Photo by Katie Rainbow via Pexels

On a cloudy February day in Edmonton, Alberta, a giant trans pride flag flies over Dr. Wilbert McIntyre Park, marking the meeting place for a rally in support of the trans community. It’s days after Premier Danielle Smith, in a seven-minute video posted online, announced the most restrictive gender policies in Canada under the guise of “preserving choice for children and youth.” Alongside my 15-year-old daughter, who has many non-binary friends at school, and my best friend, whose child is gender diverse, I join the growing stream of people heading to the gazebo at the centre of the park.

The crowd eventually balloons to over 1,000 people as we wait to hear from the speakers—politicians, Two Spirit Elders, and organizations fighting for trans rights and reminding us to celebrate trans joy. Everywhere are Pride and trans colours and handmade cardboard signs. Some are cheekier than others, like the one that says, Someone come get your ‘Auntie’ Marlaina, she’s harassing the youth again. Marlaina is the premier’s given first name, but she prefers to go by Danielle—an irony she failed to appreciate while telling Alberta’s youth that all name and pronoun changes at school need to be approved by their parents.

While it’s a scary time for young trans and gender-diverse kids and their families, protests like the one happening today show how much solidarity there is in the community, letting these students know they’re not alone. There’s also a clear message that, no matter what policy the province tries to implement, those who know and love them will not stop seeing them for who they are. All around us, clusters of teachers hold signs saying they will never out their students. We run into the parents of a trans kid who lives in our neighbourhood and have a big group hug.

We’re all in need of comfort. At their AGM in November 2023, the United Conservative Party (UCP) overwhelmingly adopted three policies all related to “parental choice.” An opt-in consent for “any subjects of a religious or sexual nature,” including enrolment in extracurriculars or distribution of instructional materials relating to them; one supporting parents’ rights to be informed of and in charge of all decisions to do with all services paid for by the province; and the requirement for parental consent for name or pronoun changes for anyone under 16.

The UCP government wants to take things even further. They are proposing legislation to restrict gender-affirming healthcare for minors—no puberty blockers for anyone under 15 years of age and no gender-affirming surgeries for anyone under 18.

In her video, Smith said that gender-affirming care “poses a risk to [children’s] futures that I, as premier, am not comfortable permitting in our province.” It’s horrifying to know that Smith believes her feelings override actual medical evidence and best practices, or that parents, doctors and minor patients need her permission to choose the right treatment plan for any health concern.

There is a real fear, echoed by many health-care associations and gender-supportive services across Canada, that these policies will result in more harm to this vulnerable and at-risk community. In the Canadian Paediatric Society’s position statement on caring for trans and gender-diverse youth, they clearly state that adolescents who have access to gender-affirming medications have “lower odds of suicidal ideation over the life course.” Denying trans and gender-diverse youth access to the care they need when they need it is the real risk to these children’s futures.

Regardless of Smith’s position on the matter, many caring adults know this, and are fighting for students’ rights to be themselves. In a powerful member statement on the first day of the spring legislature session, Brooks Arcand-Paul, Alberta New Democrat MLA for Edmonton-West Henday and a Two Spirit person, stood proudly, wearing a floral and rainbow ribbon skirt gifted to him by his community, and condemned these policies and the divisiveness they are stoking.

Arcand-Paul says he’s pleased that many Albertans and organizations like labour unions are coming together to support the trans community. The vice president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association spoke at the rally in February, and the United Steelworkers, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees and the Canadian Union of Public Employees all came out with strongly worded statements denouncing the proposed policies.

But Arcand-Paul also warns, “if this government intends to take rights away from one group, it’s certainly not going to stop there.” He says Albertans need to continue to contact their MLAs and voice their concerns about the proposed policies. “Sometimes we say something once and think it’s good enough, but we have to keep pushing the gas on this one and we can’t lose steam.” Arcand-Paul suggests people donate to organizations like Skipping Stone and Egale Canada, who are establishing legal advocacy funds and gearing up to challenge these policies in the courts if necessary.

As we left the rally, I still had the progressive Pride flag pinned to my jacket. We headed to the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market for a pre departure coffee. Within minutes, three people stopped me, curious about the flag and the rally. I gladly answered their questions. It made me realize how powerful the simple act of showing up can be—and that we can’t assume everyone knows what’s happening in Alberta politics, or that they don’t care.

The queer and trans community have been fighting for their rights for a long time, but for some of us, this is new territory. It’s imperative that progressive Albertans continue to show up and commit to defending the Charter and human rights of all people, and to keep the pressure on this government with individual calls and letters, attendance at rallies and protests, and donations to the grassroots organizations leading these actions.

Given their track record, it’s hard to say if these actions will be enough to force the UCP government to change its course. But we have to try.

Illustration by Olivia Thomson

In 2021, Aaron Beaumont decided it was time to create more queer connections in New Brunswick. While doing their undergrad at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Beaumont’s work in fat studies led them to learn more about fat activism online. After realizing that most groups were based in the U.S., and the few Canadian groups that existed were decidedly not in New Brunswick, Beaumont took matters into their own hands.

They created QT Fatties, a mostly online, and sometimes in person, community for queer and trans fat folks living in New Brunswick. Four years later, it has transformed into a space Beaumont had been dreaming of: one where trans fat folks across the province can connect.

QT Fatties uses Discord to plan both virtual and physical events geared towards other fat, trans queers. They’ve hosted clothing swaps and art markets, and have had online monthly meetups. They’ve also run mutual aid fundraisers for people in need of gender-affirming care.

Sam Walsh, who does administrative work for the group, explains that their Discord channel is where most of the community gets together. “There’ll be messages in the Discord sometimes like, ‘I want to do this. Anyone available to meet up and we can just hang out?’ Which I think is really awesome. It’s changed from being all on Aaron organizing, to being a little bit more community based.”

