “word of mouth” system enacted by students as a “large circle.” “[They] knew of at least three professors rumored to be in sexual relationships with students, and this did not include graduate students/faculty.” Moreover, “there was one professor [during their] second year at McGill in the Political Science department [they were] told was not allowed to be alone in his office with female students without the door open. To [their] knowledge, he still teaches at McGill. In fact, two of the professors with accusations of sexual relations with students are still there.”
• Aisha*, a Faculty of Arts student, has also been informed about predatory professors by peer communication and testimonies since their arrival at McGill campus in 2010. “Everybody knows who the predatory professors are, I’ve heard of one professor in my own department, ” they remarked.
• Pauline*, a Political Science student from 2011 to 2014, “recall[ed] the names of three professors mentioned during [their] time at McGill,” and explained how their names travelled by word of mouth from small groups to others through intersecting friend groups.
• Joe*, a student in the Faculty of Arts from 2012 to 2016, “heard of at least six professors in Arts [sexually involved with students] in a concrete way and heard mentions of sketchy things happening in other faculties too. Three of these were personal testimonies of people who had negative experiences with professors and the rest [they] heard from other people, including other students and professors. [They] believe some cases are more well known than others, there’s one particular case that [they] asked about even outside of the McGill context [the latest case in the department of Islamic Studies].”
• Justine*, a Political Science student,“started hearing about specific predatory [behavior] in 2013 when [they were] in undergrad. [They] wanted to take a specific course by *** ****** and was told by a few of [their] friends that he was a bit creepy. [They] also knew of the first year Psychology professor that needed [note: he doesn’t need but chooses] to do his office hours in Gerts because of previous sexual misconduct issues.”
• Saima Desai, a Faculty of Arts student from 2014 to 2017, wrote that they “first found out about accusations of sexual harassment (and more) against certain professors from friends in Islamic Studies. These were friends who had been organizing around addressing the actions of these professors. After that, [they] began mentioning it to friends in other faculties and departments, and found out that every single person (all of whom were women and nonbinary people) [they had] talked to knew of at least one professor in their department who was “creepy,” who they’d been warned about, or who a friend-of-a-friend had been harassed by. This included at least two professors in Biology, one in International Development, and a handful in other Arts departments – maybe a total of six, from [their] brief period of inquiry. [They] found that while whisper networks existed for students within departments, they didn’t always spread between faculties – so, for example, [they were] only able to access the whisper networks within the Biology department because [they] had once studied Biology. But, for the most part, students in Arts faculties didn’t have access to the information about Biology professors – potentially putting them at risk if they were to take a Biology elective, for example.” Upon knowing one of their professors was notorious for being “creepy” Saima “never went to his office hours or met with him outside of class, even though [they] knew [their] work was suffering as a result. Professors who harass students impact not only our physical and emotional safety, but our learning as well.”
• Malek*, a fourth year student in the Faculty of Arts, believed that the word of mouth system worked within “a large circle of people.” “Often, it would be substantiated through describing a female student’s experience with the professor in question. Three professors were named. Two of them were more known by the student body and administration, ******* (WIMESSA) and ****** (Poli Sci), but ******* (Poli Sci) is less known. Mostly students in upper years are aware of this information.” Additionally, “As a survivor, [they] often ha[d] to choose [their] class around which professors would be accommodating to [their] mental health/PTSD (which already limit[ed] [their] options), so [they] do this with [their] Political Science department advisor, whom [they] disclosed to. Registering for ******’s class was suggested to [them] as an option, however, [they] indicated that [they] wouldn’t be comfortable as he partakes in inappropriate/predatory relations with his female students, to which [their] department advisor dismissed [their] claims/concerns by asking if [they] [were] sure it wasn’t just rumours spreading. [They were] upset by her response as she knew [they were] a survivor and how difficult it is to navigate McGill following these experiences. Moreover, she expressed no shock or surprise when [they] did tell her about [their] concerns with ****** which indicate[d] to [them] that this wasn’t new information for her. This shows how the administration works to protect abusive professors by discrediting survivors/students.”

