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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