Beaumont founded the group in the hopes that more queers could find and help each other navigate being fat and queer in a largely rural province. “There was no activism happening in the province, more specifically, [around] accessibility. By that I mean clothing, gender affirming items, access to healthcare. All of the things that are already hard to access in this province—but you add body size and fatness on and that makes it more challenging,” they explain. “So, I wanted to make some of those things free and supportive and more accessible for folks.”

Walsh also says it was important to have a group based in the Maritimes, since a lot of resources are based on the West Coast. “Having something that’s local, where you’re able to connect with people that are in the Maritimes is really nice because some of the experiences that we’re dealing with are a bit different. Particularly when it comes to the medical system or accessing gender-affirming care.”

Some of these needs, Beaumont explains, stem from much of New Brunswick being not only rural, but also conservative, and generally lower income, especially compared to other provinces. Because of that, they make sure QT Fatties events take place in the province’s three major cities as well as virtually to remain accessible to all who need it.

“Fat activism is really grounded in disability justice. When we think about accessibility, online platforms, chats, whatever it may be, is what’s most accessible to a lot of disabled folks. I’m disabled myself and sometimes, in-person events are just not possible for me. [Online meetings] help in terms of rurality, but also disability accessibility,” Beaumont says.

The feedback QT Fatties has received from those it serves has been positive—but not everyone understands why it needs to exist. Beaumont says that simply means there’s more work to be done.

“There has been general questioning around like, ‘Why do we need a group specifically for fat people?’ Also, people being uncomfortable with the word ‘fat.’ I don’t think that has been a barrier to our events, but that has been things that come up online. Even though we’ve been doing this for four years people are still uncomfortable with just the idea of using the word fat.”

Still, members and organizers of QT Fatties feel grateful for its existence, especially in a politically tense time where we need activism and community more than ever.

Photo by HAPPYRICHSTUDIO via Adobe Stock

When I learned I had precancerous lesions on my cervix and that my doctor was recommending I remove them surgically, my reaction went as follows: One, muted panic. Two, I’m definitely going to die. Three, Wait, what does that even mean?

So I did what anyone in possession of an Internet connection in 2021 would do: I went online to do my own research. The Internet confirmed what my physician had told me: the procedure, called a loop electrosurgical excision procedure, or LEEP, is a common one, in which a heated wire is inserted into the vagina to remove the offending cells.

I also found a host of women complaining of unexpected side effects. One article, in Cosmopolitan, was particularly concerning, full of stories of post-LEEP sexual dysfunction from women who had fully healed, yet who were unable to orgasm, feel pleasure during penetration, or have pain-free sex.

I mentally rehearsed the discussion I’d had with my gynecologist. He hadn’t warned me about any of this, which worried but did not surprise me. He had seemed more concerned with protecting my ability to get pregnant, even though I had repeatedly told him I was uninterested in bearing children. With scant scientific literature available—studies on post-LEEP outcomes were mostly focused on the procedure’s efficacy in preventing cancer, as well as pregnancy outcomes—it felt impossible to assess whether these risks were real. Was I about to subject myself to a procedure that might save my life, but at the cost of one of the things that brought real joy to it?

*

The disconnect between our experiences with medical professionals and what women and people assigned female at birth (AFAB) hear from our peers has been a central concern for feminist health activists for decades. When it comes to understanding what’s going on with our bodies, who can we trust?

For much of the twentieth century, the health-care system overtly treated AFAB people as unable to make decisions about their own bodies. Contraception was not decriminalized in Canada until 1969, and limitations on abortion were struck down even later, in 1988. Birthing people often had to endure labour alone, without partners present, and without the freedom to decide on pain relief options. Many women were ignorant of even the basic anatomical realities of their bodies.

In the 1960s and ’70s, activists dissatisfied with the limitations imposed by a misogynist health-care system, regressive laws regulating their bodies, and chauvinist doctors began to organize. They formed self-help groups, opened community clinics, and ran underground abortion networks. They performed vaginal self-examinations using a speculum, a flashlight, and a mirror.

What became known as the women’s health movement was grounded in a belief in empowering women with access to information about their own bodies and their sexual and reproductive health that was being denied to them by licensed health-care providers. In the U.S., the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective published revolutionary health-education text Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1970. Inspired in part by that text, a Canadian group called Women Healthsharing launched a quarterly magazine, which ran from 1979 to 1993 with a mandate to “take health out of the hands of the experts and return it to our own collective and individual hands.”

“The media landscape for women’s health information and feminist health perspectives in particular was dismal” at the time, says Connie Clement, founding managing editor of Healthsharing and longtime public health activist.

Healthsharing featured a mix of experts and lay writers reporting from across the country. “We always tried to write for lay women and women who had training in health. And I think it was a huge success for us that we had nurses and doctors contributing and reading, and we had women who had no special knowledge,” Clement says.

The subjects of Healthsharing ’s coverage were wide-ranging. In the inaugural issue, collective members Madeline Boscoe and Kathleen McDonnell penned a piece exploring birthing options in and out of the hospital, in response to feelings of “powerlessness, ignorance, and alienation from our bodies and our surroundings” in childbirth. Multiple issues reported on the use of Depo-Provera, a controversial contraceptive with potentially serious side effects. One column crowdsourced health information from readers (“We are trying to find out more about cervical caps in Canada,” read one callout). Other stories, like a piece on the labour conditions of garment workers, looked at the wider social and economic status of women in Canada.

This kind of education was key to both the women’s health movement and to second-wave feminism more broadly, grounded in the belief that knowledge was a precondition for enacting social change. “The whole feminist health movement was trying to change the social context of women’s health, [and] the structural conditions that influence health,” says Clement.

