We’re pulling in opposite directions but Sask. is still making Pride progress
PRIDE 2025 · EDITORIAL
Stephen Whitworth | June 5, 2025
Hello and welcome to Prairie Dog’s annual Pride Month editorial! This year’s topic: weird metaphors built around a talking, two-headed chimera from early 20th-century children’s literature.
I’m pretty sure most of us straight people don’t spend lots of time thinking about their 2SLGBTQ+ friends as ‘2SLGBTQ+ friends’. They’re just, you know, friends. They have spouses and partners, families, pets, utility bills, orphan socks, hobbies and annoying habits. Like all friends. Like everybody.
Face-to-face at the coffee shop, pub, restaurant or on a backyard deck day-drinking mojitos and complaining about politics, movies or whatever, they’re just Dan, Kate, Rachel or Elliot.
That contrasts with the big picture, where members of Saskatchewan’s 2SLGBTQ+ community still collectively face discrimination, harassment and violence but can also have robust support from their friends, neighbours and businesses.
Any Doctor Doolittle fans out there? In this big picture, Saskatchewan is like a metaphorical pushmi-pullyu tugging in two opposite directions. One of the two-headed, unicornish animal’s heads (or llama’s heads, in the classic 1967 movie) pulls toward a happy gay future of acceptance, authenticity and honesty. The other tugs toward the false security of a shitty past with its comforting lies, secrets, denial and misery.
One is brave and truthful, the other frightened and angry.
It’s a strange contradiction that means you see “everyone is welcome” pride flag stickers on supermarket doors in a province where the consistently re-elected governing party chips away at basic human rights protections to lock-up support from the extremist segment of its fickle base, which is constantly threatening to vote for the most extreme right-wing politicians it can find, Sask. Party or not.
In the past couple of years, this pulling-in-opposite-directions situation has played out dramatically in the issues of transgender youth and sex education, where mostly rural conservative reactionaries push back against the broader society’s evolving understanding of and even appreciation for the vast spectrum of sexuality, gender experiences and possibilities.
But despite the Saskatchewan Party government’s transphobic 2023 law (remember, it was so bigoted the government had to suspend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to pass it) that forces teachers to “out” 2SLGBTQ students wanting to use a different name or pronoun to their parents regardless of whether or not that’s safe for the children, it’s the 2SLGBTQ+ side that keeps winning.
Part of that is because Canadians saw exactly what resurgent homophobia looks like thanks to our demented neighbours to the south, who last November lost what was left of their collective minds and elected a kumquat despot hellbent on delivering all the cruelty and craziness his deranged, hardcore supporters can dream up.
If there’s anything good about Trump, it might be that he’s so vile he blocked Canada’s federal Conservative party from power. Pierre Poilivre’s mob, which exudes genuine hostility to the 2SLGBTQ+ community, was a lock to form government before the mango manic reminded Canadians what homophobic, misogynistic racists look like. Turns out Canadians don’t like ’em.
That’s why Western conservative parties couch their homophobia in reasonable-sounding terms like “parents’ rights” and, more disturbingly, protecting women from “biological males” in bathrooms. They must create an illusion that their policies aren’t the dumb, dangerous and divisive things they are, or they’ll completely lose the broad support they’ve enjoyed since 2007.
Of course, the truth is that if conservative governments like the Saskatchewan Party’s really cared about parent’s right to be involved in their children’s education, they wouldn’t have stripped school boards of budget powers or manufactured feuds with teachers and education workers. Just like if they really cared about protecting women, they’d shut up about “biological men” in woman’s bathrooms and fix breast cancer screenings.
To me, that’s where Saskatchewan is at this Pride Month: a two-headed animal pulling in two very different directions but slowly, despite setbacks, moving forward in the right one.
It could be worse. Happy Pride!