These underground systems of communication and disclosure between students come as no surprise given the current reporting policy. When requested to explain the current policy for reports of sexual violence committed by professors, SSMU VP External Connor Spencer wrote to us:

“Normally a student, when making a complaint around sexual violence, would refer to the Policy Against Sexual Violence that was passed by the McGill Senate on December 1, 2016. However, because this policy is not a stand-alone policy and instead refers to the Code of Student Conduct, students cannot pursue complaints against faculty through this policy. Instead, they can refer to the Policy on Harassment, Sexual Harassment and Discrimination — which is a stand-alone policy — where an assessor, who may or may not have training in sexual violence, would receive their complaint and assess whether or not there is enough for them to go through a formal process. This policy, however, does not cover sexual assault, which would instead be processed through section nine of the Regulations Relating to the Employment of Tenure Track and Tenured Academic Staff.  Yet, [these regulations are part of] another policy over 20 pages long. All formal complaints are sent to the dean of the faculty where the academic staff is employed. How complicated, hidden, and inaccessible this process is, is shown by the fact that on the OSVRSE site there is a flowchart explaining how to report a complaint against a student, but none for how to file a complaint against academic staff.”

The process to report sexual harassment and assault perpetrated by professors is both convoluted and disjointed, as its steps are located across multiple jargony documents. It is nothing short of dysfunctional. Survivors deserve better. We deserve better. Without usable systems to hold professors accountable in place, students have been forced to implement their own peer-based warning system.

Without usable systems to hold professors accountable in place, students have been forced to implement their own peer-based warning system.

It seems to be that word of mouth, which is far from offering the protection of a stand-alone policy, is the only available system for students to protect themselves. McGill is guilty of nurturing a culture of gendered and sexual violence on campus by relying on a deeply flawed policy to report sexual harassment perpetrated by professors, and for responding poorly when reports of sexual violence at the hands of professors are submitted. The McGill administration hasn’t established a system that protects students in these situations, forcing students to resort to measures such as, illegal, public accusations against professors on stickers posted in McGill buildings. These are only the first symptoms of the deeply rooted student discontent and distrust in McGill administration’s intentions regarding gendered and sexual violence on campus.

This lack of trust in the administration has only been further bolstered by the administration’s insufficient response to SSMU’s request for a third-party investigation into the mismanagement of sexual violence allegations against professors within the Faculty of Arts. McGill administration’s response has been both inappropriate and, quite frankly, insulting. They first issued an overly generalized and standardized statement on McGill’s handling of sexual assault allegations. Later and more notably, Vice-Principal Manfredi’s individually addressed a statement to SSMU VP External Connor Spencer, dismissing the claims made in the petition and the gravity of the sheer number of signatures acquired. Vice-Principal Manfredi’s individual address conveniently neglected that more than 1,000 students and 40 student associations signed the petition at the time of his response. These actions are an insult to the student body. Not only was the petition moved by SSMU at large and not Spencer individually, but also it has received wide support across the entire student body.

The final response sent by the administration five days later on April 10, was yet another standardized statement about the general policy procedure with an added copy and paste (see image above) of Vice-Principal Manfredi’s message to Spencer (a mistake made clear by the fact that the font style and size of the later portion of the message had not even been changed). The administration’s response claims that “our University does not tolerate sexual misconduct in any form,” but the continued presence of professors commonly known to be predators indicates otherwise. The McGill community deserves a response that addresses the past and present failings of the administration, and actively supports survivors of gendered and sexual violence. McGill has to drop the act, and better agree to launch a third-party investigation into its mismanagement of cases of sexual violence, or find themselves hoisted by their own petard. This is bigger than another CBC article slamming McGill. The petition and the existence of this informal system of warnings between students are testaments to the pervasiveness of the violence perpetrated on our campus and McGill’s historic inaction. We deserve change. And we are demanding it now.  

The survey entries have been edited for clarity.

*those names have been changed for anonymity

If you want to add your testimony to the survey about the informal system of warning between peers, we are still interested in hearing from you, simply click here!

You can sign the open letter calling for an external investigation into the office of the Dean of Arts here.

Conversations around gendered and sexual violence can be difficult, upsetting, re-traumatizing, and scary. There are a variety of emotions that come from experiences of gendered and sexual violence and conversations concerning them. Yours are valid. When McGill doesn’t listen, peer-based support services will.

You can find more information on The Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Students’ Society (SACOMSS)’s services here and here.

You can find more information on reporting, disclosures, and legal action at McGill here.

The post We have always known about McGill’s predatory professors appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Created as a support line for people who have experienced, or are experiencing, exclusion or discrimination on campus, the task force itself is made up of people from varying roles and positions on campus, consisting of two co-chairs, both professors at McGill; one undergraduate student from the downtown campus, one undergraduate student from Macdonald Campus, one graduate student, two additional faculty members and two staff members. No members are directly tied with the university’s administration. The survey was available from December 4 to 7.

