Thursday, July 04, 2013

Bad habits are not malice (or: Why I’m pretty sure Pride Toronto didn’t sabotage the world’s biggest Trans March)

I found this piece on Vice.com about Toronto’s Trans March, which resulted in this response from Toronto Pride, to contain much more than its fair share of conspiracy theory. The discussion I've heard around it has been interesting, but many of the allegations don't quite ring true.

Historically, activists will argue, Pride Toronto’s enthusiasm for increased trans visibility at the week-long festival has been less than stellar. I accept that. But there’s a big difference between institutional lethargy and the kind of malice Nicki Ward ascribes to Pride Toronto. Misdirection and underhandedness? Sabotage? Let’s not get hysterical here.

(Background note: I used to work with Nicki at (now defunct) fab magazine. I worked in editorial, she in advertising. I found her to be a friendly and supportive colleague, so I have no axe to grind and no horse in this race.)

As someone who mostly experiences the front end—not the planning itself, though I do hear some of the scuttlebutt—of Pride trans programming, I can say that it’s gotten dramatically better year over year and has drawn a much wider audience and a much higher level of public engagement. This year’s efforts made a genuinely impressive impact—I agree with Nicki that it was a watershed year. Did I see all the messiness of how it came together? No. But there’s a point when grievances and missteps need to be left behind in order to celebrate the good will that’s been building.

As a layperson, I saw the Trans March given equal billing to the Dyke March, the Pride Parade and the Street Festival on the cover of the Official Pride Guide, on the map and within the guide itself. Considering the parade's starring role (whether you like it or not), that's not the action of an organization that wants to downplay trans programming. The parade’s international grand marshal—which seems to have become an even higher honour than regular ole’ grand marshal—was Marcela Romero, director of the Argentine Association of Transvestites, Transsexuals and Transgender People. Trans artists made up a notable part of the mix at three of the four Pride stages I visited (the Central Stage remains the almost exclusive domain of gay men who want to dance with their shirts off and the straight couples who love them).

As a spectator, Friday night’s Trans March blew me away with its size, energy and inclusiveness. It must have taken 15 to 20 minutes to pass; this year’s Dyke March took less than 40 minutes to pass. Based on pure population statistics, LGB will pretty much always outnumber T, so that’s an impressive comparison. The large number of trans allies in the march helped give it the heft it deserved. If such a march is about building bridges and showing community-wide unity against oppression—mission accomplished.

Would a corporate sponsor—which comes with built-in media attention and cash—have made the Trans March better? I’ll bet money nobody wants to go there.

It was certainly disappointing that the march got only one lane of traffic. It seemed to require a higher number of police officers (presumably because of the obviously increased safety risk) than otherwise necessary. But thinking back to the small group—maybe a couple of hundred people?—that scurried down a pedestrian-filled Church Street three years ago, the whole thing was inspiring. I’m sure the size of the march also surprised the city, which will have to rethink such one-lane closures.

I’ve emphasized my outsiderness to the Trans Pride issue for a reason. In her piece, Nicki’s core complaint is about visibility and media coverage. She blames Pride Toronto for nobody hearing about this watershed Trans March. I’m not sure the premise is true.

But even if it is, as any journalist who’s covered Pride knows, Pride Toronto organizers basically just stick a media pass in your hand and let you get on with your work of deciding for yourself what you want to cover. There was no “gushing” about the march because, during the Pride weekend, organizers don’t usually gush about anything. They answer questions lobbed at them by reporters in between running around, putting out fires. It’s in the lead-up to next year’s festival that you’ll hear Pride Toronto gushing (hopefully about how great the trans programming was this year). That's the way the news cycle works.

So if the question is: Why wasn’t there the media coverage of the Trans March that Nicki wanted? Then the answer is: Ask the media.

Mainstream Pride coverage has become hackneyed and predictable. New elements—in the case of the Trans March, newly prominent elements—don’t fit into the template. Since the 1990s, it’s been about hot guys on floats, colourful drag queens, excited tourists, Toronto’s welcoming attitudes and the revenue generated for the city. Plus a few personality profiles. Blinded by the sexy skin and riotous colour, it can take mainstream media editors years to register a change in the body politic.

Maybe this successful Trans March will make the mainstream media pay more attention next year. More likely it would take a perfect storm (like the 2003 Ontario Superior Court decision on same-sex marriage, which cranked up coverage of Pride that year) to grab headlines and draw major mainstream attention. Changing policies and procedures, tough as it is, is easier than changing long-ingrained attitudes.

It’s true that Pride Toronto itself can be a bit too enamoured of its own template. There are Pride DJ lineups—the simplest possible thing to shuffle—that haven’t changed in years. The template has carried Pride through tumultuous times, but the tension between predictability and reinvention is never as taut as it should be. It’s easy to imagine activists presenting Pride Toronto with new ideas and getting “Where are we going to put that?” as the first reaction. (Actually, that’s a scenario that’s easy to imagine at any small not-for-profit community-based organization.)

But it would be unfair to interpret excessive pragmatism as something meant to thwart trans activists. Sometimes the weight of habit is more difficult to fight against than malice. Sometimes a misprint is just a misprint.

What’s amazing is that, despite it all, Toronto pulled off what seems to have been the world’s biggest trans march. I’m betting that record will be broken soon—hopefully during Toronto’s own WorldPride in 2014.



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