Bad memories / new threat

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This article was published 23/05/2023 (877 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BRANDON — During a November visit to Brandon, Allan Tyler saw something so surprising he pulled his car over to take a picture of it.

Outside Knox United Church was a sign commemorating Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual event memorializing those who have died because of anti-transgender violence.

As a gay man who left Brandon in 1989, because he felt it was a hostile place to grow up queer, Tyler never thought he would see such a display in his hometown.

However, the psychologist now working for London South Bank University in the United Kingdom said given his experiences in the 1970s and ’80s, a recent call to ban books featuring LGBTTQ+ topics from local schools wasn’t a surprise.

At the Brandon School Division’s last board meeting, a former trustee argued books that discuss subjects such as gender identity and sexual health are not appropriate for children.

For Tyler, access to reading material that could have helped him figure out who he was and discover he was not alone as a youth would have been welcome.

“There are kids who get bullied and there are kids who are different but are still part of an easy social scene,” Tyler said.

“Being the queer kid wasn’t the only thing that made me different. I was a weird kid. I kind of marched to my own drummer but, if I’m being fair to the kids I went to school with, I didn’t have the same set of social skills.”

Bullying inflicted on him escalated from name-calling to death threats.

Tyler recorded one of these calls and took it to his school’s vice-principal: “The message from him was, ‘Be less different, stand out less and you’ll be fine.’”

Unsatisfied, Tyler threatened to contact police if the school didn’t deal with the issue. The classmates accused were eventually marched into the principal’s office and the threats stopped, he said.

At the time, Tyler said he had the thoughts and feelings of a person working on discovering themselves but he wasn’t “out” to himself, let alone anyone else.

He didn’t want to say definitively there weren’t any books discussing LGBTTQ+ topics in his school libraries, but he can’t remember any.

Being openly gay in Brandon back then wasn’t possible due to the stigma, Tyler said.

Disinformation around the LGBTTQ+ community persists today, he added.

The recent school board presentation, for instance, suggested access to queer content is setting up children to be victims of sexual grooming or pedophilia.

Tyler points out research has shown higher rates of teenage pregnancy, unreported sexual assaults and untreated illnesses in areas with limited access to information on topics such as birth control, sexually transmitted infections, sex before marriage, consent, sexual assault and incest.

“In primary school, we were read Bible stories, but I’ve never owned a slave, had multiple wives or prepared to sacrifice my son on an altar. I never thought cutting a baby in half was a serious solution to a custody struggle,” he wrote in an open letter to the Brandon Sun and Brandon Pride.

On top of Tyler’s work as a psychologist and academic on LGBTTQ+ mental health in England, he also collaborates with the Croydon Safeguarding Children Partnership, a group in the south of England that educates and supports workers (teachers, emergency responders and mental health professionals) in tackling queer issues.

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Six years ago, then-Grade 11 non-binary student Navan Forsythe (who uses they/them pronouns) went before the Brandon board with a request to make local schools more inclusive for LGBTTQ+ students.

Specifically, Forsythe wanted more gender-inclusive washrooms and for staff to receive ally training to understand issues raised by queer students. Generally, such training teaches adults to be an ally to LGBTTQ+ youth by educating them about terminology and the challenges non-binary youth face.

Speaking to the Sun from Edmonton, Forsythe said when they were a student in Brandon, there was only one gender-neutral stall for all transgender students. While ally training was available for staff, it was not mandatory, they said.

Forsythe said their concerns weren’t followed up by the division.

After hearing about the book ban presentation, Forsythe watched the archived video on the school division’s website.

“I did not enjoy watching it,” Forsythe said. “But I felt that I needed to know more… I was genuinely worried because of how much support she seemed to get, both from the outwards thanks she received and the complete and total silence from the remainder of the board.”

A couple of the books cited — Being Jazz by Jazz Jennings and Rethinking Normal by Katie Rain Hill — were written by transgender women and discuss their respective transitions.

Forsythe doesn’t remember books like those being available when they were in school. “There were some things relating to sexuality, there may have been books relating to sex education… but on gender identity, there were not.”

They would’ve appreciated having more diverse literature at school.

“I had to at that time just kind of figure it out. Knowing there was more of a community and knowing that these were paths people had (tried) before sooner would have been helpful to me and my queer and trans classmates at the time.”

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JD Crookshanks has heard about the recent presentation to the school board but doesn’t want to watch it.

“I don’t want to go through that, having to listen to someone say all these lies about the (LGBTTQ+) community,” he said. “I’ve lived through that.”

He graduated from Vincent Massey High School in 1997, but didn’t come out as gay until almost the end of his time in public schools.

“The ’80s were especially bad because of the paranoia and myths around HIV and the pervasive libel around LGBT people being pedophiles and grooming people,” Crookshanks said. “I’d like to think it’s believed less now, and it probably is… but there are still some people who perpetuate that lie.”

The 1990s, he said, were marginally better because positive examples of gay and lesbian people started to appear on television — though he notes there weren’t many, if any, positive depictions of trans people at the time.

“It would have been nice to have had resources available to let me know that I wasn’t alone and there was nothing inherently wrong with me,” he said. “All we had was the very start of the internet and that wasn’t a great resource at all.

“If you’re worried about kids seeing pornography, I don’t know why you’d drive them onto the internet by taking books out of schools.”

Not only are such resources helpful for queer students, Crookshanks said, but they offer positive depictions of LGBTTQ+ people to cisgender and heterosexual students.

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Kent Ranson, a medical doctor and health economist with the World Bank in Switzerland, said he “came out almost the minute I moved away from Brandon.”

He attended Brandon public schools in the 1970s and ’80s, before graduating with a science degree from Brandon University.

Ranson said he didn’t necessarily feel like Brandon was a dangerous or unsafe space, but he knew of queer people in the city who lived lonely or isolated lives. He wanted to live somewhere with a community of gay, lesbian and other friends.

“At the age of 21, I wanted to go to places where I could at least experience that,” Ranson said. “I knew I didn’t want to live the rest of my life as sort of an independent gay man without much community in Brandon.”

During his childhood, he said there was no internet and no access to reading material featuring LGBTTQ+ people, but more examples of gay people were shown on television programs like The Oprah Winfrey Show.

“For the first time, I began to get glimpses of what gay life and gay role models look like,” he said.

Before that, the emergence of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the ’80s through health-care facilities and on television discussed the potential health risks of being a sexually active gay man. The mortality rate among gay men was frightening, but so was the public’s view of HIV.

After he moved to Ontario for medical school, the first place he went in Toronto was the Glad Day Bookshop, which states on its website it is the oldest queer bookstore in the world.

“I had never imagined there would be an entire bookstore with nothing but gay literature,” he said. “Then I started to buy all sorts of books that were fiction, but fiction about gay and lesbian and queer relationships and families. It was great for me to be able to access that.”

— Brandon Sun