Canada Has Paused Immigration for People Like Me

[Editor’s note: This story contains discussions of transphobia and suicide ideation. It may be be triggering to some readers.]

I asked my friend recently whether straight cis people, like her, ever spend the night awake having Big Gender Feelings.

“No,” she said. “Other things, but not gender.”

For years, I’ve been playing on the gender playground — kicking my heels up on the genderfluid swings, hanging out on the monkey bars of genderlessness. Over the last month, though, I’ve really started to question what being non-binary means for me.

After putting medical treatment off for quite some time, it’s something I think I want.

But it’s complicated by my immigration status: I am a U.K. citizen waiting for permanent residency, and if I end up being ousted back to my home country, what can be tricky in Canada might end up being a years-long nightmare in the U.K.

In Vancouver, where I live now, Three Bridges Community Health Centre runs services that have a waitlist of a few months, and use an informed consent model. The province will cover the cost of some, but not all, kinds of hormones. Gender-affirming genital surgeries are covered, as are chest masculinization procedures. Coverage varies depending where you live in Canada — Yukon funds a full slate of trans-related surgeries and therapies, while Ontario charges $2,000 for top surgery — and access to health care is often much harder outside of big cities.

I know this because my girlfriend is a trans woman, and we’ve spent the last four years figuring out trans care in B.C. She has an endocrinologist who has worked with her to find the right medications. She’s also at the top of a surgery waitlist, meaning she’ll likely have gender-affirming surgery before the end of the year.

The B.C. system isn’t perfect, but it’s far preferable to what’s available in the U.K., where trans health care is underfunded and over-subscribed. There, if you’re not paying privately, then hormones can only be prescribed after two appointments with psychologists at designated “Gender Identity Clinics." These two appointments are normally a year or more apart. Surgery can take years after that.

Waitlists in general are monstrous: the London clinic, the largest in the country, is currently booking first appointments for patients who were referred in November 2017. Missing appointments sees you removed from the waiting list entirely.

My girlfriend was referred to a GIC in 2015, and had one appointment in early 2017, back when the waitlist was shorter. Her next appointment was July 2018 — by which point she’d already started hormones in Vancouver. It was faster for her to move to a different country than it was to go through the U.K. trans health system.

The U.K.’s system is designed not to care for trans people who want to transition, but to make trans people prove that they really are trans enough to be allowed to transition. Non-binary people have no legal recognition in the U.K., and a 2015 study found over half of non-binary people did not feel comfortable identifying as non-binary while accessing trans health services. (There is no reason to think things have improved in the last seven years.)

A 2021 report from TransActual lays out some of the grim realities of being trans in the U.K. Among survey participants, 98 per cent thought that health care was inadequate, 70 per cent report being impacted by transphobia in general health-care settings, and 93 per cent reported experiences of transphobia in day-to-day life.

It sucks, but it hasn’t been a personal concern since we left the U.K. in 2017 — until now.

In January, a November 2021 memo from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada leaked, indicating that most economic permanent residency applications under Express Entry programs had been paused until June 2022. After that point, the next six months will see half the usual number of applications accepted in the Express Entry programs, which includes the Federal Skilled Worker, Federal Skilled Tradespeople and Canadian Experience Class. As a result, these draws will be more competitive.

The delay is due to COVID-19-related backlogs: the IRCC invited a record-breaking 405,000 people to apply for permanent residency in 2021 without the capacity to process them all in a timely manner. This led to a decision to delay draws until all Express Entry applications can be processed within six months. (Time spent waiting for an invitation to apply is not counted.)

In February, federal Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced that Canada would have a higher permanent residency target in 2022 than 2021 — but that there would be around 55,900 combined invitations issued to FSW and CEC applicants, compared to 107,350 in 2020 and 138,375 in 2021.

There are about 198,061 Express Entry applicants currently waiting for invitations. There is no disaggregated data on how many of these workers are applying through the CEC pathway or currently live in Canada. CIC News notes that the 55,900 planned invitations is lower than the current backlog of 64,890 FSW and CEC applications, which are in the system and being processed. That means IRCC doesn’t actually need to do any draws to hit its stated target for the year.

