2SLGBTQ+ and the Law

This book is a practical, hands-on treatment of the major ways in which LGBTQ2+ issues arise in various legal contexts and how to effectively navigate those waters to ensure an equitable result. This is a print book.

In No Place for the State, contributors offer complex and often contrasting perspectives as they assess how the 1969 Omnibus Bill helped shape sexual and moral politics in Canada by examining the bill's origins, social implications, and repercussions. The new legal regime had significant consequences for matters like adoption, divorce, and suicide. After the bill passed, a great many Canadians continued to challenge how sexual behaviour was governed, demanding much more exhaustive changes to the law. Fifty years later, the origins and legacies of the bill are equivocal and the state still seems interested in the bedrooms of the nation. This incisive study explains why that matters.

Originally published in 1987 during the panic around HIV/AIDS, The Regulation of Desire was the first book-length study of sexual regulation in Canada. Drawing on his long experience in anti-capitalist groups, the gay liberation movement, anti-racist and anti-police organizing, and AIDS activism, Gary Kinsman's investigation of the social forces that produce both sexual regulations and resistance and enforce queer, trans, and Two-Spirit oppression laid the groundwork for subsequent studies of queer sexuality in Canada and beyond. Ranging from the beginning of colonization to the twenty-first century, Kinsman's historical-materialist approach attends to the specificities of race, class, and gender to show how desires, pleasures, and sexualities have been organized and regulated by state relations--in the service of patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist relations. At the same time, Kinsman documents the emergence of Indigenous, gay, lesbian, and trans resistance, and the formation of queer and trans movements and communities.

In Transforming Law's Family, Fiona Kelly explores the complex issues encountered by planned lesbian families as they work to define their parental rights, roles, and family structures within the tenets of family law. While Canadian courts recognize lesbian parenthood in some circumstances, a number of issues that are largely unique to planned lesbian families - such as the legal status of known sperm donors and non-biological mothers - remain undefined.

This edited collection provides a forum for rigorous analysis of the necessity for both legal and social change with regard to regulation of same-sex relationships and rainbow families, the status of civil partnership as a concept and the lived reality of equality for LGBTQ+ persons. Twenty-eight jurisdictions worldwide have now legalised same-sex marriage and many others some level of civil partnership. In contrast other jurisdictions refuse to recognise or even criminalise same-sex relationships. At a Council of Europe level, there is no requirement for contracting states to legalise same-sex marriage. Whilst the Court of Justice of the European Union now requires contracting states to recognise same-sex marriages for the purpose of free movement and residency rights, unlike the US Supreme Court, it does not require EU Member States to legalise same-sex marriage. Law and Sociology scholars from five key jurisdictions (England and Wales, Italy, Australia, Canada, and the Republic of Ireland) examine the role of the Council of Europe, European Union and further international regimes. A balanced approach between the competing views of critically analytical rights based theorists and queer and feminist theorists interrogates the current international consensus in this fast moving area. The incrementalist theory whilst offering a methodology for future advances continues to be critiqued. All contributions from differing perspectives expose that even for those jurisdictions who have legalised same-sex marriage, still further and continuous work needs to be done. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of human rights, family and marriage law and gender studies.

This work represents a collection of the most pertinent writing of the past fifteen years in the United States and Canada on the topic of lesbians and child custody.

A collection which represents years of struggle in the transgender, gender variant and queer liberation movements and the movement for the abolition of the prison industrial complex. Often discriminated against and harassed on the outside, time in prison can be especially difficult for this already marginalised group of people who may exist between the prison system's male/female institutions. Vulnerable to attack and often denied medical care or protection beyond segregation, they are often overlooked by mainstream rights campaigns.

Queer Mobilizations examines the relationships between LGBTQ activists and local, provincial, and federal Canadian governments. The contributors explore how various governments have tried to regulate and repress LGBTQ movements, and how, in turn, queer activists have successfully shaped public policy, across the political spectrum, from city halls to Parliament Hill. This is a print book.

