Transgenders seek safer lives

Linda Wayne, co-owner of East Village Coffee House, hopes other independent coffee houses will join her business in celebrating International Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31. (Sue Reeve, The London Free Press)

By KATE DUBINSKI, The London Free Press

A London cafe has issued a challenge to independent coffee houses all over the continent: make your shops safe for transgendered people on March 31. “Even during the heyday of the gay and lesbian movement in the 1960s, transgendered people were kicked out of the movement,” said Linda Wayne, owner of the East Village Coffee House, on Dundas St. beside the Aeolian Hall.

March 31 was declared International Transgender Day of Visibility in 2009.

“If we can stick a rainbow flag on our windows or cars to claim public space for gay and lesbian people, we can come out publicly in support of our neighbours, family, friends and co-workers who fall under the transgender umbrella,” Wayne said.

A former women’s studies professor, Wayne studied the sexual liberation movement and wrote her dissertation about the exclusion of transgendered people during the gay and lesbian movement.

“During the movement, the reach was to become “normal,” and transgendered people looked like they were the least “normal,” so they were excluded,” she said.

Despite moves to support gays and lesbians in recent decades, transgendered people are still isolated and discriminated against, she said.

“Transgender is in reality a catch-all term that is slapped on people who do not fit neatly into our binary two-gender identity system and who may or may not opt to partly or (fully) transition,” Wayne said.

A transition can be anything from shaving or changing a hairstyle to taking hormones and having surgery to reassign a person’s gender, she added.

“Outside of this medical world, the social scene can be even more scary.

“There’s still a big fight there. We thought we’d issue the challenge in London because we’re known as a conservative community. If we can have safe places for transgendered people here, then anyone can do it.”

An effeminate man or a woman who has a “manly” walk can be perceived as transgendered and could face violence, Wayne said.

“Violence reaches far beyond people who might define themselves as transgendered,” she said. The need to be inclusive, then, “is everybody’s fight,” Wayne said.