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The public sphere has been seen by conservatives as an arena for safeguarding private relations. Private power relations (in the family, religion, community and economy) could be threatened by newly recognized social groups that make claims on the state for justice and equality. Therefore, conservatives have been concerned about who can speak and exist in public and who can thereby make demands on the state. In the debates over transgender rights in Canada, social conservatives and neoliberal forces have merged in complex and impactful ways. Analyzing House of Commons and Senate debates and committee proceedings for Bill C-279 (2015) and Bill C-16 (2016–2017), I examine three conservative arguments that illustrate attempts to maintain private power relations and hierarchal gendered divisions by ensuring that transgender and gender nonconforming people are not allowed to exist, speak or make claims in public: first, the assertion that gender identity and gender expression are not definable identity categories for claims-making because transgender people are deceptive and can change their gender based on their feelings; second, the targeting of public facilities, and particularly public bathrooms, as sites of contention, danger and necessary gender segregation; and third, the attempt to delegitimize rights claims by criminalizing transgender people in relation to cisgender women and children.

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This article provides a discourse analysis of the three major cases-Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the later Perry v. Brown (2012), and Hollingsworth et al. v. Perry et al. (2013)-against California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state constitution. Based on analysis of the briefs, transcripts, and decisions from the proceedings, this article discerns how the discourses that were deployed during the Proposition 8 campaigns from 2008-2013 were filtered through the court system. The article looks at how both sides defined sexuality in making the case that homosexuals are or are not an identifiable suspect class in need of the rights and protections of marriage. The article argues the plaintiffs' efforts to demonstrate the coherence of the suspect class produced an exclusionary definition of sexuality, while the defendants co-opted queer discourses to destabilize the plaintiffs' claim to suspect class.