While it may seem like we are lightyears away from people not knowing what their own vulvas look like, as I peruse archival copies of the magazine over 30 years later, I am struck by how many articles overlap with current hot-button topics. The desire to balance “expert” medical opinion with the layperson’s experiences, the critical questioning of controversial pharmaceutical solutions, the attention to broader social, economic, and political conditions: it’s all in those pages, and it can be bittersweet to see how many issues are still relevant today, a testament to how slow progress can be in these contexts, and how easy it can be to roll it back, especially when we forget what has come before us.

*

I came of age in the 2000s, long after the era of the Women Healthsharings and vagina colouring books of women’s lib. I instinctively shied away from the diet-centric, fatphobic content in teen girl magazines. Thankfully for me, there was an entire ecosystem of feminist writing I could turn to online which shared both individual women’s experiences and fact-based reporting on our health. From blogging platforms Tumblr and LiveJournal to linchpin publications Bitch and Jezebel to private and semi-private groups of people with the same issues, for a while it seemed like the Internet could deliver on the promise of creating networks of knowledge in ways that mattered, filling the gaps where traditional media failed.

But by the time I was doing a deep dive on LEEPs, the online landscape had transformed entirely—in no small part because of social media, especially TikTok. The short-video sharing platform has become a major source for health information, especially for young women. In 2024, a survey study in the journal JMIR Infodemiology found a majority of U.S. women between 18 and 29 used TikTok for health information. Users post about vaginismus, birth control, orgasms, squirting, perimenopause, endometriosis, fibroids: I could go on. Some of these videos are created by health professionals, but many AFAB people post in the spirit of helping others through sharing their own experiences.

When I type in “birth control” on TikTok, the results are as follows: a “wellness”-focused woman encouraging natural planning, i.e. tracking your menstrual cycle to understand when you might be ovulating; a self-described nutrition coach listing ways the pill supposedly “robs us of our health;” and a sex educator responding to a question about birth control that doesn’t involve hormones.

In some ways, this knowledge ecosystem seems like an outcrop of the activist efforts of yore, grounded in information-sharing between peers and often using the language of increased bodily autonomy. Topics like hormonal birth control’s effects on the body are sometimes grounded in
legitimate concerns. Although these contraceptives are both considered safe overall and highly effective at preventing pregnancy, rare life-threatening complications can occur. There is research investigating the link between birth control and chronic inflammation that can lead to cardiovascular problems, blood clots, and mood disorders. Meanwhile, for methods like intrauterine devices (IUDs), for example, some report extreme pain during insertion, feeding into concerns that women and AFAB people’s pain is being dismissed by health-care providers.

More problematically, however, discussion online about birth control can quickly veer into right-wing misinformation territory, inflaming fears in an effort to get people to abandon contraceptive use altogether.

And in countries like a post-Roe U.S., where some states are increasingly implementing restrictive abortion laws, the stakes of an unwanted pregnancy can be high, says Dr. Jenny Wu. Wu is a medical resident in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke’s School of Medicine; she studies women’s reproductive health information shared on TikTok.

“It’s a complex conversation to navigate with my patients, when they tell me they don’t want hormonal birth control and they want to do natural family planning in a state where we have limited abortion access,” shares Wu from her home in North Carolina, which in 2023 banned abortions after 12 weeks with limited exceptions. (Both surgical and medication abortion is legal in Canada and free to those with access to territorial or provincial health care.)

Wu says the level of misinformation propagated online about reproductive health is contributing to increased levels of distrust from her patients overall. This climate makes it more difficult for Wu and other doctors to have these conversations about proper gynecological care, but it also can mean people don’t go see her at all, don’t receive proper care, don’t get the contraceptives they need or access to screening tests to detect potentially life-threatening diseases. But mistrust of the health-care system, especially for at-risk populations, is nothing new.

*

Underlying the relatively recent phenomenon of online misinformation is the much longer, checkered history of gynecological medicine. In Canada, abusive medical practices like the forced sterilization of Indigenous women are ongoing. Meanwhile, many AFAB people and racialized people feel their symptoms are routinely downplayed or dismissed by health-care providers. It’s not hard to understand why some people would want to avoid the medical system altogether.

Tracey Lindeman is a longtime Canadian journalist and author of BLEED: Destroying Myths and Misogyny in Endometriosis Care. Endometriosis, in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows elsewhere in the body, is notoriously under-researched, misunderstood, and underdiagnosed, which can lead to years of pain and suffering for those living with the condition.

“Endo is a super lonely disease, because you just feel like no one can really understand you and how much pain you’re in,” Lindeman, who lives with endometriosis, shares. For endo patients, frustrating repeated encounters with the medical system can feel more like gaslighting than care. In BLEED, Lindeman writes about asking her boyfriend to write a letter confirming that they didn’t want children in order for her request for a hysterectomy to be taken seriously. Another woman she speaks to experiences a pelvic exam so rough she files a sexual assault complaint; others still are denied referrals to a specialist or have their requests for pain relief dismissed.

Online groups can be a boon to these patients. There are thriving communities, like Nancy’s Nook Endometriosis Education on Facebook, with roughly 213,000 members, that offer a network of information and crucial support—and, just as importantly, the knowledge that those going through this are not alone.

But health influencers hawking cures of dubious provenance and efficaciousness feed off the need of those who turn to the Internet to self-manage their health. Much of the content paints itself as “natural,” implying it is better than “chemical” remedies. Looking up videos about LEEPs, I immediately stumble upon an account that is selling a course on how to “naturally” clear human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer. Another “plant-based health” account shares a video about how “chemicals” cause endometriosis and that you can heal it without hormonal or surgical intervention. These accounts are selling supplements, creams, and cycle trackers, all ways to supposedly take control of your own health or body.

