Trans march takes alternative approach to pride

For the second consecutive year, the Trans, Two-Spirit, and Genderqueer Liberation and Celebration March will take place on Commercial Drive. (transpridevancouver.wordpress.com)

Long before there was a school board policy or a park board committee about them, transgender people in Vancouver were taking to the streets.

Vancouver’s transgender community has been organizing marches of pride and protest at various times of year and in various locations around the city since 1998. Friday’s march down Commercial Drive has a considerably shorter history, but it traces its spiritual lineage to those earlier gatherings.

“We have never wanted to represent ourselves as the starting point for trans people marching in Vancouver,” said Shannon Blatt, a trans woman and founding member of the collective that organizes the event. “It would be inaccurate and unfair.”

An activist history

The Trans, Two-Spirit, and Genderqueer Liberation and Celebration March, as it’s formally known, takes place annually on the Friday before the Vancouver Pride Festival. It began in 2010 as the concluding event of the Vancouver Trans Forum, a three-day conference on transgender issues in the city.

Since then, an “organically arising collective” has continued to plan the march each year as a way to call attention to the trans community during pride week, Blatt said. She said the collective has roughly followed the model of Vancouver’s Dyke March, an annual gathering of lesbians on the day before the pride parade.

That means “organizing on our own, in our own name, from and for our own community, but not in opposition to any other communities,” Blatt said.

In keeping with the event’s protest aesthetic and roots, the collective refuses to buy permits or pay for policing.

Despite this rebellious spirit, they’ve never run into any problems with local police, Blatt said. In fact, police sometimes show up -- uninvited -- to assist with traffic control, she said.

An alternative to mainstream pride

Friday’s march is not affiliated with the Vancouver Pride Society, the organization that runs the pride parade and most pride week events. It exists as a way of “giving voice to a community that might not find their voice within the larger pride,” said Tara Chee, a trans woman and a member of the collective.

Blatt added that the march serves as an alternative to mainstream pride celebrations, where corporate sponsorship makes some people uneasy.

That doesn’t mean the collective or its members are anti-pride, however. Both Blatt and Chee have marched in pride parades in the past, and Chee will be marching in this year’s parade.

For its part, the pride society appears to feel the same way about the trans march. The march is listed on the calendar of pride week events on the pride society’s website, and several of the presenters at the pride-society-organized Trans Youth Night at the Rio Theatre on Tuesday expressed excitement for this year’s march.

'An important symbol'

The march has been growing steadily each year since it started, Blatt said. She expects roughly 300 people to participate this time.

“My sense is some of the stuff that’s gone on locally, like the big battle over the Vancouver School Board policy, is going to turn a lot more people out,” she said.

The school board’s recently updated policy on sexual orientation and gender identity is just one of a number of victories Vancouver’s transgender community will celebrate during Friday’s march. But both Chee and Blatt said there’s still much more work to be done.

While it may not directly cause any other school districts to adopt a policy like Vancouver’s, the march still has a role to play, Blatt said.

“I think it’s an important symbol,” she said. “I think it shows that this community is self-organizing, can turn out in numbers, supports itself, loves itself, and is committed to being visible, out loud and proud, taking up public space.”

Friday’s march will assemble in Clark Park, 14th Avenue at Commercial Drive, at 5:30 p.m. Materials will be provided for participants who want to make signs to carry. The march route follows Commercial Drive north to Grant Street, where it turns east and ends at Victoria Park with an open mic event.