McGill’s consultative process

A majority of the survey’s questions focused on the concept of free speech, while others constituted inquiries into possible instances of discrimination and exclusion on campus. The survey’s choice of language sparked some criticism, mainly as a result of its focus on issues of freedom of speech with only a few questions about inclusiveness, despite the task force’s mandate.

In addition to the survey, as part of the consultative process, five closed-door focus groups around different themes of inclusion were organized, occurring between January 17 and 29: Teaching & Learning, Social Spaces, Graduate Student Life, Residence Life, and an open-themed discussion. Each one was composed of twenty students, lasting for 90 minutes. As of publication, four have been held (all expect Residence Life).

The Open Forum on Campus Culture

The University held an Open Forum on Campus Culture Wednesday, January 24 in Leacock 232. McGill staff chose not to moderate the forum beyond requesting people’s definition of the theme of the focus group, discussing inclusion or exclusion experienced in that space, and requesting that the participants concentrate on discussion rather than debate.

The night’s exchange revolved around whether or not the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement had a place (or simply a right) on campus. Laila Parsons, a professor specializing in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at McGill, spoke about her views on the movement’s legitimacy.

“If the upper administration wants students themselves to engage in respectful and inclusive dialogue in a genuine way, then it needs to itself practice what it preaches,” she asserted. “It needs to respect the right of students to mobilize around the BDS movement, without picking those students out from all other activist groups on campus for special condemnation.”

“It needs to respect the right of students to mobilize around the BDS movement, without picking those students out from all other activist groups on campus for special condemnation.”

She also reproached Principal Suzanne Fortier’s February 2016 statement condemning the BDS movement after the SSMU motion to endorse the movement failed to be ratified. Parsons referred to the Principal’s statement as “bullying,” “intrusive,” the “opposite of respect and inclusion,” and “exacerbat[ing] tension rather than reduc[ing] it.”

Concerns surrounding the Task Force

Shanice Yarde, the Equity Advisor with McGill’s Social Equity and Diversity Education (SEDE) office, acknowledged the value of the task force and the hotline, but brought up important questions about the priorities and driving motives of the task force; this worry seemed to be common among many students.

One student, who wished to remain anonymous, spoke to The Daily.

“I question the extent of which the university genuinely values free speech,” they said, “considering that, in my time at McGill, the only times the admin stepped in about student voices had to do with activism that related to Palestine. Similar responses were not expressed when, for instance, an association at McGill hosted a transphobic discussion by noted pushers of hateful propaganda. Nor was there much concern or action against students who drunkenly paraded around campus with misogynist messages on their clothes.”

“Does McGill value free speech without qualification, or only on specific issues that might upset their donors?” they concluded.

During discussion, there were a few instances of students arguing for the free roaming of ideas. These students were arguing for the need to defend “free speech” even when other students’ might feel that their sense of safety was put in jeopardy by such speech, a theme many religious minorities, queer, and racialized students feel conflates freedom of speech and freedom to discriminate with one’s speech.

Another student who chose to speak with The Daily anonymously said: “It was a nice experience, people who would normally not sit together had a chance to have some debates. The board of volunteers took many notes. Unfortunately, like most commission, I seriously doubt there will be any concrete implementations of the suggestions made to the administration. In other words, such a committee with no authority does not help me believe in a better future at McGill.”

“It was a nice experience, people who would normally not sit together had a chance to have some debates.”

Moving forward

Proposals brought up during the forum included: having more face-to-face debates from opposing sides on controversial issues, implementing a binding process to make syllabi fit a required diversity clause to ensure racial and gender diversity in syllabi sources, increased support to the SEDE office, greater inclusion of student input on tenure-track applications, and representation of student perspectives in tenure-track application committees.

The task force is expected to deliver a final report and submit its recommendations to Principal Fortier by April 27, 2018, to be made public shortly thereafter and formally presented at the May 16, 2018 meeting of Senate, where the initiatives findings on inclusivity and respect will be given the opportunity to shape future policies at McGill.

Group submissions are being welcomed by the task force until January 31, 2018 at principals.taskforce@mcgill.ca as Word or PDF documents not exceeding two pages. At any time, any individual can also send the task comments or suggestions by email to the same email.

