I promised my American wife Canada was safe for queer couples. I'll vote to keep it that way

This First Person article is the experience of Kiva-Marie Belt, a non-binary farmer who lives in Seafoam, N.S. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ. 

When I first invited my then-girlfriend (now wife) Julia to come visit me in Nova Scotia in 2019 from her home in the United States, I never once questioned whether Canada would be a safe place for 2SLGBTQ+ people like us.

I knew things weren't perfect for transgender folks here, but as a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen who keeps on the pulse on U.S. news, I knew it would definitely be better here than it was there. 

That's still the case, but my confidence in Canada remaining welcoming and safe has eroded. I've seen and felt an anti-transgender movement rising here, leading me to watch the forthcoming federal election with equal measures of hope and dread. 

I first met Julia online through social media and visited her at her home in the midwest U.S. in 2017.

It felt like coming home. We realized how much we enjoyed each other's company — or, as we like to say, "doing life together". We survived seven years of a long-distance, cross-border relationship, including almost two years apart during pandemic travel restrictions, and we eloped in 2021 so that no government could keep us apart again.

A couple of years after we married, I started to see much more hateful comments and disinformation about people like my wife and me on social media feeds. It had begun to spill over into real life in my community. School protests and destruction of Pride flags were happening all over Nova Scotia. But because we have sparse local news coverage in my area, I was worried that people here might think that anti-trans bigotry was just an overseas problem.

I submitted a letter to my local volunteer-run newspaper to draw attention to the upcoming Pride season.

I was very anxious to send it, and I honestly didn't expect it to be published. When you spend your whole life feeling invisible, you don't expect anyone to want to read your words. 

So, in June 2023, when rifling through my freshly-delivered summer edition of the newspaper, I was overjoyed to find the letter I'd written printed in full.

Then, suddenly, it felt like the floor had evaporated from under me. 

Right next to my letter was one from another community member, filled with the same trans-exclusionary talking points I'd been seeing all over social media. Catchy buzzwords like "social contagion" and "sex based rights" were mixed in with unsubstantiated fear-mongering about sexual predators getting "access to our private spaces under gender-identity ideology."

GLAAD, an American organization that advocates for 2SLGBTQ+ people in the media, says gender ideology is an inaccurate term deployed by opponents to undermine and dehumanize transgender and nonbinary people. By claiming gender identity is an "ideology," it says opponents attempt to diminish the very real need for legal protections and for social acceptance essential for trans and nonbinary people's safety.

So, on the one hand, the other writer illustrated perfectly why my letter to the paper had been necessary in the first place.