Many of these solutions are obviously farfetched; others have a “science-y” veneer of plausibility about them. But for those people who have been ignored, traumatized, or abandoned altogether by formalized health care, these options may feel like the only solution.

“[The wellness industrial complex] is capitalizing on desperation,” says Lindeman. “People are desperate for help, they’re desperate for answers, and they’re not getting that help, and they’re not getting those answers the conventional way, and so they become really vulnerable to online influencers and online [gynecologists] who are proposing information that lets them maybe try to manage it themselves.”

Enduring racism and sexism in the health-care sector; traumatic personal experiences when seeking treatment; the explosion of influencers promising to help reclaim power over your own body: these all feed into one another so that AFAB people delay the treatment they need, suffer needlessly, and even die younger. We need ways to circulate accessible, evidence-based information, both from other women and AFAB people and medical professionals, which build momentum to tackle these much larger problems together, instead of isolating us even further.

*

A year after my diagnosis, I sat in a Montreal-area hospital, clad in a medical gown and socks, clutching a small piece of yellow paper. I didn’t feel like I had all the information I needed to make a decision about whether to have the LEEP, so I had scribbled down a list of questions for my doctor.

But I was called into the OR with no chance to speak to the doctor beforehand. Instead, I was ushered onto the operating table. As he applied local anesthetic to my cervix and inserted the wire into my vaginal canal, I asked him: “So… should I be worried about any sexual side effects?”

“No, no, I have never heard of this,” he replied.

With the loop still inside me, he rattled off what to expect post-surgery. In a daze, I heard the words “heavy bleeding.” “So a lot of bleeding afterwards is normal?” I asked. “No! Go to the ER if you start bleeding,” he repeated.

The whole thing was over in a matter of minutes. I stumbled off, the yellow paper crumpled and unused.

For a long time after the procedure, I felt confused and irritated at myself for not being a better self-advocate. I could have refused to undergo the procedure if I wasn’t satisfied with the level of information I had been provided. Why hadn’t I been able to say what was on my mind?

Sharing my story helped, because I started to realize just how common LEEPs were. It helped assuage my fears that I was necessarily on the road to cervical cancer. Reading accounts like those from Lindeman, who experiences doctor anxiety after a lifetime of poor medical encounters, helped reassure me that I wasn’t alone.

Is sharing stories online enough to take control of our health? In some ways, yes. The Internet has become a lifeline for many Americans seeking medication abortions. Lindeman says journalists pay attention to what is being said online and amplify concerns to a wider audience.

Meanwhile, after finding that the majority of videos about IUDs on TikTok mentioned pain, Wu shifted the way she practices: “I [now] offer patients something for pain before any IUD placement and really before any gynecological procedure.” In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States’ public health agency, even updated its recommendations for IUD insertions to include discussions of pain management.

And in 2023, a year after my own LEEP, a study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine was published exploring healthcare providers’ limited knowledge of post-LEEP sexual dysfunction and the resources patients used to cope—potentially the first ever study to look at the difference in patient and health-care provider perspectives when it comes to LEEP treatment. It found that there was “misalignment” between the two and recommended not only further research into sexual dysfunction symptoms, but also better education and training for providers, and better support for patients who do have negative outcomes.

These are heartening indications that when you share your health experiences, people are listening. The question remains: how do we translate these types of discussions into improving health outcomes for all AFAB people—especially when research into health problems that affect us is still underfunded?

It starts with finding ways to pair networked knowledge with collective action, because the power of social media is ultimately limited. “It’s the personalization of systemic problems,” points out Lindeman. “[You’re] continuing to focus on what you can do as an individual, instead of attacking the systems that are responsible for such a deficit in care.”

Social media may give us the reassuring impression of solidarity. In reality, it is atomizing, incentivizing a competitive attention economy; a billion voices speaking over, but not always to, one another. The collectives of the women’s health movement knew that to build power, you must do it together, through communities of care.

Perhaps we have to start by relearning that lesson–even if it means tearing ourselves away from our phones.

Photo by Natilyn Photography

I am admittedly a formerly pretentious, insecure hater of all things popular, pastel, and mainstream. As a teenager I forced myself to sit down and read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, making long lists of Russian names, trying to keep complex plots straight that were honestly above my paygrade. Though I still think Anna Karenina is a deeply beautiful and sad story that any Ottessa Moshfegh fan would like, I clung to a highly curated, highbrow air that was intertwined with my own internalized misogyny and white supremacy. Me? Listen to pop music? Never. I only listened to indie music I unearthed from the depths of MySpace.

I dedicated myself to becoming “not like the other girls,” or more accurately, “not how I constructed the other girls to be.” I threw myself into what I saw as alternatives: teenage goth Sam with a dyed black pixie cut and eyeliner drawn down to the tops of my cheeks; emo Sam with layered teased hair and off-brand slip-on Vans; pretentious Sam reading Russian literature; and indie-music Sam, worshiping at the altar of the manic pixies. Even into my twenties and my first tastes of adulthood, I threw myself into various alt scenes, making sure my baby bangs were blunt and my distaste for “normies” even blunter. No matter where I landed on the alt spectrum, there were still women I compared myself to, both inside my circles and out. Yet regardless of what armour I was trying to encase myself in, I was wholly in a competition not against other women and girls, but against myself.

Throughout every phase, each carefully curated taste, I found genuine interests. I love getting lost in books; the screamo and emo music of the early aughts is my nostalgic homecalling; I made lifelong friends through arts and music scenes. Through all of this, I never let myself love what I actually love, because deep down I was too scared that if I stepped one toe outside of my imagined line, the fragile house of cards I had built for myself would topple to the ground and leave my true form revealed: a shy, chubby 12-year-old in slacks and a Walmart blouse.

