Mona Greenbaum, a pioneering advocate for LGBTQ families in Canada, talks about her own family and the progress of equality in Canada in a video for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Watch.
The museum’s “Our Canada, My Story” exhibition, one of several to mark Canada’s 150th anniversary, profiles seven people “working to overcome diverse human rights challenges.”
Greenbaum and her partner Nicole founded the Lesbian Mother’s Association in their home in 1998. It later joined with a group for gay dads, Papa-Daddy, to form the LGBT Family Coalition, where Greenbaum now serves as executive director.
Greenbaum’s activism is both personal and communal. As she describes in the video below, she and Nicole had to fight for almost five years, alongside other community organizations, so that Nicole and other nonbiological parents could be recognized as legal parents of their children.
“It wasn’t about giving gays and lesbians the right to have children,” she notes wisely. “They already had children. It was about giving our children rights”—the protections that those with different-sex parents had.
The exhibition videos “explore what it means to work towards equality, inclusion and dignity for all Canadians.” Watch Greenbaum’s story below, then check out the others, which are being posted on the museum’s website on a rotating basis.
(If you don’t understand French, click the CC button in the video to turn on English subtitles.)