[Herman Wong] (0:01 - 1:17)
Welcome to Law Syrup, the show where we talk with special guests about hot topics in Canadian law. This podcast is a co-production with the Ontario Justice Education Network, also known as OJEN. I'm Herman Wong, let's tap in.
 
Before we begin, please note that this show is not intended to be legal advice or be a replacement for a legal representative. 

Hey everyone, welcome back to Law Syrup. On this week's episode, we're celebrating Pride Month with a panel discussion with three amazing guests, all from different backgrounds, and each with their own personal stories and successes.
 
You'll hear us chat about queer and trans people navigating identity and respectability, current legal issues affecting the community, and also how to be better allies. So, let's jump into the conversation. 

Hi everyone, welcome to the episode. You know, when I was thinking about the show, I knew I wanted to include this specific topic, but I didn't know what to include, whether it be triumphs, challenges, or all the progress that we've made so far. So I thought, why not all of the above? Today we have invited Bennett Jensen, Adam Goldenberg, and Johanna McDonald for a discussion. And to get things started, how about we go around and say a short introduction?
 
[Johanna MacDonald] (1:18 - 1:27)
Hi everyone, my name is Johanna McDonald. My pronouns are she and her, and I'm the legal director at the 519 Community Center in Toronto, Ontario.
 
[Bennett Jensen] (1:29 - 1:34)
I'm Bennett Jensen, I use he, him pronouns, and I'm the director of legal at EGALE Canada.
 
[Adam Goldenberg] (1:35 - 1:41)
And I'm Adam Goldenberg, I use he, him pronouns, and I am a litigation partner at McCarthy Tétrault here in Toronto.
 
[Herman Wong] (1:43 - 1:59)
Fantastic. So let's jump into the questions. And as our first topic, let's go all the way back in time in terms of when you all first encountered the law.
 
So for you, for example, Adam, when did you first remember taking an interest in law and the legal community?
 
[Adam Goldenberg] (2:00 - 3:14)
Well, there's a video of me that my parents have on cassette, because I'm old, of me playing the role of the defense counsel for Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk when I was in grade four, in barrister's robes in the law courts building in Vancouver. And this surfaced around the time that I was called to the bar and my mother sent me the side-by-side photo of me in robes as a 10-year-old or whatever I was, and me in robes as a newly called lawyer. I don't know that I knew I wanted to be a lawyer when I was in grade four, but as far as I can remember, if you asked me what my career plans involved, they at least involved going to law school, if not becoming a lawyer and practicing law.
 
And I'm still not sure that what I want to do for the rest of my career is practice law. I went to law school because I was interested in learning the law and learning to think as a lawyer. And I made a commitment to myself that I would pursue the opportunities that that opened up to me, but not to stay in any job or any role as long as it wasn't exciting to me and invigorating of my professional interests.
 
And practicing law and private practice has continued to tick those boxes for a decade now. And if that ever changes, I'll do something else. But it shows no sign of abating.
 
[Herman Wong] (3:16 - 3:17)
Amazing. Bennett, how about you?
 
[Bennett Jensen] (3:19 - 4:39)
My story is pretty different. I love that story, though, it resonates so much listening to Adam talking, knowing him now. So I was I always thought I was going to be a teacher or do something working with young people.
 
After undergrad, I was working in youth and family programming in low income housing communities in Ottawa. And there were a number of fairly frustrating situations that happened in terms of accessing resources for the communities I was working with and leveraging policies that I knew were being or technically available for the whole city. But there were a number of just procedural kind of hang ups to get folks that I was working with the same access to resources.
 
And I just remember realizing or having the sense at least that a legal education would give me tools that would grant me access, would first probably give me credibility to enter into conversations where important decisions were being made and then also give me the skill set to leverage resources in a way that I felt like I didn't really have. So it was more just like almost a sense of frustration and feeling like maybe a law degree would give me the the tools to do the sorts of things that I wanted to do in the world. But before that, I hadn't really thought about going to law school.
 
[Herman Wong] (4:40 - 4:41)
And last but not least, Johanna.
 
[Johanna McDonald] (4:42 - 5:52)
So, yeah, we'll go back to junior high, maybe a bit like Adam, much less, you know, intellectually based, my start, at least. I forgot I did a mock hearing in grade five. But what when I read this question, I did think of fast forward to grade 11 law class, which made an enormous impression on me.
 
And if you're from my vintage, the tragically hip song 38 Years Old, I remember I did a whole presentation revolving around this song. It's about someone incarcerated for a long time. And, you know, I did the principles of sentencing and I was very, very excited about the potential of law as a career and particularly criminal law.
 
