Bill C-279 protects the gender non-conforming, not peeping toms

By Rachel Braeuer
Photos by Mark Burnham

“What the actual fuck?” is a question I often ask myself when watching any Sun News Network video. My response to Brian Lilley’s interview with Rob Anders, titled “Flush the ‘Bathroom Bill’ ” was no different.

Anders is a conservative MP who recently received notoriety for suggesting that Thomas Mulcair helped speed along Jack Layton to his death and for comparing the war of 1812 to Muslim terrorism. This past week, he decided to speak out against Bill C-279 which seeks to add gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds of discrimination to the Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. Currently, while sexual orientation is protected, gender identity isn’t, meaning one can’t harass someone for being queer, but looking queer is a grey area.
One result of this bill would be that anyone who identifies as a certain gender, regardless of assigned sex, can legally use the washroom appropriate for their expression of gender. Or, as Anders puts it, they wouldn’t have to use the washroom that their “plumbing” indicates, plumbing being the umbrella term for pee-pee and va-jay-jay. He argues that this “puts women and girls at risk,” then cites an anecdotal case of a peeping tom, and the recent death of Wayne Alan Cunningham, one of the two men charged with forcible confinement and sexual assault of a 16-year-old boy.

Anders must have gone fishing in the toilet to find these red herring arguments. Foremost, the point of the bill is to protect a vulnerable minority’s rights to look, dress, and act genuine to how they feel. Nowhere in the bill is the word “bathroom” mentioned or suggested. Secondly, the boy who was allegedly assaulted was sleeping on the streets and allegedly taken, while asleep, in a van to the home where Cunningham and co-accused David James Leblanc assaulted him and kept him captive. Apparently, Cunningham had been dressing as a woman as of late, but nowhere is it stated that he was dressed like a woman during the alleged abduction, which happened on the street and not in a washroom. How this relates to women and girls being at risk if trans people or gender-neutral folk can use whatever bathroom they like, I don’t know, but I assume it has something to do with the “perverts” that Anders refers to later in the video.

Anders and Lilley are conflating two separate issues: minority rights and people using disguises to enter into private areas for nefarious reasons. During their discussion, images of Chaz Bono, Jenna Talackova and other notable trans people flash across the screen, cementing Anders rhetoric as what it is: transphobia.

Transphobia is literally the fear of transgendered people. Lilley and Anders are scared that someone allowed to use a washroom that fits the expression of their gender identity and not their assigned sex will then go on an assault-filled rampage. They don’t have a shred of evidence to suggest this is what might happen, it’s just a knee-jerk, ignorant response based around their discomfort with trans people, framed around the age old “think of the women and children” defence.

The sick irony here is that when it comes to violent attacks, trans women (the only group referenced as a threat by Anders) are more likely to experience violence than any other identifiably queer person. The National Coalition for Anti-Violence Programs 2011 hate violence report found trans women specifically accounted for a disproportionate 40 per cent of hate murders, while only representing 10 per cent of all hate victims and survivors. Non-gender-normative people were 28 per cent more likely to experience violence of some kind, and were 45 per cent less likely to see police classify their incident as a hate crime. These statistics should hold more weight than Anders’s one anecdotal story from an anonymous source about a man who dressed as a woman so that he could watch women urinate from over the stall without sticking out.

When a society refuses to guarantee the rights of a minority, it makes them less important than the majority. Bill C-279 gives people the right to express their gender identity how they see fit. It doesn’t protect the rights of peeping toms dressed as women; you can be dressed as a horse while you peer over a bathroom stall, it won’t change the fact that it’s illegal.