The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) needs Jesus; more specifically, they need to heed the savior’s story concerning kicking up dust about the speck in the other person’s eye, all the while having a plank in your own (Matthew 7:3-5).
I had a come to Jesus moment when ETFO was supposedly addressing workplace transphobia, yet was exhibiting enough unexamined bias to splinter into at least enough transphobic planks to build a schoolhouse. Turn your eyes to ETFO’s response to my human rights tribunal complaint and behold how ETFO’s in-house legal council explains my mental health accommodation request that ETFO NOT engage in transphobia, cisgenderism and microaggressions while representing me…
“ The applicant wants ETFO to vigorously pursue their six human rights grievances about their experiences of discrimination and harassment as a trans teacher in the school board without having to talk about gender identity, gender expression, and their experiences of transphobia and how it has impacted them with counsel or ETFO because their doctor had “requested that discussion around [their] gender identity and exposure to transphobia be limited as it was damaging to [their] mental health”. When ETFO and their counsel try to engage the applicant in these necessary and potentially difficult discussions, the applicant alleges that ETFO has failed to accommodate their medical restrictions and/or has engaged in discriminatory microaggressions or “othering”.”
Perhaps this was just a case of learning by doing… So what was the talk about gender identity, expression and experiences of transphobia that ETFO thought necessary to engage in to defend me from discrimination and harassment? Well. Let’s see…
I suppose it is super important for ETFO to understand what Queer people are when advocating for trans rights. In July 2019, I attended a meeting with ETFO in Toronto at the law offices of Goldblatt Partners to
discuss the human rights abuses of my former employer. At the start of the meeting, ETFO’s lead lawyer stated that he had recently trained in LGBTQ issues to fight against the Doug Ford government about the new health curriculum.
This lawyer reported that the training was good but that there was just one thing that he could not understand, and that was queer people. He then turned to me and asked me what the difference was between gay and queer and what did queer mean?
Discussing gender identity to educate others is not something cisgender people have to engage in, as they have the privilege of being cis and, therefore, form the unspoken“norm”. Alison Foreman writes about the assumptions that require minorities to shoulder the burden of educating,
“Assumptions can force marginalized people to repeatedly serve as involuntary educators for those who lack awareness, forcing them to repeat LGBTQ 101 factoids and canned definitions of the words “stereotype” and “discrimination” for any (and every) insensitive person they encounter.”
https://mashable.com/article/common-antiqueer-microaggressions-pride-2019
I was very embarrassed and put on the spot that everyone at the round table looked at me expecting some queer/trans education. Having a lawyer who is supposed to defend me, a queer, ask such a basic question did not bode well. It clearly did not help the students of Ontario that ETFO’s lawyers were fighting for LGBTQ representation in the curriculum while at the same time not knowing what the Q in queer meant. Imagine a lawyer defending a client against racism and asking but what does race really mean? I’m not surprised the Sex ed case went this way….
I was also misgendered by a another lawyer at the meeting, and no one said anything but me. Standing by in silence while someone is misgendered is a microaggression.Note : this meeting was supposed to be about the transphobia of my workplace were one common invalidation was misgendering. I am not sure how my union thought it could protest the very thing it was doing itself – see above for Jesus’ hot take on hypocritical eye logs. This is kinda like defending a person in a sexual harassment case and taking work on the case as an opportunity to ask if they’d fancy a quick fuck.
For many, unconscious biases creep into the common vocabulary by way of microaggressions, behaviors that subtly or indirectly communicate a derogatory or otherwise hostile message to the recipient. Microaggressions have the power to make those on the receiving end feel socially uneasy, culturally out of place, or even physically unsafe. – Alison Foreman
At that meeting, I was asked to weigh in on Drag Race and Pose, and was told how unbelievable it was that these ladies looked like women. I was unaware that these LGBTQ-based TV shows and the gender identities and gender expressions of drag queens and trans actors were essential to my own case facts. I had no knowledge at that time of either show, anyhow. Questioning a queer person on stereotypically queer culture is the common microaggression of lumping us all into one category. It also distracted from my reason for being there – fighting transphobia in the workplace.
Kevin Nadal, who wrote the seminal That’s So Gay!! Microaggressions and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community, states,
“People just need to be aware of any stereotypes that they have about any group, and reflect upon that before they get into those situations,” advises Nadal. “If you have that awareness before you come into contact with a queer or trans person, then you are less likely to say those kinds of things because you recognize that it is a stereotype.”
I fail to see the relevance of these stereotypes and microaggressions to my case, but ETFO must have thought they were paramount because they doubled down on them. At a mediation meeting in August 2019, my Queer support worker was also asked by the same ETFO lawyer what it means to be queer. Queerly, google must not have been working in the month since he had first asked me, and he didn’t have the chance to educate himself. (If you google the word queer right now the first 3 listings will be all you need). Perhaps his query, “What is queer ?” broke the internets? It’s a mystery to me as deep as the definition of queerness is to ETFO lawyers.
During the negotiations, the head lawyer engaged my supporter in a side conversation about Pose and how incredible it was that the actors “looked just like women”. I finally interrupted this conversation, asking if
we could get back to my case, and the lawyer responded, “ Your case, your case, why is it always about you, Key?” The whole room laughed and I felt very embarrassed for having asked the focus to shift from
speaking about transgender tv shows to my case. If I were cisgender, there is no way a lawyer defending me would engage a support person like this nor discuss how amazing it that cis women look like women.
As a final parting shot at the end of a mediation day, the lead ETFO lawyer told me out of the blue he had no idea how anyone could misgender me and that I looked like a man. I reminded him of his colleague misgendering me in front of him and his doing nothing about it. He said he could not remember…
We never did get to reading out the grievances and addressing them
as I asked. It seems that engaging in stereotypes and committing microaggressions was a more important part of my defence than addressing and rectifying a union member’s experience of transphobia. Of course, my ETFO defense would involve discussions around my gender identity and expression and experience of transphobia, as it pertains to workplace happenings. ETFO’s contention that they have to discuss my gender identity and expression apart from the facts of the case and perpetuate transphobia in microaggressions to defend me from transphobia is blindingly stupid.
Ambrosius Francken I and
Jan Collaert (I)
They should be able see workplace wrongs without overlooking the same wrongs and bias in their own lens. Why can’t ETFO see that they cannot commit transphobic microaggressions when defending trans persons from the same? They haven’t the remotest idea of the cisgender privileged mote in their collective eyes. Take it from Jesus, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye.”