“How was your summer?”, a professor asks. “It was good!”, I reply. “I got to do interesting work, my colleagues were great, and I made some interesting connections.”
A labour disruption at the Faculty of Law has caused an eerily slow start to my second year of law school. Whether it’s the hallways of Chancellor Day Hall, the terrace at Thomson House, or at a friend’s party on a weekend, the semester’s delayed start has stretched out time so much that, everywhere I go, I find myself getting asked a million versions of this same question.
Though I can’t say I have a reputation for cheerfulness, the first answer I find my brain jumping to is this simple, albeit sometimes dismissive response: “It was good.”
Don’t get me wrong. In many respects, it was. I couldn’t have asked for better co-workers, or a more thoughtful and engaged boss. Egale Canada is a kind and welcoming place, full of bright people determined to chart out a safer, more inclusive, and more affirming world. As I reflect on the 12 weeks I spent with the organization, I continue to feel reassured that a fulfilling career in law need not necessarily be the most conventional. What matters is staying anchored to your values – your sense of self, and your aspirations for society. No matter what domain of law I touched or heard about – tort, tax, constitutional, and everything in between – as long as the nexus to my core values was there, so too was the motivation.
“How was your summer?”, a friend asks. “It was fine,” I reply. “Toronto was okay, but it’s not a match for Montréal.”
Part of the allure of travelling away from home is discovering new things about yourself – who you are, what you’re made of, and where you’re going. Of course, some of my colleagues have had more formative experiences in that regard this summer than me. But there are still some things that I learned about myself on my commute from Osgoode station to the precipice of Toronto’s Village.
As the joke goes, Toronto is Canada’s only American city. Though I don’t want to exaggerate, the unfussy mind-your-own-business attitude and overall unfriendliness were, at times, slightly unnerving. Downtown Toronto was very quarter-zip, mind-your-own-business, AirPods-in-and-walk-at-a-brisk-pace – the epitome of the 21st century atomized society. And on the subway, it was full-zip – as in, shut your mouth. The TTC’s trains promote an advertising campaign extolling the virtues of a “quiet commute”, aptly summarized by blogto.com as a “new [TTC] campaign politely telling passengers to shut up”.
True, Montréal has its corporate, fast-paced, metropolitan side. But it is charming for its eccentricities, its noisiness, even its irritating though endearing(?) orange pylons and eternally slow construction projects. Most of all, it just feels like a city where there are, ever-so-slightly, more moments of mutual recognition – a place where there is joy and there is conflict, where there is a faster pace and there is a slower pace, and where, for Christ’s sake, you’re allowed to talk on the metro.
Maybe you think that says something about me. Maybe it doesn’t. I think it does.
And maybe it’s just that I have more friends in Montréal than in Toronto. Or maybe I “did Toronto wrong”. Yet all along, something just felt off.
Overall, it was fine.
“How was your summer?”, she asks. I try a few different answers, but we both know they aren’t quite sitting right. Eventually, she leans in, gives me that look, and asks, “What’s on your mind?”
My therapist knows. (And I pay her a lot, so she’d better.) A large part of my summer was spent meeting with, listening to, and learning from experts and community leaders in the fight to eliminate the prevalence of conversion therapy practices (CTPs) in Canada. Though the quintessential (and horrifying) example of CTPs are things like electroshock therapy, there are many organizations and individuals, religious and secular, that administer practices or services that, though less overtly violent, nonetheless seek to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual or gender identity/expression to cisgender/the sex assigned at birth. Ultimately, the objective is to train or ‘cure’ someone to shed their queer identity, and making them feel as though their authentic selves are wrong or defective.
In 2021, the Parliament of Canada adopted Bill C-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy), making the provision or promotion of conversion therapy, as well as causing a person to undergo conversion therapy, a criminal offence. This was a widely celebrated moment – particularly because the bill was adopted unanimously in the House of Commons, including with support from Conservatives. For many, including, I suspect, many legislators, that was the end of the matter. Criminalizing conversion therapy – and making clear that penal sanctions would apply upon those who persist in the administration of this abhorrent practice – would be the final word.
But putting something in the Criminal Code alone does not stop something from happening. And over and over again, whether I was interviewing an academic, a lawyer, an activist, a community leader, or someone with lived experience of conversion practices, the verdict was fairly unanimous – the criminal ban has not been all that it was made out to be. Many organizations have begun to use more subtle or coded language to obscure the true nature of their business activities. There are major barriers in training police officers and prosecutors to detect and identify conversion practices. Not to mention the panoply of challenges in convincing someone to bring a case forward – pushing through a lack of faith in law enforcement or the judicial system, convincing them that criminal remedies are the best way for them to achieve ‘justice’ in their situation (spoiler: it sometimes isn’t), or, because conversion therapies are insidious in their subtlety and systematicness, helping deeply traumatized people identify whether they experienced conversion therapy in the first place.
That last point stuck with me, and still does. To be so wounded as to not know who hurt you, or when, or whether you were even hurt at all. And to then be asked to strain the immensity of that experience – some of it compartmentalized, long tucked away, but more often messy and overwhelming and raw – through the narrow filter of legal definitions, statute books, and court procedure. In some respects, we’ve set up a process which will leave survivors of conversion practices with so little of themselves by the end, and ask them still to keep pushing, to turn those parts of themselves we are willing to hear into something beautiful – to make law from pain, divorced from the context and complexity that shapes it. It hasn’t been working.
As one survivor shared: Not everyone wants to send their pastor to jail. Forgiveness does not often look like a courtroom or a prison cell.
Perhaps, in the context of conversion therapy, but also more broadly regarding the lack of acceptance towards queer people, we can start elsewhere. To cure the pain and misunderstanding in our society that leads some to hurt others in the way that leaves one not knowing who hurt them, or when, or whether they were even hurt at all.
Perhaps naively, perhaps selfishly, this is sometimes how I prefer to think of things.
“How was your summer?”, a relative asks.
I smile.
“Same as any other.”
Sometimes forgetting is reconciliation. The proverbial, narrow, enclosed spaces with sliding doors are the cost of family harmony. The discharging of cultural responsibilities and burdens comes with a tax we pay with a part of ourselves each day that we carry them, knowing nonetheless that some hard truths are better left unspoken; some lines better left unwritten.
Sometimes life is imperfect. Sometimes it just is what it is.
But not always.
***
“How was your summer?”, he asks.
I smile.
“It was good. I missed you.”