Pride Week Editorial: why we made this issue

Since the early 2000s, the Xav has published an annual Pride Issue in partnership with the LGBTQ+ community on campus.

This year, after a week filled with hate and discrimination toward women, immigrants and refugees, we, The Xaverian Weekly and the StFX X-Pride Society, are prouder than ever to publish and disseminate our celebration of the queer community at StFX.

We are witnessing a wave of increasing intolerance for those who do not fit according to established norms and binaries. In response, it is our hope that this issue will contribute to denormalizing heteronormativity and dispelling myths that only serve to alienate LGBTQ+ folks.

These sixteen pages feature an array of diverse content produced by individuals of equally diverse sexual identities. From LGBTQ+ research on campus to media misrepresentation, our writers and contributors draw attention to often untold stories worth our attention and others that warrant our agitation. We’ve done our best to seek out individuals who can speak from their own experience to ensure that our issue is as honest and as accurate as possible.

Inside, you’ll also find a copy of the schedule for Pride Week. We ask that you please consider taking time out of your busy day to come out and attend an event in support of the X-Pride Society and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole. Allyship is a noun that does not always manifest itself in an active form: it’s not enough to simply declare one’s allyship, as though saying a thing out loud automatically makes it true. Allyship can only be demonstrated through action, and Pride Week is arguably the best time to take that first, twentieth, or umpteenth step.

It can be easy to lull ourselves into a false sense of security thinking that Canada is the great progressive defender of equality – after all, we were one of the first countries in the world to legalize same-sex marriage back in 2005, plus we have a handsome, dancing-in-the-streets-at-Pride-parades prime minister to boot, right? Yet appearances can be deceiving: discrimination is still at large within our borders, and even right here at home in the Little Vatican.

Hate crimes happen in Antigonish and they happen at StFX. It is more necessary than ever to work together to end all stereotypes and forms of oppression, including but not limited to those pertaining to the LGBTQ+ community. It may be 2017, but we still have a long way to go.

Read this issue. Go to Pride Week. There’s a lot more that can be said, but if there’s one bottom line to be drawn, it’s that we all want and deserve to experience love. And that’s certainly something worth celebrating.

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