Divest this
Divestment from oil assets does little to nothing to prevent climate change or fossil fuel usage ("Divestment dinosaurs," Voice of The City by Simon Greenland Smith, September 15). All it does is lower stock prices marginally so third-party investors can get a slightly lower price when they are on the market for energy company stock. If you want to reduce oil production/consumption, spend your time advocating for increased usage of green energy, and research into alternatives.
—posted at thecoast.ca by Scrutinizer
A royal fuck-up
Trans women are treated as freaks and monsters for just living their lives in Halifax, while a cisgender man playing at wearing a dress and calling himself "Princess" on stage for a few nights gets a glowing promotion ("Gender-fucking royalty," cover story by Ashley Corbett, September 8). It would be lovely if cis men would stop manufacturing what they claim are "trans" or "genderfuck" stories, but in reality are just transmisogynist appropriations and misrepresentations of the lives of real trans feminine people. It would be even better if other cis people would stop lauding these cis men as brave and creative, while turning around and treating trans feminine people like utter shit in real life.
Cis people making up lies about who trans people are and the issues we face are not brave. They are not innovative. Performances like this are hurtful and harmful to actual trans people, because it leads to cis people making dangerously incorrect assumptions about real trans people they meet. And it co-opts space that could be dedicated to actual trans people telling truthful stories about our lives, based in lived experience.
Until and unless cisgender Halifax actively supports its trans citizens, you are harming us by putting on bullshit performances like this. If cis Haligonians will not stop intentionally causing harm to the trans community (and you show no sign of planning to stop that), the very least you could do is simply leave us the hell alone and stop making crap up about us. We are not your playthings, and our lives are not your stories to tell. —Morgan Dambergs, Halifax
No Steele wheels
There is understandable anger at the destruction of affordable urban housing by Rob Steele's Honda dealership on Robie Street. Perfectly acceptable housing is being bought up, boarded up and then knocked into matchwood to make more parking, when Mr. Steele owns vast amounts of car dealership parking all along Kempt Road and elsewhere in Metro.
I received a reminder from Mr. Steele's Subaru dealership in Halifax to tell me that the 2017 models are soon to arrive. I have just sent the salesperson with whom I purchased a Subaru a letter indicating that, in protest of Mr. Steele's destruction of urban housing on all three sides around his Steele Honda business, I will not easily deal with a company owned by Mr. Steele again. While it may be perfectly legal, his is a morally bankrupt action. —Alan Ruffman, Halifax
Corrections
Things went pretty far off the rails with last week's Fall Arts Preview issue. In the Reply all section, Joanne Light's "Climate political" letter incorrectly referred to a 2008 submission to city council as being about a carbon fee and dividend, when it was actually about the "Fair Trade Town" model.
In The City section, the photo for Payge Woodard's story "Lacking the tools to stop bad development" ran without its proper caption—"Peter Ziobrowski thinks interim development controls could have helped HRM grow smarter. Too bad city council shot down that idea."—and Ashley Corbett did not receive proper credit for taking the photo. Also, the story's sub-headline shouldn't have said "council turn down" anything, because of course council turns stuff down.
Finally, in the Fall Arts feature, the story "10 other films to see at AFF" was written by Carsten Knox, not Tara Thorne as we printed. All these mistake are due to human error, and we apologize unreservedly to our readers and contributors for them.
