Two hands under rainbow light, indicating pride.
We have survived it before. We'll survive it again. Credit: Canva Credit: Canva

I’m not going to sugarcoat it: 2025 will be a difficult year for queer Canadians. 

Whether it’s the bulk of Alberta’s anti-trans legislation coming into effect or the impending election of an openly queerphobic Conservative government at the federal level: queer Canadians, in particular trans Canadians, are going to have political targets on our backs. And the reason is simple. As we’ve just seen in the recent United States presidential election, queerphobic rhetoric galvanizes the reactionary right and gets them out to the polling stations. You can bet Canada’s (increasingly) right-wing political parties have taken note.

As those parties work to divide “you” from “they/them,” to allude to one of Donald Trump’s now-infamous campaign slogans, queer Canadians are going to find out exactly who is really on our side; and who is more than willing to sell us out for a tax break.

But that’s no reason to despair.

Queerness has always been at odds with majoritarian politics, and it always will be. It will always be the case that a large number of folks hate us for who we are and how we live our lives. We’ve survived it before, and we’ll survive it now. If, that is, we stand strong in the courage of our convictions and refuse to allow ourselves to be sidelined by false allies who care more about civility than justice, including those that are within our own 2SLGBTQ+ community.

Of queers and pessimists

It’s commonplace nowadays for people to use “queer” as a shorthand for everyone who falls under the 2SLGBTQ+ umbrella. It’s convenient to do so, if nothing else. It’s also wrong.

I’m informed here by the writing of critical theorist Lee Edelman, a professor of English Literature at Massachusetts’ Tufts University. A little over 20 years ago, Edelman published a provocative book entitled No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, in which he took aim at what he dubbed the politics of “reproductive futurism.”

Edelman’s argument is complex (and complexly argued), so you’ll have to bear with me as I explain it.

Heterosexist and cissexist society is obsessed with its own reproduction, Edelman argued. And this obsession constellates around the figure of the mythical Child. 

This Child is not any actual infant, to be clear. Rather, it is a signifier of the horizon towards which politics—be it conservative or liberal—is oriented, but at which politics never fully arrives. The basic idea of reproductive futurism is that people value this mythical Child, and the future it represents, over the present and the actual people who inhabit it. As Edelman puts it:

“On every side, our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters, or even by the threat of potential encounters, with an ‘otherness’ of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve, uncompromised by any potential access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfolds as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up.”

Politics, in other words, stands for identification with the advent of this Child and the consummation of the social order that that arrival figures; it stands for “our identification with an always about-to-be-realized identity.”  When the Child arrives, the social order and we citizens thereof will be complete. 

But—and this is politics’ big secret—the Child never does.

You probably want an example. So allow me to offer one. Although the political obsession with the Child is everywhere in evidence, it is nowhere more so than in the political rejection of queerness.

Just look at the obsession both liberals and conservatives have with literal reproductive potential when debating the regulation of health care for transgender youth. Such health care is either a social evil because it impedes sexual reproduction, contrary to the demands of reproductive futurism; or it is socially acceptable (although never actually good) because it does not do so, preserving the Child’s coming as a possibility. 

Edelman’s book helps us to parse this obsession.

To the extent that queer genders and queer sexualities stand in opposition to the Child—they are quite literally sterile—they stand in affirmation of social death and are a cancer on the body politic. “For the only queerness that queer sexualities could ever hope to signify,” Edelman thus writes, “would spring from their determined opposition to th[e] underlying structure of the political—their opposition, that is, to the governing fantasy of achieving Symbolic closer through the marriage of identity to futurity in order to realize the social subject.” 

Queer sex and queer relationships as queer are anti-Child, anti-social reproduction, anti-politics, and quite literally pro-death. That’s why one of the queerest things one could do, at the height of the AIDS crisis, was to keep having gay sex: It meant dying a queer death.

As a term of art, then, “queer” is not simply shorthand for the 2SLGBTQ+ community. To the extent that 2SLGBTQ+ people, in attaining rights, assimilate themselves into the logic of reproductive futurism, these 2SLGBTQ+ people are not queer. (Cis gay men can be some of the loudest opponents of trans rights, remember; just look at the so-called “Gays Against Groomers” movement within the 2SLGBTQ+ community.)

Queer people as such do not participate in reproductive futurism. We stand outside it, against it, as embodied disturbances of it.