This is not without nuance, and within my own journey there are multiple intersections of class, race, and gender privilege and oppression I both hold and face. Womanhood, in all its complexities, is constructed in ephemera and is a varied experience across communities. I, in my lived experience as a fair-skinned, cisgender Métis woman from rural Northern B.C., performed with the best of them in a theatre of public opinion.

As growing parts of our lives are lived through social media, we are all in some sort of death-knell competition where obsession with liking the right thing is the law and we are all our own jury and executioner. To put it simply: we love to hate. Being a hater is a tongue-in-cheek, relatable identity we slip into that provides us with shallow boundaries, shallow connections, and the idea of control in a world that feels like it’s slipping into chaos. Why rally against capitalism, colonialism, and crumbling Western democracy when we can all rally against Bethany and her ivory Stanley cup? Or point fingers at long lines of eager consumers lining up outside Target to buy the newest Stanley collab? We are all implicated under a crumbling colonial and capitalist empire, and it’s easier to point fingers at others than to look in our own backyards.

Now, before anyone gets the idea that I’m here to defend the harbingers of Christian Girl Autumn with their perfect Utah curl: I’m not. We need to challenge our consumption habits and the ways in which we are all media trained to think “me good, them bad.” Social media has given us a new gateway into fast-moving microtrends that tell us “x is out and y is in” on what feels like a near-weekly basis. Just as fast as the rise of the soft girls, we saw their downfall and the rise of the mob-wife aesthetic, which just happened to coincide with the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos. This is the gears of late-stage capitalism telling us to consume more.

Sure, influencers are showing us unobtainable lifestyles built on consumption, but these are small symptoms of much larger issues of systemic capitalism and hungry empire. It’s easier to look at individuals and see them as the problem than it is to look at the larger structures of oppression, the ways in which we are harmed, and the ways in which we harm.

Coastal grandma, vanilla girl, mob wife, and whatever new viral trend will pop up in the next five to 10 business days all suffer from the same suffocating delicate whiteness that erases the aesthetic and political history of many of these trends. Much of what is “new” today was created within Black and racialized communities. Think Hailey Bieber’s “brownie-glazed lips.” If you grew up around Black and brown women in the 1990s, you recognized this trend instantly. Yet, when these trends were stewarded by racialized people well before the rise of TikTok, they were met with racist backlash. Now, heralded by a new generation of young white women, they are trendy, and cosmetic colours better suited for deeper skin tones— which are already less available— are selling out as a result.

Critique is not hate. None of us are above critique, but we are all socially indoctrinated into thinking that we are better than one another based on the things we enjoy. Boycotting, speaking truth to ignored histories, and fighting against systemic injustices is not being a hater.

Lately, I’ve been trying to ask myself two questions before I throw myself into discourse:

Do I hate this thing everyone loves because I have solid critique or reason, or is it because I am projecting my anger and frustration on something innocuous?

If I hate it because I just don’t like it, do I need to share this publicly?

It feels like we’re in an era where individualist pressure to be “right” surpasses the need to organize along collective lines. Nothing we do is without critique, without us having to live our values, and identify where we need to be accountable. But what if we did this work without also fighting in stan death matches, defending multimillionaire celebrities who are never held to the same standards we hold each other to?

Recently, I’ve started letting myself openly love and enjoy the things I loved in secret: cheesy romance novels, action movies (ask me about the Fast & Furious franchise), all the indie folk you can imagine, and yes, I have a lovely teal Stanley cup. I’ve shed my near-pathological need to try to force myself to only read whatever is being lauded as The Literature of the season, apologize anytime I listen to music out loud insisting it’s only a guilty pleasure, or sit through long arty films that bore me to tears. It’s not that I don’t enjoy these things, but I’m getting far too old and far too exhausted to try and like the right things, to cultivate my personality around them.

If I’m being completely honest, in the last couple of years I’ve been relearning who I am and just letting my interests and desires lead my process. Who knew that I’d end up being a former snob now revelling in romantasy books about fairies and getting too caught up in reality TV dating competitions? Maybe it’s basic, laughed at by people who think they’re better because of the media and art they consume, but I’m learning how to have fun again. And yes, Titanic is my favourite movie, and I have an annual, nostalgia-fueled Twilight rewatch every year. When I was younger, I used to make jokes about basic girls, but deep down, I was a basic bitch with a yearning heart.

This is me officially retiring my hater hat. I simply cannot waste any more energy on what water bottle Midwest momfluencers are using. Sure, there are things I see and need to make jokes about, but I’ve found my people I can do that with—privately.

We are watching untold horrors unfold: genocide, climate collapse, the rise of fascism, and ever-increasing instability. If reading smut and drinking from a fancy water bottle gets you through the day, I love that for you. But let’s be accountable to each other so neither of us get lost in the hypocrisy of capitalism and white supremacy. Let’s hold ourselves to the same standards we hold each other to.

Photo courtesy Kid’s Stuff [Trucs d’enfants]

Gender-neutral clothing is a growing trend in Canadian fashion, and one that is trickling down to the wardrobes of the youngest Canadians.

From chains such as La Tuque, Quebec’s Aubainerie, to small businesses such as Vancouver’s Pley Clothes, options for parents looking to build their children a genderless closet are growing across the country. Brands appear to be thriving in Canada’s larger cities and fashion hubs, including Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.

Ideas of gendered children’s clothing have been evolving since the 19th century, when pastel colours for children came into fashion. Some historians say the idea of “pink for girls, blue for boys” only fully solidified itself in the public sphere in the 1940s.

