February 16, 2016
As members of the University of British Columbia community, we express our solidarity with the UBC Pride Collective regarding last week’s rainbow flag burning incident.
In a statement released by UBC last week, the University asserted that “freedom to explore topics around gender and sexual identity are an integral part of what makes a university a place of learning. Any incident that disrupts this freedom is taken very seriously as it contradicts the respectful environment our community upholds.”
While it has vocalized its support for the Pride Collective and even the celebration of gender and sexual diversities on campus, UBC has failed to produce substantive initiatives to educate its members around LGBTQI+ identities and communities.
As scholars and activists who are committed to dismantling institutionalized homophobia, transphobia, and cisheteronormativity, we urge UBC to take action beyond the criminal investigation of this particular incident. By isolating homophobia and transphobia in our community to this single act of hate, UBC risks downplaying a broader climate of violence against LGBTQI+ people that persists on and beyond this campus. We hope that the UBC campus community will move forward from this incident by initiating a deeper conversation around gender and sexual diversities.
Equality has often been conflated with “gay marriage”. While gay marriage has been “legalized” in Canada for over a decade and last year nationally in the United States, the burning of the rainbow flag at UBC is symptomatic of a larger climate rooted in fear and hatred. Our work is far from over.
The 2014 “Renewing our Commitment to Equity and Diversity: UBC’s response to the Task Force Recommendations” states that the University will “[e]nsure that sexual diversity and transgender issues are appropriately addressed in policy reviews.” The recent burning of Pride’s rainbow flag reveals the necessity of addressing these issues beyond a policy context.
Many of us are scholars of diverse genders and sexualities who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, two spirit, non-binary. Many of us are community organizers and activists who are activity involved in mobilizing for social justice, especially for and with those marginalized along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, dis/ability, religion and immigrant status.
We are committed to intersectional gender, racial and sexual justice both in our scholarly work and in our political commitments within and outside of the academy. We thus unequivocally support the UBC Pride Collective and others within our community who are doing this work and look forward to deepening the ongoing conversation about equity on this campus.
In solidarity,
Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
