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Dozens turn out for rally, this time over gender identity (7 photos)

'I feel like it’s one step forward and 15 steps back. I feel like we’re in 1975 all over again'

More than 50 people turned out to an “urgent” protest Monday evening in front of Barrie City Hall for the latest rally against the provincial government.

The impetus for the rally, organized by Barrie Pride, was a potential policy discussion on gender identity, posed by former Progressive Conservative leadership hopeful Tanya Granic Allen on the weekend.

Granic Allen proposed the PC Party recognize “gender identity theory for what it is, namely, a highly controversial, unscientific ‘liberal ideology’,” while also calling for the topic to be removed from Ontario schools and its curriculum.

David Bradbury, the founder and chair of Barrie Pride, said there shouldn’t still be a need for a rally such as Monday's, something he believes will unfortunately happen again at some point.

“It’s just really sad to hear people in positions of power tell you that you don’t matter, or that you’re not valid, or that you’re not a person, or that you don’t exist,” Bradbury told BarrieToday following Monday’s protest. “It seems like there’s one political party specifically (the PCs) that tends to do this kind of thing a lot.

“This party seems to feel like they have jurisdiction over every single person and to make them do whatever they like,” Bradbury added. “We’ve already seen what this party does when they’re in power.”

Bradbury noted the resolution discussed by the PCs would never make it into law, because it infringes on human rights, but that they’d even talk about it “sends a really strong message about what that party’s about and it really concerns me moving forward.”

Aiden Brown, who was one of several speakers at the rally, came out as a transgender man just a week ago.

“I felt that it was finally my time,” said Brown, adding just three days later the PCs raised the gender identity topic.

Brown said it's "exhausting" that the transgender community and its allies have to keep up the fight. 

“We exist, we’re real, but to have to show up to these events and to have to host these events and to have to put forth our energy continues to invalidate that we exist,” Brown added.

Society is “getting better” with discussing gender identity, “but I feel like it’s one step forward and 15 steps back,” Brown said. “I feel like we’re in 1975 all over again.

"We’ve made such progress as a community.”

Granic Allen’s resolution was OK’d on Saturday at the PC Party’s weekend gathering and could have been up for discussion at next year’s convention.

However, Premier Doug Ford said Monday he will not pursue the proposed discussion.

“They shouldn’t have had to step back because they shouldn’t have stepped forward in the first place,” Brown said. “That’s the reality of the situation.”

Bradbury said Ford’s back-peddling on the issue wasn’t a surprise.

“It’s good that the backlash is working, because when we band together, we make real things happens,” he said.

For Brown, coming out as transgender was something that simply had to be done.

“I’ve known for many, many years that this is who I am,” Brown said. “I initially came out as gay and that’s what most of us do, because we’re afraid of acceptance and we’re afraid of public ridicule, so we kind of dip our toe in the water.

“Then you see how that feels and you finally a find a community. And I’ve been fortunate enough to have found one here, that you feel that you’re safe enough to be who you need to be. And I say ‘need to be’, not ‘want to be’, because nobody chooses this life.”

Bradbury said the original plan was to have the Transgender Day of Remembrance, “and then this horrible thing happened,” he said of the weekend news out of the PC convention. “We didn’t expect to be running a rally.”

Transgender Day of Remembrance will be observed in Barrie on Tuesday night. Events get underway at 4:30 p.m. with a flag raising at city hall, followed by a walk to Drors, located at 98 Dunlop St. W., for a vigil to commemorate and recognize the struggle of all transgender people.