What’s so dangerous about the anti-trans policy resolutions the party endorsed isn’t that they will become legislation any time soon, but their effect of bolstering Smith’s claim that she’s pursuing a sensible middleground with the anti-trans legislation she’s already introduced. But when it comes to basic human rights, there is no middle ground.

In the wake of the Hamas assault of October 7, journalists indignantly called out feminists for not addressing this violence sufficiently. The same critics have had little to say about the countless overlooked and ignored examples of sexual violence perpetrated against Palestinians in Israeli prisons and by IDF soldiers before and since that day.

To debate someone’s very existence, their right to live, their right to dignity, is to dehumanize them. It’s why the conservative ‘debate’ over trans policy and trans-specific health care is not a debate—it is a thinly veiled attempt to seize control of individual bodies, shaping them in a way that aligns with reactionary interests.

As we bear witness to the multiple assaults on us once again, an assault that is coordinated, state and policy driven, and heading towards even more severe forms of violence, we know what we must do. In fact, we have only one option. It is our tradition now. We will fight back. We will also shoot back if that is what is required. And we will win. It is our destiny.

Corporate Pride is not about liberation but about keeping the potentially unruly in line. If Pride must maintain its corporate sponsorships, then I can only work to abolish it in the same vein as I work for police and prison abolition. This June I will be attending Abolition and Anti-Fascist Pride events for the second year in a row, where politics and a good party are intimate partners.

Community researcher, support worker and organizer Carl Bystram details how the death of trans health care services in Canada has only worsened amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Bystram explores the utter lack of services available to trans people, particularly youth, who are falling between the cracks of a weakened public system.

As conservatives in North America, but particularly the US, redouble their efforts to restrict women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, we must applaud Cuba’s popular and democratic decision to draft, discuss, and implement their new Families Code, a powerful document that is one of the world’s most progressive laws concerning women’s rights, familial rights, and LGBTQ+ rights.

A radical re-orientation of queer and trans organizing is in order, one that understands queer and trans liberation as part of an overall vision of social and racial justice. We need to take leadership and direction from Black, Indigenous and racialized queer and trans people and espouse an approach that views different oppressions as interconnected, placing the needs of those left out of the rights revolution at the centre.

Sex workers have for too long been seen as something less than fully human, our work seen as unskilled, as a “high-risk lifestyle” rather than a job. Our fight for decriminalization is but one aspect of the sex workers’ rights movement. The other, more complex component is our fight against stigma and the silence that we are encouraged to maintain around our work.

Paul Jackson’s One of the Boys is a complex, layered, and compassionate analysis of homosexuality in the Canadian military during World War II. Through careful and painstaking research, using archival evidence including court martial proceedings and interviews, he writes into World War II a social history of homosexuality in the Canadian Forces—a social history that had been, as he notes, ignored by military historians.