#as a heavily gender non comforming woman

[hidefdoritos]

not folding my laundry not refilling my pill sorter not cooking dinner. lying down and thinking about longhaired boys.

[antoine-roquentin]

was in a wal-mart in rural ontario recently, and i realized that, not only could you buy beer alongside hunting guns, in wal-mart, on a sunday, which all were not possible in this province the year i was born, but also the current ruling party was the main impediment to those things being illegal, and now it’s the main champion. the ontario conservatives were the very vanguard of rich people protestant morality in the public sphere. the statistical probabilty of protestants voted conservative and catholics voted liberal was such a truism that it was a shock when it dipped below 80% in 2006. in the 1950s, women couldn’t drink in bars without chaperones and religious groups went around harassing people who worked on sundays like saudi religious police. you could be jailed if you took a beer to the washroom until 2006. we were the last people in north america to get beer sales in sports stadiums, in 1982 (hilarious vids). indigenous people couldn’t buy booze until 1959, and the government reserved the right to inspect anybody’s home on a moment’s notice who bought booze and deny them that right until the 70s. even then, when government-run stores (which were the only place to buy booze until 2015) started introducing self-serve in the same years, it was common to hear denunciations of the evils of such practices on any given sunday. essentially, we were ruled by a protestant theocracy until the liberals were elected in 1985, the first non-conservative government in 42 years (and even then, it took until the social democratic ndp were in in 1992 to allow stores to open on sundays, even though a supreme court challenge on the basis of religious freedom had struck down the laws against that nationally 7 years before).

and then, despite those 42 years elected on the basis of the rich protestant vote, the tories abandoned that stance. first to neoliberalism, which gave mike harris 2 terms that absolutely shredded his coalition between the few remaining protestant moralists and the emerging pro-finance sphere, then to a series of failed runs at power. ernie eves and his effort to push a red tory welfarist agenda, john tory and his technocratic governance, tim hudak and his attempt to go full neoliberal, and patrick brown and his effort to unite religious conservatives across faiths. and then, doug ford went for the rural conservative vote, trying to align the religious conservatives who were ferociously terrified that their eight year olds would be taught about “gender identity” (indeed, the only difference between ford’s 2019 sex ed plan and the 2015 one is that such talk is delayed till grade 8), the rural austerians who hated the green energy push by the liberals which increased their electricity bills (which they paid for with federal agro subsidies anyways), and the anti-pc suburbanites who wanted someone who “says it like it is” (ie goes on racist rants), mostly while drunk at hockey games, which in turn requires booze to be readily available (in contrast to that horrible marijuana, which shouldn’t be in our community).  and where are the rich ass protestants? they voted heavily for a gay man for mayor of toronto in 2010 and for a lesbian woman as premiere in 2018, which shows how protestant moralism 40 years later has diffused itself into a class of urbanites who prefer limited welfare and ruralites whose notion of morality is wholly about preventing anybody gender non-comforming from living in public view, which is why i can buy 12 blues and some ammo on a sunday afternoon at a wal-mart in 2019 (wal-mart entered canada by buying woolco in 1994).