And I guess fast forward from that, I did become a practitioner in criminal law, but went along a path where I certainly was considering the critique of that system through criminology and maybe master's degrees or thoughts. And then, yeah, landing into the legal clinic system, which is more social justice-oriented, but really enjoying the community member and client interactions through.
 
[Herman Wong] (5:53 - 5:53)
Fantastic.
 
[Bennett Jensen] (5:54 - 6:10)
Herman, it's so striking that I know both Joanna and Adam now professionally and personally a little bit for both of them and seeing how much their childhood sense of themselves have just tracked into their careers. It's really amazing hearing that. So that's a great question.
 
[Herman Wong] (6:11 - 6:27)
Yeah. So I was super excited to hear all of your different backgrounds. And at the beginning of the episode, you guys already mentioned your current titles.
 
But what has been the narrative arc of your professional pursuit so far? How did you end up in your current position? And maybe Johanna, we'll go back to you first and ask you this question.
 
[Johanna MacDonald] (6:28 - 7:59)
Yeah, I would say that I know I said I did a little bit of criminal law practice, but I was really driven and interested in the clinic system. So thinking about law in the sense of being able to make changes to it as well as providing legal education. And so in Ontario, we have this still community legal system, which is wonderful, a clinic system. And I was lucky to land in a job in that system as a street youth lawyer for a few years. So mixed practice. 

And from there, I think the narrative arc has been because I will say that that's a unique job. There's only one street youth legal services lawyer in Ontario and there still is only that today. I have been attracted to and very privileged to have been able to land in unique roles, startup projects and clinic work that is not replicable in certain ways. So at the Health Justice Project, partnered with St. Michael's Hospital, over to Parkdale Clinic and now the 519. So I think it reminds me of what you said, Adam, like I do like something to invigorate me and all of those positions have invigorated me, but have a common arc of kind of being unique, project based and, you know, focused on a specific population of persons as well when interacting with thinking about how the law is shaping that population and how to make change.
 
[Herman Wong]
Amazing. Bennett, how about you? 

[Bennett Jensen] (7:59 - 12:18)
I think that I can trace arcs for my career now looking back that I certainly couldn't at the time. So when I talk to young people thinking about what they view for themselves or how to achieve a career trajectory, I always want to emphasize that, like how much we can make sense of our careers often looking back. But so often they just flow from sort of, as Adam said, following interesting opportunities as they present themselves. But I think that I need to really name the extent to which my identity informed the way my career played out.
 
I first realized that I was trans in my like early 20s, but lived in Ottawa and it was 2005 or 2006. And that was a very different time and found like the one therapist who worked with trans folks. And the advice she gave me that I don't think I realized at the time shaped me so much was get as much education as you possibly can, because your life will be much, much easier.
 
And it's an incredibly privileged thing to say. And I resented it at the time and I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted to do. But I think it was also very practical. And so I sort of put my head down and did that. I went to McGill for law school because McGill's great, but also because Montreal felt like a safer place to be to explore who I was. Then I clerked in Canada and that was a great opportunity. But I was also aware that it was good for establishing credentials. And then I went to New York because I got a job at a big private law firm and I thought that they wouldn't fire me if I came out and transitioned. And I also knew I could just sort of put my head down and keep earning a salary and pay for any supports I needed and do something that would, I think I had a sense that I needed to prove to the world that who I was was OK. And if I had some sort of external professional credibility, that would give it. So you can say what you want about me being trans, but I have this big New York job. So that will, I don't know, none of this, I don't want to say any of this is healthy ways of thinking about it, but I think I was really in it and didn't know what else to do. And that provided me with a sense of security that dictated a lot of the professional decisions that I was making. 

And then as I sort of landed a little bit more in myself and felt more secure, then I was able to shift more to where my heart really was. I always did pro bono work, but I moved into a job that was running the or the deputy head of the pro bono practice at this firm, which the American firms do these incredible jobs of developing massive infrastructure and like intentional programming around their public interest practices. And I did that. I moved into that job a couple of months before Donald Trump was elected. So my work for years was really just marshalling the resources of massive law firm in the private bar in response to, you know, violations of civil rights announced by social media, which unfortunately a skill set that has become applicable in Canada in a way that I didn't anticipate. I stayed in that job for several years, moved back to Canada during the pandemic, again, for personal reasons. And I went back to Ottawa to be closer to my family, was lucky enough to get a job there working for the former Attorney General of Canada and was his director of litigation for a while and then moved to Toronto again, mainly because I was like, sorry, Ottawa, there just aren't enough queer and trans people there. There are wonderful ones, but not quite enough for my liking at the moment. I mean, no offense to Ottawa, but it's also hard to do that where you grew up, which was, you know, Ottawa still feels like my childhood place. 