The post McGill consults students on respect and inclusion appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, spoken word artist, therapist, wicked witch, and lasagna lover who divides her time between Montreal and Toronto, unceded Indigenous territories. Her poems and essays have been published widely in print and online, and she has performed in venues across the country, including Verses International Poetry Festival and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her first novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir was released by Metonymy Press in 2016, and her debut poetry collection, a place called No Homeland, was released by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017. Her book for children, From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, was published in October of the same year. Kai Cheng was also a featured columnist for The McGill Daily from 2012-2014, writing about race, sexuality, and gender. She sat down with us on a sunny Saturday morning to talk about queer community, #MeToo, sinning, living in diaspora, dreams, love, and radical healing. This interview will make you laugh, cry, and really want to sit down and talk with Kai Cheng.

The truth of the heart

Arno Pedram (AP): Hello.

Kai Cheng Thom (KCT): Hiiiii.

AP: So my name is Arno.

Tai Jacob (TJ): I’m Tai.

KCT: I’m Kai Cheng Thom. I wrote some books that all came out at the same time. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but they all came out last year. I also write for the internet sometimes. I used to be very much involved in, like, Montreal activism and queer activism culture, and now I’m not so much, partly because I moved to Toronto, and partly because I am getting older, and I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life! Also, I’m visiting Montreal right now because my wife Kama La Mackerel lives in Montreal.

TJ: That’s a name drop! (everyone laughs)

KCT: Giant name drop. I’m married to someone famous! And yeah, Montreal is always going to be the city where my heart came into being and where I found myself and also was destroyed, and found myself again.

TJ: That sounds a lot like the story of Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, which was one of the three books that all came out at the same time. I was wondering, in what ways is this book an allegory for your actual life experience?

KCT: Oh, not at all.

TJ: Really?

KCT: I don’t know, it’s really funny. People ask this question in different ways a lot and I love answering it. So Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, the subtitle of this novel is “A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir,” and when you put the word memoir in the title of your novel, people are always like, “Hey, oh my god, I’m excited to read your memoir!” And I’m like, “It’s not my memoir, it’s the memoir of the character who is fictional.” But of course, people notice certain superficial similarities, like this character being an Asian trans woman growing up in a city where it’s always raining on the west coat, and moving to a city where everyone is speaking French and smoking cigarettes. I used to be an English major in theatre, and my favourite play that we studied was Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a classic play about an aging Southern belle who’s also, like, a deep racist and you know, a horrible person. But Blanche DuBois, that aging Southern belle, has a line where she’s being accused of being a pathological liar, which she is, right, she’s lied to everyone in her life and kind of tried to trick everyone into seeing her as something that she’s not. And she says, “I never lied in my heart.”

AP: “Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart.”

KCT: Yes, oh my god! (Laughter)

AP: It’s my favourite line.

KCT: I love it, I love it. And that’s what Fierce Femmes is about. You know, it’s the truth of the heart. And so, nothing that really happens in the novel “happened” — and I have to also say that for plausible deniability, which is the joke I always make — but that novel is the truth of what happened to me in my heart.

Sin and punishment

AP: Okay, so let’s get into activism and queer spaces.

KC: Sure!

AP: Having read your article “Righteous Callings,” I was wondering: how do we manage accountability in social spaces, activist space in particular, in the context of a call-out culture, and how does shame fit into that?

KCT: Mhmm, just like a nice, light question. Oh god, I don’t fucking know, but I’m gonna take a try, because you asked me the question. Whenever this question comes up in any kind of interview context, I’m like, let us set the stage, why am I being asked. And I think people are asking the question because I write about it a lot, and I just want to make it really clear that because I write a lot about accountability does not mean that I am an expert in accountability. It just means that I think about it a lot and, also, that I put these thoughts on the internet. All that to say, I think we live in a culture, in addition to call-out culture, of celebrity culture, in activist space. And we do this thing where we’re like, oh my god Kai Cheng Thom, Kim Katrin Milan, Mia Mingus, all the big names, and some names are bigger than others obviously. And we’re like, “Those people are perfect and the example of how we should live our lives.” And that is terrifyingly similar to certain religious communities, where beautiful ideas around accountability and goodness are then pinned to people who are actually very fallible. Because, I mean, scratch the surface of any celebrity and you will find a sinner. All this to say, I have done bad things. I’ve been called out for some things that I think are fair, others that I don’t think are fair. So take everything I say with a grain of salt! Coming back to accountability in social space, the truth is, I think we’re obviously going through a crisis of accountability in all space right now. In so many countries, in so many places, with the #MeToo movement. And I think the powerful and amazing thing is that the veil is being ripped off of the shame of survivors, and, like, the shame of people who have experienced violence, who have been silenced for such a long time. Maybe this is the first time in history that this particular kind of movement is happening. But I think we are conflating the conversation of punishment with the conversation around accountability and justice.