In politics’ governing fantasy, “there are no queers in [the] future as there can be no future for queers, chosen as they are to bear the bad tidings that there can be no future at all.”

The future ends with us. 

Carving out queer utopias

Polemic engenders polemic, and that is certainly true of Edelman’s book and the “queer antisocial thesis” it articulated.

Perhaps the strongest objection is one that Edelman himself anticipated, albeit without actually mounting a defense against: that queer pessimism reeks of “bourgeois privilege (variously described, in identitarian terms, as ‘white,’ ‘middle-class,’ ‘academic,’ or, most tellingly, ‘gay male’).” For privileged it is, at least in the terms in which Edelman articulated it.

As critical theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, politics is not oriented towards the coming of just any Child: it is oriented quite specifically towards the coming of a White Child. 

Reproductive futurism does not obsess over whether youth of colour will be able to grow up and have children in the same way that it obsesses over whether white youth will be able to. In point of fact, reproductive futurism is actively hostile to the coming of Black children and Indigenous children. “The future is only the stuff of some kids,” Muñoz points out. “Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity.”

Which means that the identification with social death that opposition to the Child represents and Edelman prescribes is only “radical” if one is not already marked as socially dead. That is to say, it is a white man’s game. 

All of which raises the question: Can there be any decolonial or antiracist force to the pessimistic rejection of the Child? I think the answer is “Yes,” and based on my understanding of him, I think (the sadly now-deceased) Muñoz would agree.

Queer pessimism is not totally incompatible with utopian thinking. Queerness need not be apolitical, even if it necessarily rejects politics as currently constituted.

Muñoz again: “It is important not to hand over futurity to normative white reproductive futurity. That dominant mode of futurity is indeed ‘winning,’ but that is all the more reason to call on a utopian political imagination that will enable us to glimpse another time and place: a ‘not-yet’ where queer youths of color actually get to grow up.”

Queerness can (and should) stand against the status quo, in which only some lives are marked as worth living, as deserving of governmental protection. And it can still stand for something: a Never-Never Land in which the lives that actually exist, in the here and now, mean something, indeed, mean everything.

At a time when conservative governments are quite literally trying to erase trans people from Canada’s present and future, could there be anything queerer than that?

What do we stand for, if not this?

As queer Canadians, we do not and we cannot stand for the ways in which conservative political movements are scapegoating sexual and gender minorities to push their reactionary agendas onto an all-too willing voting public; or the ways in which they are normalizing violence—rhetorical and physical—against those minorities in this country and around the world. 

And while we may not be utopian thinkers in the usual ways (that is, the ways that are grounded in reproductive futurism), we do stand for things nonetheless: love; hospitality; justice; and, I dare say, hope.

Because we can be hopeful pessimists, contradictory as that might appear at first glance.

You see, the problem with reproductive futurism is not the reproduction of society per se. It is the reproduction of an unjust status quo in which certain people (trans folks, for instance) are denigrated, and our freedoms curtailed, in order to perpetuate a sociopolitical order in which those same people are marked for social death and exclusion.

It is what reproductive futurism reproduces, in other words, and not the bare fact that it reproduces, that is the issue. A just order that insists on its own reproduction would not necessarily be unjust merely on account of that insistence.

Utopia, Muñoz teaches us, is queerness’ rightful domain: “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”

As a horizon towards which people may strive, queerness demands action. But where the horizon figured by the Child demands the condemnation of all those who work for its undoing, the queer horizon demands modes of performativity that figure worlds, Muñoz writes, “in which multiple forms of belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collectivity.” 

Queer utopianism demands, in other words, the sort of doing that materializes its effects and, in so doing, builds towards a new and more inclusive social order.

In practice, this looks something like enacting alternative ways of inhabiting reproductive politics itself. It looks like enacting a queer cultural discourse in which the radically other is not perceived as a radical threat; a discourse that does not exclude but rather leaves space for the things it cannot name.

Which, in the current moment, means enacting sexual and gender freedom: by being trans, for example, as adults and, yes, as children; government restrictions on our ability to do so be damned.

To be queer, after all, is to be different. Radically so. And that difference contains within itself the resources for constructing a better world.

Charlotte Dalwood

Charlotte Dalwood (she/they) is a Student-At-Law at Prison & Police Law in Calgary, AB; and a Master of Laws student at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. Find Charlotte online at www.charlottedalwood.com.