So I moved to Toronto and was lucky enough to get this job at EGALE where, as I said, it's really some of the same skill set, like all it feels now looking back, like all of the jobs that I've had have made me well positioned to do the work I'm doing in this moment. But each decision I made along the way felt very almost like opportunistic. Yeah. So that's been my path.
 
[Herman Wong] (12:19 - 12:27)
Yeah. Thank you so much, Bennett, for sharing. That's really interesting.
 
And Adam, last but not least, you, how has your identity shaped the choices that you've made so far in your career?
 
[Adam Goldenberg] (12:28 - 18:45)
So I have a very different personal story than Bennett's, but I definitely subscribe to the advice that his therapist gave him all those years ago. And looking back at my own career and my own experience, prestige as armor is a principle by which I think, if I'm being honest, I have lived my life maybe more than I needed to, maybe a lot more than I needed to as a cis white man. But certainly a lot of the choices, when I look back on them, are informed by, among other things, a desire to create security for myself, to have things to fall back on, as Bennett says, and to ensure in my own case that I was defined by what I did and what I achieved in case it wasn't safe or wasn't good to be defined by who I am.
 
And that, I think, goes all the way back to high school. There's the concept of the best little boy in the world. I forget who wrote that book. Was it Frank Bruni, maybe, years ago? About this phenomenon of gay boys in school being overachievers for the very reason that I just described, out of a fear that if they didn't do everything, if they didn't accomplish everything, if they weren't everything other than just being themselves and didn't give the world a million different ways that were impressive by which to define them, then they would be defined according to other people's impressions of their identity. And that was something that I don't think consciously, but subconsciously, if I'm psychoanalyzing myself, motivated a lot of my decision-making. So, you know, I was the kid in school and in university and in law school who took on absolutely everything, who joined every club, who did every activity, and who wanted to be the best at all the different things that I got involved with. And I think that was part of the reason why. 

Which, you know, to be fair, is not an unhealthy way to channel the insecurity and anxiety of growing up queer in the sense that it has positioned me very well for the adult life that I live now, but it's obviously not the foundation for those sorts of activities that you would choose if you had your druthers. So I think that's one thing that has informed my career path.
 
And the other thing I think that has defined my career path has been a desire to have an impact. I am very privileged for a whole bunch of different reasons, but the biggest one I think is that I have parents who are high-performing professionals. And that's both a privilege because it meant that I grew up with a standard of living that's commensurate with professional incomes, but I actually think it's more of a privilege because I grew up with examples in my home at the dinner table of people who used their careers to improve the lives of people around them, who were driven by that in each and every work day.
 
They're both doctors, my parents are. They're both exceptional cancer physicians who have done lifesaving medical work and patient advocacy throughout their careers. And they've been recognized for it. They're both members of the Order of Canada. Sorry, my mother is an officer of the Order of Canada. My father is just a member. And members of the Order of British Columbia, they are exceptional, exceptional people. And for me, growing up with that, it's impossible not to think, okay, well, how am I gonna make the world better? How am I gonna live up to that example in some way?
 
And I've pursued that in my post-university life in a number of different careers. The first thing I did was I went and worked for a UN humanitarian agency called the World Food Program based in Rome. Then I went and I worked in politics for three years and wrote speeches for a guy called Michael Ignatieff who led the Liberal Party to its, to date, worst electoral result in Canadian history. We'll see if that record holds up. Hopefully it will because I hope that it is not repeated, but you never know. And that's how good I was as a political staffer, I guess, at least on the speech writing front. I take my share of the credit for that outcome. 

And then after that is when I went to law school. And after law school, like Ben and I, clerked first for the Court of Appeal here in Toronto.Then I joined the firm that I'm now at. And then I went and clerked again at the Supreme Court in Ottawa. And then I came  back to McCarthy's and I've been practicing here ever since.
 
And I think when you look at the most recent career decision that I made, which was to join and then return to this law firm, the reason I did, the reason I wanted to be at a full-service firm, the reason I wanted to be at this particular full-service firm is that it presented itself to me and I saw it as a platform to do work that would have an impact on the world around me, not just work on behalf of our paying clients who are often large corporations involved in business disputes, some of which you read about in the newspaper, most of which you don't. And not just because I find that work intellectually stimulating, which I do, or that I get to work with a large number of super smart people who are all extremely hardworking and devoted to doing the best for our clients that we can. And I do. 

But also because my firm has always given me a platform to do impact work that's focused on achieving good outcomes for people in our community and in my community as a queer person in particular. And from the very earliest years of my practice, like Bennett at his former firm, I've had the resources of my firm put at my disposal to do work that is meaningful to me, that is impactful to the community of which I'm a part and to other communities, and to be the kind of citizen and the kind of lawyer, professional in the broad sense, that it is important to me to be. And so that's always been the story that I've told myself and that I think I've done a consistent job of trying to live up to over the course of my legal career, this current chapter of my professional journey.
 