Based on official security documents and interviews with gays, lesbians, civil servants, and high-ranking officials, this book discloses acts of state repression and forms of resistance that raise questions about just whose national security was being protected. This account of how the state used the ideology of national security to wage war on its own people offers ways of understanding, and resisting, contemporary conflicts such as the "war on terror." This is a print book.

Courts, Liberalism, and Rights guides readers through a nuanced discussion of liberalism, court rulings on sodomy laws and same-sex marriage, and the comparative progress gays and lesbians have made via the courts in Canada. As debates continue about the ability of courts to affect social change, Jason Pierceson argues that this is possible. He claims that the greatest opportunity for reform via the judiciary exists when a judiciary with broad interpretive powers encounters a political culture that endorses a form of liberalism based on broadly conceived individual rights; not a negative set of rights to be held against the state, but a set of rights that recognizes the inherent dignity and worth of every individual. This is a print book.

Bruce MacDougall sifts through hundreds of reported and unreported cases of the past four decades in order to uncover the subjective assumptions and biases operating in the courts. In his examination of issues including gay bashing, homosexuality and the school system, outing, and pornography the author exposes the insidiousness of homophobia in society. MacDougall also assesses the impact of individual judges on Canadian society. This study examines the rhetoric of judicial expression in connection with a vast array of material on the subject of homosexuality. This is an eBook.

Real Queer? is an ethnographic examination of the Canadian refugee apparatus analysing the social, cultural, political and affective dimensions of a legal and bureaucratic process predicated on separating the 'authentic' from the 'bogus' LGBT refugee. Through interviews, conversations and participant observation with various participants ranging from refugee claimants to their lawyers, Refugee Protection Division staff and local support group workers, it reveals the ways in which sexuality simultaneously disrupts and is folded into the nation-state's dynamic modes of gate-keeping, citizenship and identity-making, and the uneven effects of these discourses and practices on this category of transnational migrants. This is a print book.

Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions explores the politics of sexual diversity in Canada and the United States by analyzing three contentious areas - relationship recognition, parenting, and schooling. It enters into long-standing debates over Canadian-American contrasts while paying close attention to regional differences. David Rayside's examination of change over time in the public recognition of sexual minorities is based on his long experience with the analysis of trends, as well as on a wide-ranging search of media, legal, and social science accounts of developments across Canada and the United States. This is a print book.

Banning Transgender Conversion Practices centres trans realities to rethink and push forward the legal regulation of conversion therapy. Florence Ashley considers pivotal questions for anyone studying or working to prevent these harmful interventions. What is the scope of the bans? How do they differ across jurisdictions? What are the advantages and disadvantages of legislative approaches to regulating trans conversion therapy? How can we improve these prohibitions? In answering these questions and more, they synthesize statutory interpretation, comparative and constitutional analysis, bioethics, the sociology of professions, and policy evaluation to conclude that preventing conversion efforts necessitates affirmative healthcare professional cultures and the adoption of detailed laws that clearly communicate which practices are banned.

This book is a compendium of emergent global Human Rights Scholarship offering current ruminations on justice, indigeneity, gender, security, and human rights. This edited collection examines Access to Justice, Allyship and Equality, Human Rights and Social Justice, the Rights of Indigenous People, Indigenous Rights and the University, Transgender Healthcare, Femicide, Women Workers, Extremism and Misogyny, Human Rights and Aging, cyberwarfare, climate change.

A principal forbids same-sex prom dates. A community group tries to prohibit gender-neutral bathrooms. Despite growing acceptance of 2SLGBTQ+ rights, Canadian schools regularly become battlegrounds in clashes between students wishing to express their sexuality or gender identity and those who perceive this as a threat to their values. Making the Case clearly shows how Canadian law responds to "competing" human rights claims, when there is a clash between people asserting sexual minority rights and those asserting religious rights. The authors call on related court cases to explain the position of Canadian law. They demonstrate that Canadians have rights to religion and rights to gender expression or sexual orientation; and that supporting sexual minority rights does not undermine other people's rights to religious freedom.