My girlfriend and I applied for permanent residency in September 2021. She has two years of full-time work experience assistant managing a retail store in Gastown, most of that dealing with anti-maskers and anti-vaxers during a pandemic. I have a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, and a string of short-term and freelance jobs that do not count as Canadian work experience. Most recently, I was laid off from a staff writer job at a small media outlet — such is life in journalism.

My education granted us post-graduate work permits, which have a spousal allowance. I was allowed to stay here after graduating, so my girlfriend was, too. Similarly, as she’s met the requirements for permanent residency, her application includes me. We’re a package deal.

We would have been eligible for any of the CEC draws that ran for most of 2021; we missed the last one by just a few days.

Without draws, there are no invitations to apply. Without an invitation to apply, there is no “acknowledgement of receipt” letter. Without an acknowledgement of receipt letter, there is no way to get a bridging work permit.

Our work permits expire in June. There is no clear data on how many people are in the same boat as us, but it’s likely in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands.

Minister Fraser has not announced what will happen to people like us. CIC News reports that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is looking at options but has not come up with a “perfect solution.” Minister Fraser has also discussed resuming some Express Entry draws — perhaps for specific occupations. He has also consulted with the Canadian Bar Association Immigration Law Section, though no plan has yet emerged.

None of this is providing a solution to workers in Canada who are worried about being deported due to situations which the government has caused. And none of this gets into the reality of what immigrant workers in Canada actually need, which is blanket extensions on work permits that will allow us to stay in the country until we are invited to apply for permanent residency.

For my girlfriend and me, the fear isn’t just losing our home and our life here. It’s losing access to trans health-care services — the ones my girlfriend is currently using, and the ones I plan to use in the near future. It’s the fear of being sent back to a country where I don’t legally exist, and my girlfriend will be unable to get the medicine she requires.

Beyond the problems with trans health care, the U.K. is undeniably transphobic: hate crimes against trans people have quadrupled over the past five years, the government’s Equality and Human Rights Commission are meeting with anti-trans groups, and there are daily news articles depicting trans people as dangerous threats.

On Feb. 6, my girlfriend emailed our MP, Taleeb Noormohamed, to ask what he was doing to help people in our position. “I can’t stand the thought of moving back to the U.K. because of an administrative decision that doesn’t view my humanity as mattering,” she wrote. “People would yell at me in the street and I didn’t feel safe going out at night. I regularly thought about killing myself before moving here. If I were to be moved back to the U.K.... I would most likely be without medication and probably wanting to take my own life.”

The delay on permanent residency applications isn’t just messing with people’s economic lives: it’s affecting their very will to live.

Moving to Vancouver saved my girlfriend. It gave us a place where we could be free to safely, actually live as ourselves. I didn’t know how to deal with the thought we might have to go back to a country that hates us. I couldn’t be sure the love of my life would make it out alive.

After a month of horrific uncertainty — and crying most days — we finally received a glimmer of hope on Feb. 21.

My girlfriend was offered a working holiday permit — a special kind of two-year work permit that is allocated on a lottery system. The working holiday permit grants her two more years of worker status; she’s allowed to continue contributing to the economy, which means she’s allowed to stay in our South Granville apartment, host Drag Race nights for our friends and access prescriptions and surgery on a timeline that works for her.

By 2024, when this permit expires, we will probably have a better idea of what’s going on with her permanent residency application — she could even be a permanent resident by then. And for now, the gender playground is still hers. Nobody is coming to drag her away from the transfemme jungle gym where she finally feels happy to be herself.

But: the working holiday permit has no spousal attachment.

I only have a few months for the authorities to fix this problem that they have caused. IRCC has not indicated when it will provide more information on possible solutions. I have also applied for a working holiday permit, but there’s no guarantee my name will be drawn in the lottery. Every day that passes is another day closer to June 16, the day my permit expires. If I stay in Canada on a visitor visa, I could be here until Dec. 16 — and then returned to the U.K. until our permanent residency is processed, probably sometime in 2024.

That’s a long time to be away from my home — and a long time to wait for trans health care that feels more urgent every day.