[Herman Wong] (18:46 - 20:04)
Wow, amazing. Thank you so much, Adam. And I definitely relate to that and also to what all three of you said.
 
And I really liked what you said, Adam, about prestige as armor. I think that's also a really good title for a book. But I think I definitely relate because even when I was growing up as a gay person, it's like I struggled so much to find friends because people thought maybe I was too feminine or maybe I didn't really like playing sports.
 
And throughout my entire schooling life and even throughout law school, I always try to get the best marks because again, as you said, if I'm smart or seen as smart, then people would hurt me less or not think of me as less. And I think subconsciously, this has also accompanied me throughout my life. Whereas if I build up enough goodwill in the eyes of people, suddenly they can't really attack me even if they see faults in me that aren't even faults at all.
 
So thank you so much to all three of you for sharing your experiences and your personal stories because these are really inspiring. And I wish I had people like you to look up to when I was young as well. But shifting focus now to LGBTQ+ people, for example, not just those who are kids or in high school, but of all ages, what do you see right now from your perspective as unique challenges for those people when they are interacting with the law or dealing with legal issues?
 
And maybe Bennett, we can start with you.
 
[Bennett Jensen] (20:05 - 23:51)
I think that I'm really interested to hear what Joanna says about it too, because I think so many of the challenges that individual queer and trans people have are going to be informed by just broader accessibility issues to the justice system as a whole. Like the legal system is designed to be used and navigated by professionally trained, like skills people or like trades people almost. Like we go to law school to learn the language of it, to learn the procedure to help be able to navigate these systems. They're not accessible generally to anyone who doesn't have that training, let alone somebody who might be dealing with an identity-based challenge that is informing some of their legal issues. So I think there's like access to justice things that I will let Johanna speak to more. I think there are courts have done a great job of improving their understanding of the realities of queer and trans people. And I'm regularly impressed by the skill with which judges are navigating gender questions as they come up with just a lot of knowledge and expertise, which is good. 

I think that the biggest challenges we are facing as communities within a community more broadly is I think the weaponization of our identities and that being translated into policy and legal action at the hand of the state. So I think that we have had the benefit, I'm speaking in generalities, but of existing in a world, a country where there has just been continued progress on our rights. And so most of the fight has felt like it has to be, like since marriage equality was achieved, most of the fight has had to be like, how do we actually achieve inclusion? What does it mean for people to exist as their full selves at work? How can we imagine a world where we aren't trying to achieve, we can just exist and feel safe and comfortable in that?
 
We're in this moment now where that dynamic is really shifting and Adam and I are, I'm lucky to be working closely with Adam on a lot of these, this defensive work where we're having to go to the courts to fight back on affirmative attacks against our community that I think right now, yes, our focus, I mean, our focus on some of the most vulnerable members of our community, namely young people, young gender diverse people, but have consequences for all of us. So things like, and we can talk about it, it winds up getting a little bit really nerdy and technical in the legal world, but things like the use of the notwithstanding clause, part of our charter against queer people, trans people for the first time, that has consequences, that setting, crossing a line that hasn't yet been crossed and that has pretty terrifying consequences.
 
So there's so many different directions I can go with your question, but I think that there are in some access to justice realities that folks are having all of the time in terms of navigating their daily lives and their interactions with the legal system. But from a broad perspective, I mean, I think we're seeing dehumanization of our identities and that is translating into legal needs that are of a different kind than we've had in possibly ever. So we can follow any of those threads and both, I know both Johanna and Adam can talk more details about both and other things. So I'll stop there.
 
[Herman Wong] (23:52 - 24:00)
Yeah, Johanna, let's turn to you because with your work with the 519 and access to justice issues, maybe you can talk about how you deal with this within the queer and trans community.
 
[Johanna MacDonald] (24:01 - 30:29)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm gonna take us back to a little bit to the, just the question about personal identity and like professional arc, because the experience that I had, again, as the street youth legal services lawyer for about five years, what I realized while I was that lawyer and in that position, that there was probably about 40% of the people I worked with, the young people between ages of 16 and 24 identified as queer or trans and they were all homeless. And that is an enormous over-representation of our community amongst street involved youth. It's unacceptable. And it was shocking to me, but also in some veins, it shouldn't be surprising with families being intolerant, so being kicked out and then the struggles of income security when you're 16 and living on your own. So that alone was happening. And I'm going back to the personal identity piece because I was really interested in Bennett and Adam, how you were discussing about needing that armor and some self-protection going through your careers. I came out as gay just about the time I became a lawyer and was in the street youth legal position.
 
