Going deeper than Pride Week

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/06/2024 (626 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Pride is increasingly celebrated as a corporate opportunity to use rainbow branding to capitalize on profit, a time to recognize how “much better it is now” and to “see how far we’ve come.” Many so easily forget that the Stonewall riots in New York City were an act of public civil disobedience and protests for LGBTTQ+ rights. Disruption, resistance and activism are part of the fundamental fabric of Pride.

First and foremost, Pride is a civil rights movement. Its activism extends beyond the rights of LGBTTQ+ groups; Pride doesn’t exist without anti-racism, anti-ableism, climate action, decolonial lenses, and support systems. These issues cannot be siloed into convenient boxes and categories, but rather need to be acknowledged for the compounding and layered harms of systemic violence.

Rupturing hopelessness within systems, including education and allowing educators and students to feel well-equipped to build realities that can question, make sense of, and work in solidarity towards equity is crucial in fostering hope as resistance and ensuring that activism is safely supported and maintained year-round.

Manitoba’s school divisions need to explicitly and visibly support LGBTTQ+ students not only through policies but also in how they support educators in navigating difficult conversations without the fear of reprimand or burnout.

The urgency to empower and equip students as activists beyond the month of Pride is critical especially in the wake of rising anti-LGBTTQ+ sentiment; rhetoric disguised as “parental rights,” attempted book bans in Manitoba libraries, and even an increase in global travel bans. These movements are cause for growing safety concerns for LGBTTQ+ community.

In recognition of the complexity of these calls, recommendations for school divisions on supporting students and staff are equally varied and include taking a public stance in support of educators and students in the name of maintaining their charter rights and honouring students’ chosen names and pronouns at school from all ages and grade levels.

Divisions need transparency around what supports are in place to acknowledge and record compounding violence and escalating anti-LGBTTQ+ issues. Also, divisions need to be clear about how they will support staff and students using school spaces as sites of rallies to voice their passions and/or concerns publicly and safely.

Educators also play a significant role in advocacy and must reject the idea that resistance and involvement in intersectional activism movements is inappropriate or invalid. They need to identify where students can take up space in/around their schools to convey their messages.

Educators must feel supported by their divisions to empower students by showing them how to access policy and formally advocate for themselves and others, while also providing students with historical knowledge and grounding for how activism has worked in the past and where it can help in the future.

Students must be supported in navigating difficult topics with kindness and creativity, using alternate methods of communication, such as art, storytelling, music, and ceremony.

Pride activism is a means of survival and resistance against what Sara Ahmed, cultural theorist, describes as “feel-good politics.” We can’t purport to support Pride and LGBTTQ+ students and not support their activism work, including activism related to LGBTTQ+, anti-racism, decolonization, anti-ableism, pro-peace, and the climate crisis.

Community-led protestors at the Winnipeg Pride parade briefly blocked the march this year to request Pride Winnipeg to return to its political grassroots movements. Protestors demanded Pride Winnipeg “end complicity with genocide, divest from corporate pinkwashing, remove police from Pride and centre QTBIPOC leadership” underpinning the importance of collective and intersectional solidarity and the liberation for all people.

For some, activism involves attending rallies and organizing protests, while for others it is showing up in a classroom, walking the hallways and moving through a school as LGBTTQ+. Raising the Pride flag without proper vigilance for the current and future anti-LGBTTQ+ movements is an empty gesture for institutions to brand themselves as inclusive while refusing to make structural changes.

Unequivocally, championing the safety of LGBTTQ+ youth requires school divisions and educators to commit to transparent and ongoing continued development of policies, practices, and environments that support the diversity of all students.

Kim Cao (they/them) is a queer, non-binary Vietnamese educator and a member of People for Public Education. Kathleen F. Wilson (they/she) is a 2S Métis educator, parent, and PhD student in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manitoba.