A bill introduced last month in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, Canada, would allow the attorney general to bring charges carrying fines of up to $25,000 against those who say the wrong thing within 100 meters of a location the attorney general has designated as a “2SLGBTQI+ community safety zone.”
The following report is by Thomas Jipping from The Federalist:
Bill 94, titled the “2SLGBTQI+ Community Safety Zones Act,” requires the attorney general to make three decisions: whether to designate a particular location as a safety zone, whether to charge someone with uttering the wrong words within 100 meters of that safety zone, and, if so, whether to seek a fine of up to $25,000. All three decisions would be completely up to the attorney general’s unfettered, and unreviewable, discretion.
The bill does not define what “2SLGBTQI+” means or includes, but it’s apparently not a completely new term. The website of one Canadian organization providing mental health services defines a similar combination as including “two-spirit,” lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual. This website says that the “plus” includes such things as pansexual, pangender, gender queer, bigender, gender variant, and agender — which, in turn, “includes a very broad range of identities which do not conform to traditional gender norms.”
As if that weren’t enough, “this acronym and the various terms are always evolving” anyway. There’s no way to know whether this “plus” is the same as the “plus” in Bill 94 or, say, how pansexual differs from pangender, asexual from agender. Maybe the attorney general knows…