And what I noticed, not surprisingly, I really enjoyed going to, it was a drop-in center for queer youth. And I remember telling the person, I'm like, I really like coming to this drop-in. And so not surprisingly identified as part of the group. And so I'm reflecting on that because I do think one of the unique and pressing legal issues affecting our communities is safety and security writ large. So from our families, from our governments, from strangers, institutions of all veins, and that comes right back through our criminalization of identities, medicalization of who we are as humans. And so there's a violence of like an institutional violence that our governments have placed on our communities. And then it goes drilling right through to the personal level in families, in friendship groups at school. And I will say that even in the last few weeks, so we have pro bono legal advice clinics running through the 519, and we try to provide that service. It's very limited from kind of a harm reduction approach. Like you're gonna get a lawyer that will give you advice that is competent and will not discriminate against you in any way and understand your culture as a queer or trans person. And we've had an increase in a hate motivated, self disclosed victim, being a victim of a crime or a victim of violence. And that's alarming because it takes it right back to Bennett's point of politicians, government officials, and then actual policies that are coming out that are discriminatory and hateful. And that's coming right through then to the personal security of individuals in our communities. So I think that's a really important bucket that is vital for us to not lose track of.  The over criminalization and over policing still of our communities is not a long history line. And still exists today, especially for people who are living on the streets, like those 30-45% of street involved youth, persons that are doing sex work as a livelihood and those that otherwise don't have income. 

So the other vein though, that I will wanna highlight that Bennett foreshadowed was about bureaucratic access and supports through all those different kind of government systems. I do think that's unique for queer and trans people. So I'll give the example of a newcomer. So you may know that there's been, as there often is like a big influx of people coming internationally to Canada. And in Toronto, our shelters were overfilled.
And many of the people that we were in contact with were claiming refugee status based on sexual orientation, gender identity. So facing actual death penalties and violence in the countries that they were fleeing from, extreme back to the violence issues. So landing here, what we heard was that unfortunately, it was that population of folks that were being kicked out of the shelter first or being met with unfortunately a service provider that treated them in a disrespectful or discriminatory manner. And so not only is that group really in high needs internationally coming in and requiring asylum and our laws should be robust at supporting people coming, but then also meeting this other layer of discrimination and racism and many circumstances for the first time in their lives and having to navigate those legal rights and failures of us as a Canadian society providing those services. 

So I like to think of that's just one example. There's many others and the other one I will highlight, the idea of having to change your name and your gender markers through our government. Currently, it's for anyone out there that has tried this yourself or know someone that has, it's an incredibly backwards and bureaucratic system that has just boundaries and barriers at every step, especially if you were born outside of this country. And so there's lots of changes that need to be made, but I would say the access to basic rights and basic things that fulfill and declare who you are as a person, they shouldn't be faced with this level of barriers. And so a nod to McCarthy's, thank you so much as our partner on our trans ID clinic. And there's just so much to be done, not only for the processing of those highly bureaucratic and administrative processes, but also just changes to the entire system. So I'll highlight those two examples on that vein of things. And then also just highlight again that the overall safety and physical integrity of our communities.
 
[Herman Wong] (30:29 - 30:53)
And I think something that we really mentioned is that this idea of weaponizing identities, it's often seen, for example, in the media that LGBTQ plus persons always seem to be the ones who are first cast aside or demonized. And I was wondering if you all had an opinion about why that is. Like why are queer and trans people so easily seen as easy targets?
 
[Adam Goldenberg] (30:54 - 37:02)
I think because there are so few of us. You look at who is the front and center target, to use your word Herman, of the populist conservative rhetoric, the backlash against the progress that's been made over the last number of decades for 2SLGBTQ+ equality, it's trans people, which is a tiny minority of an already tiny minority of the population. And most people in Canada, most parents who have kids in school don't know a single trans person. I mean, I remember growing up, my parents didn't have any gay friends, which was not a criticism. I mean, they did probably, but no one who was out. And so I didn't have any people that I knew as a kid growing up that were my parents' vintage that were analogs for how my life might unfold.
 
And if you look around today, I'm suspecting that most of the parents who are adamantly opposed to curricular measures or inclusion measures in schools that promote the equality and dignity of trans kids, they probably don't know any trans people. And if they did, if only they did, if only there were more of us, then perhaps this would be a different conversation. And so one of the things that's heartening when you look at data that show more and more young people identifying as queer in some way is not like there's an epidemic of queerness. I mean, it's not still a very small number of people, but it's basically impossible, I would think now, to leave high school in Canada without knowing some out queer person in your class. And that experience is actually a fairly new one. And so when that generation is the one that's making the decisions and that's deciding who gets targeted by xenophobic conservative populism, which sadly I think is always gonna be a feature of our politics, because it always has been. And if someone had an answer to move beyond it, then we'd be a better society, but no one's figured that one out yet. Then perhaps it will not be as easy to target our communities. 