Now, it seems these old ideals of gendered colours are being given up in favour of attitudes toward clothing that allow for self-expression in any colour or style, regardless of gender.

The industry is still in its early stages and its numbers can fluctuate due to self-reporting among other factors. While there is not much information available about the value of the market in Canada, industry projections see the global market for genderless clothing reaching a worth of $3.2 billion (U.S.) by 2028. Even A-list celebrities such as Megan Fox and Zoe Saldaña are raising their children to wear what they want, without gender stereotypes.

“Colour, clothing, style—everything can be gender neutral. It’s really up to us as adults to see it differently,” says Mary-Jo Dorval, the designer behind the Montreal-based gender- neutral kids’ clothing line, Trucs d’enfants. “By not labelling my clothes it makes it easier for consumers to see it like that as well.”

Dorval began her business producing alternatives to the highly gendered clothing of the fast-fashion industry seven years ago. She said she was inspired by her friend’s difficulties in finding sustainable, locally made genderless clothing for their children. Her website is chock-full of orange, purple and green shirts, pants and overalls. Most items are made from a cotton or bamboo-modal blend, and are modelled by children of all ages displaying the clothes’ stretch and fit as they play or nap.

“I really wanted to break this ‘black- grey-beige’ idea we have of gender- neutral clothing,” Dorval adds. By giving children genderless clothing, Dorval says, she provides them with the option to choose how to express themselves.

This rings true for Markus Harwood- Jones, a YA author and PhD candidate in gender studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He says the decision to raise and dress his child, River, in a gender-open way was an easy one. He says he wants his child to be able to express themself now, and feel comfortable with their gender expression as they grow up, whoever they grow up to be.

“When they get older, if River is really butch, or really femme, or whatever, we want to just make sure that they have pictures that feel like, ‘oh, that’s me,’” Harwood-Jones says. His family often uses an analogy referencing starting babies on solid foods. “You don’t start your kid on solid foods on day one,” Harwood- Jones says. They want River to express their fashion sense as soon as they are developmentally ready for it, and provide River a wardrobe that helps them do just that.

Harwood-Jones adds that children show their preferences earlier than many would think. When River was six months old, Harwood-Jones, his husband and their co-parent would hold up onesies on the changing table so River could choose what they wanted to wear.

Now, at almost two years old, River takes the lead on shopping excursions, asking for purple dresses and tutus. Harwood-Jones says his family often thrifts clothing to keep costs low, but when they do buy new, they lean toward small businesses that are queer owned or gender neutral.

Dorval believes small businesses will continue to bear the torch of clothing designed for everyone once the mainstream sheen wears off. However, if parents want to ignore gender labels in big-box stores, she says they should go for it.

“You can buy a princess skirt for your little boy,” she says. “It doesn’t matter.”

Photo by IMAGINIMA

“It was just something to do…like getting your hair braided,” says Kayowe Mune, describing the mindset held by many communities about female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C).

Mune, now 42, is a content creator based in Toronto and was cut when she was six years old, as part of what’s known as vacation cutting, which often happens during the summer when school is out. Mune was born in Somalia and was living in Saudi Arabia with her parents at the time. While spending the summer at her grandmother’s house back in Somalia, Mune was taken to a hospital to be cut. Since her cousins were already going, her grandmother added Mune to the group, accompanied by her aunt.

“It wasn’t like the village lady…shrouded in scars came with a…razor,” says Mune. She explains that she was taken to a “really nice” hospital, where a lineup of other girls also sat waiting for their turn. While the hospital may have been welcoming, the procedure was done without anesthesia.

“I remember sitting outside waiting for [my] turn, and that part was pretty scary because you can hear them screaming,” Mune says. In the days that followed, all that Mune recalls is feeling dissociated from her body.

A tradition in many African cultures, FGM/C is viewed as a way to protect a girl’s chastity and ensure that she gets a good husband, explains Mune. Older generations often don’t see anything wrong with the practice and it’s frequently equated to male circumcision, which isn’t comparable at all, according to Giselle Portenier, co-chair of the End FGM Canada Network. Portenier, who is also a journalist, learned about the abuse of women’s human rights through her documentary work. She co-founded the End FGM Canada Network after realizing how big and under-reported an issue this is in Canada. Portenier explains that the equivalent of this kind of genital mutilation/cutting performed on males would consist of cutting off the head of their penis.

“There is no comparison,” she says.

*

Female genital mutilation/cutting is classified into four types, per the World Health Organization. Type I, also known as a clitoredectomy, involves the partial or total removal of the visible part of the clitoris and/or the prepuce/ clitoral hood, which is a fold of skin surrounding the clitoris. Type II, also known as an excision, is the partial or total removal of the visible part of the clitoris and the labia minora, the inner folds of the vulva, with or without the removal of the labia majora, the outer folds of the skin of the vulva. Type III, also known as infibulation, involves the narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal. The seal is formed by cutting and repositioning the labia minora, or labia majora, sometimes through stitching, with or without removal of the clitoral prepuce/clitoral hood and glans. Type IV includes all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, such as pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterizing the genital area.

FGM/C is not something that affects only those in African countries. While there’s no official study detailing the prevalence of FGM/C in Canada, vacation cutting affects survivors living in Western countries, too. It is practiced and/or affects those living in 92 countries across every continent but Antarctica, and this number is only growing as more survivors are discovered.