TJ: I have questions about this actually. Specifically, about that really good article you wrote for GUTS, called “#NotYet,” in response to #MeToo. How do you work at the intersections of the work surrounding sexual violence and work surrounding prison abolition?

KCT: So I think we have a really powerful and beautiful statement, a beautiful activist truism, now blowing up in the mainstream, which is: “I believe women, I believe survivors.” This is a really important statement, in that survivors and women have not been believed for a long time. And that statement, I think, finds its greatest use in situations of support. Whether you’re providing a social service in an institution, or you’re providing support for your friends, the thing you don’t want to do when your friend is like, “I’ve been hurt,” is to say, “Really? Can you tell me exactly how? Does it fit into a legal standard?” And this comes from a history of women’s shelters operating in the United States and Canada where, by law, the definition of sexual assault excluded sexual assault and violence between married partners. But believing survivors has taken on, I think, and maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s taken on a different kind of meaning when we talk about justice and accountability. I think in the mainstream there is a move to conflate, “I believe survivors,” with, “And that means the person who is the perpetrator should go to jail, or go through some kind of punishment.” And we really have not figured out how to separate the idea of punishment from the idea of justice. So like, if I have been harmed, that means the only way for me to feel like that harm has been seen and addressed is that the person who hurt me is being punished. And that is really hard to let go of. To be honest, like I really wish that some of the people that have hurt me would be punished. But from a place of values, when I really think about that, then I’m like, okay, that doesn’t solve the problem of violence. Carceral solutions to violence only displace violence into the prison system and also disproportionately affect vulnerable people, because the truth is that punishment doesn’t happen to the powerful. Punishment only happens to people who can’t stop it, who don’t have the power to stop it. And the activist response to that, which is shunning, or to remove people from social circles, only displaces violent people into other communities, and those people are then angry and traumatized by the loss of their community and so the cycle just spins and spins. And then the secret truth, I think, about activist communities, in the same way the secret truth about religious communities is, is that all of us are sinners. And the extent of the sin varies, it obviously does. But I think all of us, if we were to look into our past, would find something bad that we have done. And it’s so important to talk about this. I’m actually really happy, in a weird way, that the Aziz Ansari story is unfolding the way it does, because the reason there has been so much pushback around that story is that Aziz Ansari, who in his own way is sort of like a figure for liberal and leftist communities, what he did is actually normal — not good, but normal. And when we start to understand that violence is normalised and normative, and happens all the time, we can realise that, actually, most of us are participating in it in some way, from either colluding with the perpetrator to being the perpetrator. Then, I think we can start having a discussion about shame: shame is a normal and healthy response to having done something bad, but it cannot stop there, and we cannot let shame silence us. The most important truth that we need to come to terms with, as believers of justice, is the truth of the harm that we, ourselves, have caused, and not the harm that we think other people have caused — because the truth is, the place where we will have the most impact is in our own hearts and relationships. And I say that as someone who has, you know, a trail of shattered relationships behind me. So there you go.

Being bad

KCT: As a therapist I have the privilege of speaking to people in an intimate way about things that they’ve done that are abusive, that they know are abusive, and the pattern that always comes up is, “Look what you made me do!” The desire to shift blame onto another for one’s own personal pain, trauma, behavior, taken into its extreme, is an abusive pattern. The best part of the movement/moment we’re in is the part that says, “Look at yourself, and also love yourself.”

TJ: Something that I value so much about your work, specifically the article “Righteous Callings” is the way that you incorporate yourself into your analysis, and you start off “Righteous Callings” with this line, “I have always believed that I’m a bad person,” and that’s also been a theme in this interview, the idea of sinning, being bad, and religion. It keeps coming back! But I wonder if perhaps this is the wrong framework, if perhaps we could move beyond sinning and badness to just, “This is who we are.” Because sinning still implies that it is wrong, what if it isn’t wrong? What if it is just who we are and we’re constantly working towards something… ?

KCT: What I’m terrified of about this thought, what I struggle with in moving towards this thought is this: “What if I’m just trying to let myself off the hook for being bad?”