But I think in that respect, there are two phenomena that I think are worth noticing with respect to queer people in the law.
 
The first is what we've been talking about in terms of targeting queer people. The point that Bennett made about how the judiciary has been very good in Canada, better than the United States, certainly, but not just in Canada, but in other societies as well. Every couple of months, there's a new jurisdiction where a high court recognizes a right to marriage equality or rather a right not to be discriminated against in marriage laws or sodomy laws or the like. Though that progress, which is made through the judiciary is in part a reflection of the fact that we have judges who are elites in a society. And I don't mean that as a derogatory term. Judges like lawyers are part of an elite cast of decision-makers. That's how the system is supposed to work. They're highly trained, they're professionals, they have a specialized language through which they exercise and dispense public power. And that is how our system is intended to work.
 
There's been a backlash against that form of decision-making, that form of governance, a distrust of elites that has become second nature among too many, both conservatives and people on the left in the last decade or so. I've certainly noticed it in my own observation of politics and of rhetoric around politics. And that's dangerous for queer people because as Bennett pointed out, we have to too often turn to the judiciary in order to protect us against populist politics. And in a country like Canada, where our rights, our constitutionally guaranteed rights can be legislated around, not in the sense that the legislation makes the rights go away, they're still there, but the legislation can operate notwithstanding the rights, certain rights that are guaranteed in the charter. That kind of populist trend can be really dangerous. And if it's fueled by a dislike for, a distrust of independent judges who know what the law is and are trained to apply it, that's a big risk to a lot of the gains that we've accumulated as a community and as communities over the last few decades.
 
The second thing that is worth noticing, the second phenomenon is that there's something of a pulling up the ladder behind you thing that has gone on, I think, in the queer community over the last number of decades. And I'm saying this as a cis gay man. Marriage was a huge landmark in the long march toward legal recognition of queer equality. For too many in our community, it was the end of a long march. And I don't think anyone would come out and admit it, that that was the end, but we kind of exhaled as a community. We kind of let the spirit that drove a lot of our efforts toward that point, I think slackened over the decade that followed, and particularly the Obergefell decision in the United States, which came down in 2015.
 
What we've seen in that time is the energies on particularly the right, and I know, and particularly among some communities that have always been hostile to queer equality and to us LGBTQ+ people, that hostility never went away, it was sort of in abeyance or in the cold cellar for a period of time. It's reemerged and is targeting not people that look like me, but not to put them on the spot, people that are like Bennett, who aren't in a position to pull the ladder up behind them and say, well, my life's great, I'm married to my husband, and I'm a partner in a law firm, life is good. And I fear that if we're being honest with ourselves as a community, we've allowed ourselves to take the foot off the gas and allowed ourselves to become comfortable with some of the privilege that we've gained, even vis-a-vis other members of our communities over the last number of years. And that is something of which I think we need to be vigilant.
 
[Herman Wong] (37:03 - 37:04)
Johanna, how about you?
 
[Johanna MacDonald] (37:05 - 38:38)
I guess, just thinking about like queer and trans lives don't fit into like the historic heteronormative structure that fits within a neat and tidy capitalist framework. So I won't get into capitalism versus other things and structures of how our society runs, but I do think that there's an element and your thoughts, Adam, about like the pulling up the ladder and then my comments earlier about the actual stats of our communities is that we're living at the low income end within our society. And we are facing so many different levels of disadvantage. So the classic like poverty law conversations about that is that the law sticks into you. And you have to interact with the government in order to seek disability benefits, for example, and you're facing an uphill battle and discriminations that way. And I think that's the piece where thinking about our communities having those basic needs from like some social rights, so basic healthcare rights, for example, and that a lot does need to continue to develop in advance for our communities and generally in society to support people in a way that we're fed, we're all eating food that's healthy, we're all have a place to live and we have medicines and healthcare that we can afford.
 
[Bennett Jensen] (38:39 - 42:36)
Yeah, I think that's such an interesting, but I mean, both of what you both said was so interesting because it's all operating all operating at the same time, obviously. And I think what Johanna just put so well is like the essential which some parts of our community just have to engage with the administrative state in a way that other parts don't. And so when I was thinking about how we have become, I think those of us with privilege have become complacent in the needs to do advocacy in terms of progressing rights-based work over the past 10, 15, 20, maybe not 20, 10, 15 years, all of this still fits in together in that we're at a moment where up until now, I think the rights were clear, but the ability to benefit from those rights was uneven. And now we're at a moment where some of the rights are even being taken away. So everything that has been a problem up until now still exists and is being heightened by the political rhetoric and then actual policy and legislative decisions that are being pursued. 