Often, girls who are born in Canada are taken to their parents’ home country, usually in African nations such as Somalia or Egypt, to be cut and then brought back home to Canada. In other cases, such as Mune’s, girls immigrate to Canada with their families having already experienced FGM/C. This happens despite the fact that female genital mutilation has been identified as a form of aggravated assault in Canada’s Criminal Code since 1997, a move the Department of Justice says was made in keeping with Canada’s commitment to support the 1993 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the 1995 Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women. These recognized that violence against women, including FGM/C, violates their human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Still, according to Portenier, there are over 100,000 survivors of FGM/C in Canada and thousands of girls at risk. This figure is based on End FGM Canada’s analysis of immigration from 29 FGM/C practicing countries in the Middle East and Africa as reported in the 2011 Canadian Census. Yet, “there [is little support] for them in Canada, largely because there is a culture of silence and silencing about this issue here,” says Portenier.

The silence is often due to a fear of causing offence around other people’s traditions. In May 2023, a daycare worker alleged that a two-year-old child’s genitals had been mutilated and alerted Quebec’s youth protection services, which reportedly replied that the case was too delicate for the agency to handle. (The child was later examined by a doctor, and the case has since been declared unfounded.) In response to This Magazine, Quebec’s Human Rights Commission refused to comment as this case involved a minor.

Canada is also the only Western country, besides New Zealand, lacking in official statistics on FGM/C, according to a 2020 report by Equality Now, a human rights association dedicated to the welfare of women and girls. “Efforts to get statistics and be [funded] by the Canadian government on statistical analyses have failed on several occasions,” says Portenier. While the government has attempted to calculate estimates, their most recent September 2023 report still states that “the results should not be interpreted as official estimates of FGM/C in Canada.”

Despite the failure of the federal government, last year Alberta was the first and only province to date to pass a bill strengthening existing laws that ban female genital mutilation in the province. The bill states that health professionals who practice or facilitate FGM/C in the province will be removed from practice if convicted. Additionally, those convicted in other jurisdictions will not be permitted to practice in Alberta.

When asked how things can be improved for survivors in Canada and those who are sent for vacation cutting, Women and Gender Equality Canada stated that they strongly condemn FGM/C and under the federal Gender- Based Violence Strategy they “provide funding to various community-based initiatives that address FGM/C nationally” and will “continue to work together with [their] provincial and territorial counterparts as well as with academics and service providers to ensure a multidisciplinary approach so that impacted women and girls have access to culturally safe services.”

While there are federal as well as provincial plans in place to address FGM/C, not a single prosecution has occurred since the 1997 criminalization of FGM/C in Canada. According to Global News, a leaked border services report in 2017 also showed that FGM/C practitioners were entering Canada to carry out the procedure. The lack of prosecutions in Canada come as a shock when in comparison, the U.S., the U.K., France, and Australia have all prosecuted cases of FGM/C.

*

Since FGM/C is generally performed without anesthesia, the first immediate side effect is the intense pain. Bleeding occurs and scar tissue forms over time in most cases of cutting. Depending on the type, menstruating and urinating can be difficult and cause pain, as can childbirth and intercourse. Female sexual pleasure is hardly taken into consideration, but this is also compromised.

Depression, PTSD, and anxiety are just a few of the psychological effects of FGM/C. Others include not being able to do things a child normally does, recalls Mune. “When you’re cut, they don’t want you to learn how to ride a bike because you can open up your stitches.” Sports were out of the question for girls, but Mune was able to rebel when she moved to Toronto and signed up for her school’s athletics program.

While immigrating to Canada helped Mune escape some of the cultural restrictions imposed on girls, she and many other survivors faced, and continue to face, a whole other set of challenges here.

“I would say white Canadian doctors are not educated, and a lot of them don’t care, especially the males,” says Mune, speaking about her experience with the Canadian health-care system. Mune has found compassionate care with doctors who are primarily women of colour, but other challenges persist. With staff shortages, difficulty in getting appointments, and medical professionals’ generally busy schedules, awareness and empathy have been hard to come by for Mune.

Over time Mune has gotten better at advocating for herself, but she wishes there was a way for doctors and gynecologists to know that they are seeing a survivor of FGM before they enter the examination room. “I think… it should be highlighted, like every [appointment] that this person is a survivor of genital mutilation…before [the healthcare provider] sees [the patient],” says Mune.

Organizations like End FGM Canada are working to create more awareness around the practice in Canada. Initiatives include educational modules designed for health-care professionals and child-protection workers. A special module for teachers is set to release in November 2023. They also created “Miss Klitty,” a campaign that promotes education about the clitoris. In the vast majority of cases of FGM/C, the clitoris is harmed. This is often due to the belief held by many practicing cultures that the clitoris is evil, explains Portenier. Thus, “Miss Klitty” was created as a way to demystify the clitoris and get people talking.

One option for those who have experienced FGM/C is reconstructive surgery. Dr. Angela Deane, an obstetrician/gynecologist at North York General Hospital and the University of Toronto, focuses on clitoral reconstruction. Deane sees up to five patients per month for consultations regarding potential treatments. She explains that in some types of cutting the clitoral glans is removed, which is the very visible tip on the vulva.

“What we can do is release more clitoral tissue from beneath all that and bring that forward to the outside. And having that new clitoral tissue on the outside is like a creation of a new gland,” says Deane. This new gland can then offer more sensation. Surgery can also include removal of a cyst or scar tissue, as well as defibulation. Depending on the impacts of FGM/C, an individualized care plan is recommended which can be non-surgical and include medications or therapy to address pain or scar tissue. Often, recommendations also include seeking mental health support, sex therapy, and physiotherapy.

Mune says one step forward is to make therapy or counselling free of cost for survivors. “It used to be hard for me… when I was younger to afford [therapy]… and I knew I needed it,” she says.

