Real Queer: "Authentic" LGBT Refugee Claimants and Homonationalism in the Canadian Refugee System

Abstract

IntroductionAt a meeting in Toronto for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT)2 refugees who had received a positive decision from the Immigration and Refuge Board and were in the process of applying for permanent residency, the conversation focused what the members had liked and disliked about the weekly LGBT refugee claimant support group meetings they had attended. Most of the conversation focused the positive aspects of the group-how it was a home away from home, providing emotional support and important information for LGBT people going through the refugee claim process and adapting to a new life in Canada. However, toward the end, one member, Janine, started to talk about how things had changed since she first started coming to the meetings about 10 months before. She noted that these meetings used to have only 40 to 50 people attending each week but now had grown to almost 200. Janine now felt unsafe at the meetings, because she had been hit on by some of the men there and she saw some people from her own whom she did not think were gay or lesbian. For example, she said, a few weeks before, she had seen a woman at the group meeting and then later outside, she saw a guy feeling her up. know she's claiming refugee status as a lesbian and it pisses me off. Janine wished there was some way to find out who the fakers were and get them out: They're using our tactics and they're making it harder for people like us. She was worried about her friends who were suffering back in her of origin and planning to come to Canada, but the was getting so corrupt it would be increasingly difficult for them. Others in the group murmured their agreement and one person added how the group was now alienating and unfriendly ... fwithl 99 per cent new faces, it feels totally straight. The facilitator responded that their concern was duly noted and would be addressed by the group's administrators.Perhaps not so coincidentally, this conversation about fake refugees in an LGBT refugee support group contained similar themes to comments made by the Canadian government as it introduced Bill C-31 in 2011, the aim of which was to reform and fundamentally change certain components of the refugee in Canada by speeding up the claim process, introducing mandatory detention and denying appeal procedures for certain categories of refugees. (The bill passed in the House of Parliament in June 2012 and was implemented in December 2012.) Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, and his Conservative Party majority government claimed that the reforms were in part motivated by the fact that the system is clogged with false applications (Smith 2012) and the refugee backlog was due in part to claims (Ling 2012).In this article, I argue that the talk of false, fake and fraudulent versus true, authentic and genuine sexual minority refugees, which pervades different levels and networks of the Canadian refugee system, is nothing new (Mountz 2010), as the refugee determination process is a quasi-legal juridical in which most cases are predicated upon the of the claimant, along with documentary evidence of the claimant's country (Showier 2006).3 In other words, a process focused the determination of credibility is premised upon the assumption that truth can be deduced through the analysis of factual evidence, which in most refugee cases is primarily oral narratives and written documents. The objective of evaluating evidence is to determine if the claimant fits the definition of a refugee outlined in the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), much of which is based the United Nations Refugee Convention and Protocols. However, individuals who are claiming protection as a refugee the basis of sexual orientation or gendered identity persecution face the daunting double challenge of proving that their sexual orientation or gendered identity is credible (i. …