TJ: I know, that’s exactly why I stopped my question halfway, because I thought, “We’re actually bad.”

KCT: So much of the righteousness, self-righteous part of social justice is like, “See how you’re bad! See how you’re racist!” and the right response is, “You’re right. I am a racist,” and that’s of course true in some ways but also, there is this desire in me to be like, “But also, this is a human being human and growing up surrounded by a giant fucking terrifying system of trauma and systemic oppression, and this is all of us!” Does that mean I’m not being accountable? I guess we could question the framework of accountability itself, that, you know, we should do at some point. But also I’m like, “If I said that, what would happen next?”

TJ: I’m wondering what the motivation is? I guess the desire to be good, constantly, actually is a utopic desire — a place that is actually no place. What if we can think of goodness as always inaccessible, and that being okay?

KCT: That would be amazing! And you see people trying to create homelands that are free of sin: like with the Islamic State, a perfect caliphate, similarly with the cultural revolution in China, creating a communist land free of the sin of bourgeoisie. Whoever is doing that is creating this trap of desperately trying to be good, never getting there, blaming everyone else, hurting everyone else. I would love that to be able to say, “It’s okay…not to be good,” but then how do you respond to things that are violent? That need to be changed? But I think those two things are not incompatible!

Kill your heroes?

AP: I feel like a lot of queer culture has built itself around guides, and the history of queer communities often is: in your life you meet certain people who allow you to get further and further into your exploration of queer identity. Should we seek to have no more guides? Or should we try to keep it in a spiritual, social, kinship way?

TJ: That’s really interesting when looking at the similarity between religious communities and queer activist circles.

AP: And also in relation to fame.

KCT: I think it’s always most illustrative and interesting to talk about how I’m actually impacted by this. I often talk about the hypocrisy of celebrity culture and how much I hate it, which is, you know, kind of burning the ship that you’re sailing in, because, obviously, hello?! So much of what I have in my life is because I’m a micro-celebrity. I became a micro-celebrity, basically, as an alternative to becoming a sex worker. I’ve never said that out loud before, but that is true. The options that I felt were open to me in my life, as a trans woman of colour, were sex work or doing the queer celebrity gig. And I chose queer celebrity because, honestly, I found sex work too difficult to get into; I didn’t have the skills. I also found a different career path in social services, but that too is really tied to my queer celebrity. Part of the problem with queer celebrity is that it’s a neoliberal culture — it’s a brand! I’m sorry to pick on fellow micro-celebrities, but most of us are making anywhere from a tiny amount of money, to a moderate size amount of money from speaking, running, touring, modeling, all these other things. And so many of the queer youths that I work with have this in mind: “Oh I could be a YouTube celebrity, I could be a speaker/ writer/ artist/ whatever lifted by the activist community into the realm of fame.” Because it’s neoliberal, and we have to make money, so we’re always trying to be the next critical thing. And I just want to be suspicious of that as someone who is also, supposedly, anti-capitalist, and also, this is how I pay most of my rent guys! When it comes to guides: who doesn’t look up to someone and say, “I wish that were me/ could be me?” That’s so powerful! I don’t want to take that away from people! And I couldn’t!

TJ: And it’s more than that too, that person is helping you survive.

KCT: Yeah! This person is helping you maybe not harming yourself, or ending your life. What I do want to speak against is the concept of infallibility. Because that is so scary both for the people who have idols and for the idols. “Kill your heroes.” The thing queer communities love is celebrities, but the community also loves to hate celebrities. What if we set up a system where we don’t kill, or eat, or burn anyone? Inherently, the idea of having a hero that you then kill, or burn, or eat is disposable, disposability culture. So I’m wondering if we could allow for there to be guides, celebrities, with an understanding that people are humans and actually do some terrible things in life to survive, and also humans do some shitty stuff in life all the time, because they’re human.

No homeland

AP: I’m wondering how identities of queerness, being in a diaspora, not being able to speak your language as you would like to, intersect. I found this in a place called No Homeland, and I particularly resonated with the part where you have this recognition of someone that you see as part of your (diasporic) family, and you feel the need to bond because diasporic identities are so lonely and unique. But even then, we come to feel a tension between our diasporic identity and queer identity, we could ask ourselves: is queer identity a Western identity, a white thing?

