Canadians must help trans refugees flee Yankee persecution.
We must never again be the cowards that say "one is too many."
On the very first day of his second term, Donald Trump passed the first Nuremberg Law. Starting January 20th, the United States Federal Government will no longer recognize the existence of transgender, nonbinary, or intersex Americans.
With this executive order, Trump has mandated that every single Federal employee, regardless of position within the United States Government, must enforce every single Federal law under the interpretation that gender identity does not exist.
Further, despite intersex people literally having sex chromosome arrangements that are neither XX nor XY, they are also legally determined to no longer exist. Many of these provisions do not make sense when you consider intersex people, but that is because Trump has quite literally unpersoned them.
Government identification, including your passport, will soon be invalidated if it recognizes your transgender or intersex identity. Trans women who are sentenced to prison for any offence will now be sent to men’s prisons, and will be forcibly detransitioned against their will.
And most strikingly Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act will now be interpreted to ban transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans from “single-sex spaces”. False “civil rights” claims at these tribunals can now be weaponized against any queer American who defies the ban.
In short? The very existence of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans has now been criminalized at the Federal level. No matter which of the fifty states these queer Americans live in, they cannot flee the persecution of their own government.
To claim asylum in Canada, i.e. to make a request for refugee protection, you must make your claim either within Canada, or after arriving at a Canadian port of entry by land, air or sea.
You must be unable to return to your home country due to either :
Well-founded fear of persecution;
Danger of torture;
Risk to your life, or:
Risk of cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.
On the face of it, transgender, nonbinary and intersex Americans would now qualify for several of these provisions, considering the nationwide reach of Trump’s transphobic Nuremberg Law.
Indeed, they do have a well-founded fear of persecution due to their inherent characteristics. There is a risk of cruel and unusual punishment under the new guidelines for transgender and intersex prisoners. And many of these provisions, such as the forced withholding of medical care, could indeed be considered torture.
But there is a massive problem, and that is the so-called “Safe Third Country Agreement”, which allows the Canadian government to unilaterally turn back refugees arriving from the United States, without due process.
This is not how international law works, and the requirement to accept asylum seekers and not send them back is a fundamental principle of international law that cannot be violated.
Indeed, the Supreme Court of Canada determined in 2023 that while this agreement may not violate Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it may violate Section 15, and thus the entire agreement is still under judicial review.
For Canada to send back those fleeing American persecution would be to repeat one of the greatest sins of Canadian history, an act of horror which will live in eternal infamy.
In 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for Canada’s refusal of the MS St. Louis in 1939; over 900 Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust were told by the Canadian government that “none is too many.”
As a result, those Jews, my people, were sent back to Germany, where they were slaughtered in the death camps by the Nazi regime and their collaborators.
Successive generations of Canadians have told our children this story, believing that we have learned a moral lesson from this tragedy. And yet, with successive refugee crises over the decades, it is clear that “never again” was a lie.
Time and time again, craven beasts like Minister of Immigration and Refugees Marc Miller have thumped their chest like apes and screamed “none IS too many”, and then increased restrictions on refugees seeking asylum.
Canada must not allow a trans genocide to happen before our own eyes, not when we have the power to save those that Trump is seeking to eradicate. If “never again” means anything, the time to act is now.
If the Canadian government is not willing to take a stance on trans and intersex refugees fleeing American persecution, then the Canadian people must. If our elected leaders will not do the right thing, then we will lead, and we will save as many as we can.
This is a terrifying time for the queer commuity, not just in America or in Canada, but across the globe. The movement to strip us of our civil rights is real, and we will not stop it by pretending it isn’t happening.
There is nothing I will not sacrifice to protect my trans friends from the bigoted filth who want to harm them. There is no pain that we as a nation cannot endure, if it means that we can save innocent lives.
Because decades from now, our children will ask what we did to fight the fascists…and I plan to tell them that we did everything we could.
If you would like to help, please donate to Rainbow Railroad, a registered charity which helps queer refugees flee to safe countries, away from persecution and violence. Tax receipts can be issued for the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
All their immigrants will come as REFUGEES also . And must be given the same rights as TRANS REFUGEES,MIDDLE EAST,AFRICAN,PALESTINIAN,SYRIAN REFUGEES. All these FORE-MENTIONED REFUGEES MUST BE TREATED JUST LIKE THE UKRAINIAN REFUGEES WERE TREATED .