Inside Out Toronto LGBT film fest doc star on Canada’s transgender-rights bill

TORONTO – For nearly five decades, American activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy has fought tirelessly for the rights of transgender women, particularly those of colour and those who have been incarcerated.

While she feels trans rights have a long way to go in the U.S., she applauds a recent bill tabled by Canada’s Liberal government which would make it illegal to discriminate against trans people.

“I’m so excited about that and wondering where that’s going to go,” says Griffin-Gracy, who is set to appear at the Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival, kicking off Thursday.

“With anything, once it’s done, you have to step back and see what the effects are and where it goes from there…. It’s a wonderful beginning and in my heart, I hope it stays true to what its purpose is.”

Griffin-Gracy is the subject of the documentary “Major!”, which is in the lineup for the fest that runs through June 5. Annalise Ophelian directed the film, which shows Griffin-Gracy’s heroic efforts to help trans women.

A trans woman of colour who has been incarcerated herself, Griffin-Gracy grew up in Chicago with parents who felt she was “an abomination.” In 1969, she was involved in New York’s so-called Stonewall riots, which was considered a milestone in the LGBT civil rights movement.

Griffin-Gracy has also done HIV outreach and worked with the Transgender Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project, which focuses on empowering trans women within the criminal justice system.

“In the ’50s and ’60s, when they would arrest one of us, we would go immediately to the psych ward in the closest hospital,” says the Oakland, Calif., resident.

“And where did they put us when they started putting us in jail? They put us in the cell blocks that had the crazy people and the murderers.”

As other transgender women attest to in the film, some wound up in the criminal justice system because of being downtrodden and discriminated against.

The film documents how trans women in the U.S. who haven’t had a sex change are usually housed in men’s jails and prisons, where they suffer abuse by both inmates and guards, and are sometimes put in solitary confinement. It also suggests there is a disproportionate number of trans women of colour behind bars.

“The vast expansion of the prison industrial complex in the United States hits hardest in communities of colour and is particularly devastating to trans women of colour,” says Ophelian, who lives in San Francisco and describes herself as “a white, cisgender, queer woman.”

“The way that wealth disparity and the intersections of racism, white supremacy and the expansion of the prison industrial complex work … I think it’s a very dangerous and devastating time right now.”

Ophelian points to North Carolina’s controversial House Bill 2, which requires transgender people to use public bathrooms aligned with the sex on their birth certificate.

“We’re seeing those in state after state after state,” says Ophelian, who is also a forensic psychologist.

“I just see those bills as being a direct backlash to marriage equality being guaranteed, so then the right wing has to go after something else.”

When it comes to the trans rights bill in Canada, Ophelian says she loves “a national leader saying, ‘We are going to protect this group.'” But she’d like to see the policies ensure “the maximum amount of justice for the most marginal folks.”

“My own personal feeling about any human rights, any civil rights legislation that includes hate crimes and includes criminal penalties for folks who enact violence or discrimination against any group is that I think that’s territory to be tread into very carefully,” she says.

“I don’t think further criminalization creates justice for anyone.”

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