Serious Legal Problems faced by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Other Sexual-Minority People in Western Canada: A Qualitative Study

Executive Summary

Context & Approach

While there have been major strides in legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, Two-Spirit, and other sexual-minority people in Canada, sexual minorities continue to face serious legal challenges, including discrimination and systemic exclusions within health systems, workplaces, housing, immigration systems, family law and adoption systems, and police and criminal justice systems. In order to better understand these persistent legal challenges, the Community-Based Research Centre (CBRC) conducted 21 qualitative interviews with sexual-minority people who had recently experienced a serious legal problem in British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba to explore the types of legal problems, barriers to justice, and impacts of legal issues experienced by sexual-minority people in Western Canada.

Key Findings

Participants discussed a wide variety of legal problems, including workplace discrimination, family law, immigration and refugee law, human rights law, criminal law, and the prison system. Participants discussed discrimination in a variety of settings, including employment, health systems, and educational institutions.

The legal problems faced by participants were often rooted in systems of racism, settler colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, and cisheterosexism (N.B., a glossary of key terms is included at the end of the report). These structural factors contributed to participants pursuing legal recourse and shaped their legal experiences. Indigenous participants positioned legal systems within histories of colonial violence, which rendered these systems inherently harmful. Homophobia and transphobia contributed to barriers in accessing legal resources, verbal harassment, stereotypes, dehumanization, and bullying within legal processes. Participants also noted how cisheterosexism contributed to the erasure of queer and trans people and the presumption of legal actors who were cisgender, heterosexual, monogamously coupled, and part of nuclear family structures.

Participants experienced several different barriers when attempting to resolve their legal issues, including lack of clarity about legal systems and processes, financial barriers, the disproportionate burden of proof placed on participants, and lack of response or slow timelines within legal processes. Ultimately, these forced many participants to advocate for themselves within legal systems. These barriers contributed to participants’ lack of optimism for positive outcomes within legal processes. Participants also identified supportive factors that contributed to their ability to resolve and/or cope with their legal issues, including support from an LGBTQ2+ advocate, their family and community, and their workplace. Experiences with the legal system and/or unsatisfactory resolutions to legal issues had far-reaching impacts on participants’ lives, including on their finances, employment and career prospects, social life, and mental and emotional well-being.

Conclusions & Recommendations

The findings suggest that sexual-minority individuals experience limited access to adequate legal assistance and encounter additional barriers to justice relative to cisgender heterosexual individuals. Our findings indicate that access to justice for sexual-minority people will be enhanced by efforts to:

  1. provide access to legal representation by professionals who are sexual- and gender-minority people themselves and/or who understand the unique challenges facing diverse sexual- and gender-minority communities;
  2. uplift community and informal support systems for individuals who lack adequate access to legal resources;
  3. provide access to holistic support services, including mental health support services, for sexual- and gender-minority people who have become engaged in legal processes;
  4. address the financial burden and barriers associated with securing legal counsel, particularly for those with limited resources;
  5. acknowledge and uproot the legal system’s colonial impacts on the lives of Indigenous Two-Spirit and other sexual- or gender-minority people;
  6. deconstruct systemic, cultural, and structural barriers, such as homophobia, transphobia, and racism that ultimately produce many legal problems and the disenfranchisement of sexual- and gender-minority people;
  7. explore decarceral and/or restorative justice approaches for sexual- and gender-minority people who have become engaged in legal processes;
  8. provide resources for legal professionals (e.g., lawyers, judges, paralegals) on the experiences of sexual- and gender-minority communities including topics on pronoun use, HIV stigma, transphobia, homophobia, cisheterosexism, settler colonialism, and structural racism;
  9. produce resources specifically for sexual- and gender-minority people that make complex legal processes more transparent for those who need to navigate this system. These resources should include information on sexual- and gender-minority people’s rights when engaging legal systems and avenues for redress if they feel that their rights have been transgressed;
  10. provide resources on the human rights bodies in each province, the issues they cover, how to access them, and what outcomes can be sought through them.