KCT: a place called No Homeland is my favorite piece; I wrote it over ten years! That topic is the primary theme of the book, as the title indicates: feeling connection to different places, but also massive disconnection from those same places, and language and identity is so much a part of that. I do not really speak Chinese very well, even though I’ve taken some courses, but there are many different kinds of Chinese that vary between generations, even within my family. What we’re trying to access is a homeland that is frozen in time, a fantasy, that actually doesn’t exist anymore: you can never really go back. But there are different ways of accessing homeland. In some ways the homeland that is really yours is your immediate family: parents, siblings, uncles, which can also be full of trauma for some people. And there are different things we do, like making different foods, trying to access different pieces of culture. The truth is, living in diaspora and being queer means we are so many shades removed, and that can be a terrible and painful thing. It also is, I think, an amazing and powerful gift, when you realise that what is happening to you is the result of your family’s resilience, and a breaking of the narrative of nationalism and homonationalism that entrap most people and most queer culture. When you walk into a queer community, you immediately disrupt it as a person of colour, and when you walk into queer cultures in “the homeland,” you bring this Westernness. I think something interesting is that contemporary Western identity politics are actually very based on essentialism, which feminism and post-modernism tried to break out of for a while. People now are really hammering down, “Are you a POC? Are you a BIPOC? What kind of person of colour are you? How much do you pass? What is your white skin privilege? What is your adjacent-ness to whiteness?” All these terms are coming up, right? I think if you just take a second, it’s easy to realise that everything is fluid and that your experience is your experience, the story you carry is the story you carry, and there is something very freeing about that. When I run into queer Chinese people from the mainland, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong: it’s always different, and there is always a point of connection. What you get to have is a memory, the ghost that your parents gave you, and you get to let the past go, and I think that’s really important actually — to embrace living in this “place called no homeland” is to be able to let go of the past.

TJ: Also living in diaspora is constantly living in a liminal space.

KCT: Exactly. I am of the opinion that all things are happening at the same time — that all traumas are happening past and future, and I love that — when we are talking about diasporic people, the past is always going to be with us but the future is with us too! And we’ll always be a part of that.

AP: I have a hard time writing in my first language, French, or my second, English, in relation to what I am discovering now about this whole part of my Iranian heritage. It doesn’t have to be, but it’s like English allows at the same times that it limits diasporic creativity. How do you feel about English, what do you think English has allowed you and what do you think it is pushing away?

KCT: Another hard hitting question. I love it! Yeah, I have a complicated relationship with English, like most diasporic writers. And English is so much my first language and my best language. So I was raised speaking Chinese and English, and then, you know, more and more English, and then I really stopped speaking Chinese at all, and then I learned French when I moved to Montreal. But yeah, language is so complicated and does have its limitations, and is such a form of colonization, right? And I think the truth is, I might not be a writer if English were not my best language, because I feel like with English I’m always trying to figure out how to say things that don’t exist yet. And maybe they would exist for me if I spoke my mother tongue more fluently. So I think English pushes me, to find more ways of expressing meaning, and to find new ways of saying things. Also, most of my literary exposure has been through English, some through French also, but like, all of my major references are to English writing, even if the English writing is diasporic or post-colonial. I’m so shaped by that. And I actually do sometimes wonder how limited my politics are because so much of them are in English, and therefore also from the American canon.

Dreams and nightmares

TJ: What are your dreams?

KCT: So, I’m not gonna lie to you! I have a really strong dream that keeps coming up. Literally, when I’m sleeping, but also its a fantasy life. So I am currently married to Kama, but I am also dating a white guy, whom I love, who is definitely the dude who has treated me the best in all the world of all the dudes I’ve ever met, and he’s in tech. And I have this fantasy that he’s going to become a tech millionaire, that we’re going to live in Silicon Valley, and that I’m going to be like a tech millionaire’s trophy wife, and host parties and be disconnected from the world and just float in this billionaire’s palace for the rest of my life.

TJ: Wooow. Wait, I’m sorry, but this happens for a moment in Fierce Femmes.

KCT: It does.

AP: It does.

KCT: It does. And sometimes life is very fascinating because I didn’t meet this boy until right after Fierce Femmes was published. And like, the names are also very similar. Anyway! So, I have this fantasy dream of being lifted into wealth and into heterosexuality and into safety, out of queer community, out of activism, into like the 1 per cent, living a life of safe luxury. That’s a fantasy. It’s also kind of a nightmare, obviously. Because what happens in the book, Fierce Femmes — oh, I guess I can’t spoil what happens in the book — but you know, the character in the book who has that for a moment, doesn’t really enjoy it. And I don’t think I would enjoy it if I had it, either. But I think this says a lot about what I fear right now. And to be really honest, what I fear is queer community and I fear this political moment. At the same time, all of my loves are in queer community, and all of my strengths and all of my gifts come from queer community. And all the potential to change the world in a positive way comes from this political time. But it’s terrifying. Let’s be honest, I think we’re all fricking fucking terrified!