And Adam and I are working on a case right now in New Brunswick and we have been chatting with the young people and their parents and the community-based workers who run programs for them, who've been living for the past year in a province where just about a year ago, the premier started saying really troubling things about gender diverse young people, saying that gender dysphoria had become trendy and then he thought it was bad for young people and their parents and that parents had no idea what was going on, what were going on in school. And the reality, like the power of that sort of political discourse immediately translated into what Johanna was describing and seeing at the clinic in terms of increased violence. So the kids we're talking about or we're talking to went from being generally respected in schools, like maybe sometimes, there's normal kid stuff, maybe there's a mean kid or whatever, but like not being targeted and vulnerable in any particular way to the next day, having to like hide at school because they're being bullied so badly and you know, their life becomes a real nightmare. So it's like at all of these different levels, things are coming into play. And then I also, and then we'll stop talking, wanted to give a quick shout out to Johanna's point about how just like capitalism period.
 
And I think a little bit also just like misogyny, why are we targeted? Because like there are massive like structures that inform the way our society is structured that make us all particularly vulnerable, but we don't need to have a conversation like more of a kind of political theory, critical conversation. But I think that, I mean, there's been a lot of really interesting writing and thinking done about how the progress of the feminist movements and the queer and trans movements over the past like 50 years have scared a lot of people who are uncomfortable with that and seek a return to a family structure that sees the father at the head and the mother and wife working at home. And that is deeply uncomfortable with what all of us represent and how we're challenging some of those historic power structures. And so a lot of that I think makes us, the combination of those felt that sense of threat with what Adam spoke to, which is like our lack of humanity because people don't actually know trans people in particular makes this all easy to kind of foment and grow unfortunately.
 
[Herman Wong] (42:37 - 43:10)
And Bennett, earlier you talked about, for example, people with privilege who have become complacent. I was wondering, in terms of everybody, not just people in the queer and trans community, but also allies, for those with privilege, what are some best ways to overcome that complacency and really take steps to address these issues? And there might not be a right or wrong answer, but I was curious to know what each of you might think about this. How can people take steps that aren't too far-fetched, but they're actually achievable? And how can they do that in order to help those who are in the queer and trans community?
 
[Bennett Jensen] (43:11 - 46:09)
So a lot of what I think about this is informed by living in the States and seeing two countries that you, I mean, we grew up with American media, so I don't think I appreciated how different the two countries are. And then when you're there, you really start to absorb it. And so when I talk about complacency, what I'm thinking is like, I think that, I don't know, your average, like reasonably progressive, white, middle, upper-class Canadian generally trusts that the government will take care of or is responsible for the wellbeing of folks in the country. Like I'm generalizing a ton and there are gaps in there, but I think that the shift that we need to realize in this moment is that something that racialized folks have done for a long time, that like the threats can really come at the hand of the government. And so taking, I mean, you asked for simple things and I'm about to say like broad things, but like taking democracy seriously, taking your voice seriously, I think is the shift that people, an orientation that people have to do. 

What I mean by that though in practice is like I've been telling people to get more comfortable saying the word trans. And I seriously think that that's a better, that's like an easy start for getting more comfortable being able to have conversations with maybe your parents or a family member who doesn't get it. Or if you're working like a coworker or your neighbor or whomever, whoever's in your little, in your circle about why you think it's troubling that politicians are targeting, why a so-called parental rights policy is problematic because people don't know. And so how can you just talk about it in a way that is calm and not adversarial and that sort of allows people space to open their hearts to the humans really at the center of this. So I think, yeah, having conversations, equipping yourself with some knowledge and being comfortable having conversations is huge. 

I think to the extent you're able financially supporting organizations like the 519, like EGALE, like other community-based organizations doing this work. If you are employed and not in school, getting your employers to support that kind of work can be really powerful.
 
And then also like making your voice heard politically, whether that means organizing and running for office yourself, becoming, joining a political party, writing to your representatives, running for like school council, you know, school board elections, like all of these things are really, really important. And I guess that's what I mean by taking this all seriously and becoming a little bit more active. And in contrast to maybe probably Canada is fine. I think in Canada, we often have relaxed on this sense that like we're doing pretty well here and that I think we need to problematize a little bit in this moment.
 
[Herman Wong] (46:10 - 46:14)
Amazing. And Johanna, how about you? Any next steps that people can take?
 
[Johanna MacDonald] (46:15 - 50:52)
Well, I certainly echo everything that Bennett has outlined in the sense of speaking up. So speaking up and getting involved, it's really challenging to speak out, especially if you identify as part of the group that is being speaked about. So taking that into consideration, because you're not going to always have something to say right away, but that's where allyship and like having conversations with people that you know that you feel like you can strategize together. So I'm thinking about if you're at school or you're at your sports club, music class, whatever. 

But I do think, especially right now, considering what Bennett outlined that not only do we have, unfortunately, as a community, a more challenging time with inclusion in our society, but we actually have the government attacking us and particularly trans, non-binary, non-gender conforming folks. And so I think now is the time to have those conversations and like similar to what Bennett said, like at home with your friends at the events that you're at. And, you know, unfortunately, we've had protests and rallies and those things happening in society that are hateful towards our community. So coming in, lending a voice safely at those counter protests, I can say that when there were a number of protests and rallies in the fall of 2023, I was really heartened by so many statements and one was by a student's organization. I'm going to read it.
 
So it was the Ontario Students Trustees Association. And so they really just very clearly were making a statement on gender identity and personal pronouns at school. And so they say, we'd like to emphasize our unwavering commitment to the rights of students within an outsider educational institutions. We firmly believe that the decision to determine one's own identity is not subject to parental or teacher authority. Rather, it is a student's fundamental choice to write, to choose how they identify.

And I thought it was just very simple and helped ground maybe where things get kind of confusing. It's just, it's really our own choices to have our identity and that it's a young person or an old person's right to do that. And so I wanted to just read that as a quote, but I will say I'll plug the 519 Army of Lovers website as a source alongside EGALES and many other organizations across Ontario that have facts about the situation of, for example, you know, HRT, getting access to hormones and things like that, that really get all wishy-washy once the politicians are speaking about it. So not only is it harmful that there's unfortunately negative things being said, but also a lot of misinformation, unfortunately. So there's information to be gathered at that website I just highlighted and on EGALES website.That's really important to gather so that you feel confident speaking out as well and when you're confronted with someone saying something that doesn't make sense. 

I also just wanted to highlight, and this is back to, you know, what can you do? So it's speaking out, it's getting knowledgeable, certainly donate, come on, but is thinking about the global aspect. And so it's back to that example of our shelters in Toronto, overflowing with folks that were arriving, is really thinking about that we have all sorts of people from all different places of the world that are facing very serious violence for their identities and that the intersection of race, particularly in Canada, really puts you at such a higher risk of disadvantage and discrimination. And so if you have an identity that is a white privilege, then that's certainly to be informed of what people who are not white are experiencing as part of the queer and trans community, because the needs just are increased with that intersectional, as well as people with disabilities. So there's to be really thinking about that. So what am I going to do? What's my next step? I'm going to really understand the issues from maybe not just my perspective, if I have those elements of privilege.
 
[Herman Wong] (50:53 - 50:56)
I 100% agree. And last but not least, Adam.

 
[Adam Goldenberg] (50:57 - 52:47)
Whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever you have, there is something you can do to help people like Bennett, like Johanna, do the work that needs to be done on the ground for people in our communities. And so take a moment and think about what that is that you might be able to accomplish. You don't have to have the money to make a donation. You don't have to have a legal education or a large law firm with resources to let you do pro bono cases. Those are big things and those are great things. And if you have those things, you need to call Bennett and say, hey, I've got a big law firm for you to ask to do a pro bono case for you when you get sick of working with Goldenberg. But what you may be able to do is stand in front of people going to a drag story hour at your local library so that the people shouting hate from across the street aren't intimidating kids whose parents are bringing them to hear a drag queen read a story to them. It might be that you can write a letter to the editor of your local paper. It might be that you can do the little things just at a personal level that Bennett and Johanna both spoke about, about stepping in when your uncle at the dinner table says some hateful thing that he heard on cable news and saying, well, hang on a second. You're talking about my classmate. You're talking about me. And that is a brave thing. That's a big thing too. And you shouldn't think twice about considering that to be something that anyone is able to step up and do in those moments. And then finally, you should listen to people like Bennett, like Johanna, who are the ones who are fighting on the front lines, who are providing services directly to queer people in our community like Johanna does. And listen to them and take what they say seriously because they will know how to deploy your skills, your resources better than you do. And if you do that, everybody benefits.
 
[Herman Wong] (52:47 - 53:07)
And I think that's a fantastic way to end our episode. And I just want to thank each of you individually, Johanna, Bennett, Adam. Thank you so much for being here today and for your answers. I think that this episode has become a very rich episode and I think that listeners will have a lot to benefit from. So once again, thank you so much for being here today and I hope that we can stay connected soon. Thanks, Herman.
 
(53:07 - 53:10)
Thanks so much. Thanks, everyone. It was fun. Talk soon.

[Herman Wong] (53:11 - 53:33)
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Law Syrup. On the next episode, we're diving into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms with the freedom of expression. What is expression? What does it mean for us? And what are its limits and restrictions? Law Syrup is produced by me, Herman Wong, and the Ontario Justice Education Network.
For more information, check out www.ojen.ca and our show notes. See you next time.