TJ/AP: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

KCT: Because, you know, a despot, like a nationalist despot, is in control of the most powerful nation in the world. All of our idols are falling from the stars, for good reasons maybe, but are still falling, and I think we’re all kind of falling with that. And the longing for safety is ingrained in us, and I think it’s an essential thread in white, queer American community, this idea of safety also being tied to economics and if you can just be wealthy enough and married enough and heterosexual enough, then you can be safe. When of course, everything that Fierce Femmes is about is releasing these ideas of safety to seek out transformation, to seek out justice, to seek out connection, to seek out magic. So I guess the shadow dream to my dream of becoming a tech millionaire’s trophy wife is the dream of continuing this life and finding more freedom in that. The dream of being a tech billionaire’s wife is embracing the unknown, and I think that’s what we all grapple with, right? And we have the choice of being assimilative or upwardly mobile, in the same way that my parents really, really tried to fit in — this is like the dream of a different kind of world.

Forgiving and being forgiven

TJ: What is the role of relationships and friendships in healing in social justice movements? We kind of touched on it before, but could you expand? I’ve been thinking about friendship as the root of freedom and the communities that we form being alternative universes.

KCT: If we can return to a cliché for a moment, it’s been said that love is the answer, that our relationships are the answer, that within the microcosm of our intimate partnerships and chosen families we create these spaces of not constantly having to experience otherness, of not having to experience non-consent. But we know the truth about a lot of our friendships and family relationships, especially at this age, is that of course violence is replicated in queer family, how could it not be? We are traumatised creatures trying to build, and when we are doing that we are going to fuck it up, a lot. So I think the revolutionary potential in relationships is the potential for honesty, for saying, “Wow you really fucked up and hurt me badly,” and for forgiveness. And this is what trauma takes away from us: the potential to be forgiving and forgiven. When we live in traumatic environments with parents or caregivers, we are taught to believe that making a mistake will erase us from the possibility of having love. There’s this horrible, beautiful quote in the God of Small Things where this child is being chastised by her mother, and her mother says, “Do you know what careless words do? They make people love you less.” And there’s this terror in queer communities of being loved less because of careless words. You say something that’s a microaggression, or you do something that is politically incorrect, or is problematic — that’s the word, right — then we will be loved less and less and less, we live in terror of this, right? And one thing I wish was more present in queer community, that actually was present in a weird way in the Christian community I grew up in, is this idea that you could be forgiven if you were honest about your mistake. I mean, it didn’t work out for the Christian community that I grew up in, but it was an idea that was around, and I feel like it is actually not that much around in queer community right now. But now as a therapist, what I know is important for recovery from trauma is the ability to break a relationship and to repair it again, and to have faith that we won’t lose each other.

Returning to the body

KCT: It’s so human that we fuck up and people leave us and it SUCKS, right? And then there’s just that moment of totally being lost in the pain, and there’s something about how pains returns us to the body that is so important. And I think we have to listen to that, the body tells us things, that people are important and that it’s bad we fucked up, for one thing, and also that relationships are changing. You know, as we’re talking about this experience of getting into these close relationships, and you hurt each other and you love each other again, I think sometimes people resist that idea for the good reason, because I think a key factor of abuse in intimate violence is someone saying you have to forgive me, and things have to be the way they were again. Like, if I said “I’m sorry, now we have to be friends exactly the way it was,” and that’s actually not possible. When you hurt someone you do change the relationship forever, and sometimes we change it in a way that is better and more close, and sometimes we change it in a way where it’s time for it to be over. And forgiving and being forgiven, or having forgiveness as a value, does not mean someone has to still be your partner after you’ve hurt them or still be your friend, or even that you have to like each other. It just means that you’re allowed to exist together, right? And that grief and that pain is what transformation feels like, but also is what allows us to change. Pain is what tells us, “Okay, I really have to change my patterns,” or “Oh, that person was really important to me, and I grieve that loss.” I think we spend so much time trying to avoid that pain that we end up sometimes locking ourselves into really difficult and sometimes violent patterns.

This interview has been significantly edited for clarity and length.

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