Mune also emphasizes the importance of education and a present father in a young girl’s life. Her parents were unaware of her being cut and they never would have supported it had they known. Even today, she knows Somalian families where daughters with present fathers have never heard of FGM/C, while other families send their daughters to be cut without the father’s knowledge. That’s not to say the women and other men of the families are deliberately trying to hurt their daughters, Mune underlines. “They’re not monsters…they’re doing this out of love…It’s just an old, very ancient procedure that needs to go away, and it just won’t go away.”

Anecdotal statements from Mune, other survivors and wider diaspora communities suggest that FGM/C is still a problem and while global efforts from the United Nations have been helpful, change has been slow due to its secretive nature. What sets Canada apart from other Western countries is the lack of statistics on FGM/C and its implications here.

In order to prevent vacation cutting in Canada, a first step would be to fund a project on obtaining proper statistics. Efforts at all levels of government also need to be placed on genuinely communicating with members of communities and working together to eradicate this practice from Canada rather than being afraid of offending people.

Providing coverage for reconstructive surgery under provincial health policies would also help. In Ontario, for example, coverage varies depending on a person’s needs, and clitoral reconstruction is not fully funded. Finally, law enforcement and the legal system also need to work on prosecuting cases of FGM/C, as done by most other Western countries. Canada’s culture of silence can no longer afford to continue to perpetuate this abuse.

The Scarlette Ibis, wearing burgundy curls, a red leather corset, and matching heels, strode across the pub floor to the buoyant electro beat of Kim Petras’s “Slut Pop.” She briefly disappeared as she hit the floor in a confident roll. If she wobbled slightly on the rebound, the crowd only cheered harder. Shockingly, the February 2023 show, at Vancouver’s University of British Columbia (UBC) campus, was The Scarlette Ibis’s drag debut—it seemed like she’d been doing this forever.

Cheers from one table rose above the rest. They were from members of UBC’s Trans Coalition, a new group campaigning to add gender-affirming care to UBC’s student health-care plan. The Scarlette Ibis, also known as Oliver McDonald, is one of the coalition’s most outspoken organizers. McDonald is transmasc, two-spirit and Cree from Peguis First Nation in Treaty 1—all of which shape his drag and advocacy.

The coalition formed because UBC’s student health-care plan did not include trans health care. Paying out of pocket for hormones, surgery, and other treatments was a staggering burden for many trans students already struggling under the rising costs of living. “People’s lives are at risk, including my own,” McDonald said in an address to the UBC student council in February.

A month after the show, the coalition succeeded: UBC will now insure trans health care. Drag performers—both in and out of makeup—were a vital force for advocacy and queer joy during a tense campaign.

Gender-affirming care can be an issue of life and death. A 2020 U.S. study of 20,619 trans adults found that of those, 3,494 had wanted pubertal suppression at some point in their lives. Amongst that segment of the population, those who had received puberty blockers were 15 percent less likely to consider suicide than those who hadn’t.

But council members and student executives had reservations. UBC’s student insurance plan is financially strained, and adding gender-affirming care to the plan would require an $8 increase in student fees. Ultimately, the student body voted to raise their health fees to add gender-affirming care to the insurance plan. “I hope that with this win it lets other activist groups … see that it is possible,” McDonald says.

UBC’s gender-affirming care campaign represents just one facet of a bigger fight for trans rights occurring across the continent. Trans health care in Canada is notoriously underfunded and inaccessible, and transphobic discrimination is on the rise. Last year, protestors harassed over 15 drag queen story hours across Canada.

Although McDonald is new to drag, he has always been a performer, and he used to sing in choir. That changed when he medically transitioned. “Testosterone changed my voice, so I can’t sing like I could before,” he says. “It pushed me out of my comfort zone.” Lip syncing to femme-fronted anthems has been one workaround.

“[The Scarlette Ibis] is about expressing that fun, very feminine persona which, as a transmasc person, it’s not always easy to express,” McDonald says.

The Scarlette Ibis was born when McDonald was a volunteer at the Vancouver Aquarium. As a self-described biology nerd, he felt a special resonance with scarlet ibises—a vibrant red-orange bird related to flamingos. “That’s me in every way—the drama, the poofiness, the colour … they also love shrimp,” he says.

The Scarlette Ibis is not the only alter ego McDonald has up his sleeve. King Colin Izer is McDonald’s latest drag persona, intended to challenge settler Canadian masculinity by laughing at it.

King Colin Izer looks like moose-patterned boxer shorts, red flannel and miniature Canadian flag props waved with a sinister swagger. Before he struts onto the floor, he breaks character to tell audiences “not to be afraid to boo.”

McDonald described this new act, which he performed for the first time at the end of March, as a way to process and play with “mixed confusion” as a light-skinned person with Cree and settler ancestry.

“I want to have a look that’s iconically Canadian, that calls back to this very white working-class … thing,” McDonald says. “People who have a lot of misconceptions about Indigenous people—I really love playing with that.”

He also plans to do more performances that represent his Cree culture. McDonald emphasizes that his drag career builds off of the Indigenous and two-spirit drag performers who came before him and created a thriving scene in Vancouver. He hopes to pay it forward through organizing drag events to platform other Indigenous drag performers, with the principle of ensuring that all get paid equitably for their work.

“Performing is really fun and I love it, but the more important thing is [to make sure] that other Indigenous people can show their stuff,” he said.

Fashion spaces have long excluded people who aren’t straight, white, cisgender, able-bodied men. But for many disabled folks, the field also represents opportunity—a place where it’s possible to crip, or challenge through a disability justice lens, dominant understandings of disability and gender.

A new project called Cripping Masculinity explores how disabled men and masculine people build and reimagine their identities through fashion. The project team, which consists of researchers from Toronto Metropolitan University, the University of Alberta, and Parsons School of Design in New York, invited disabled folks to participate in interviews about clothing, outfit creation workshops and a fashion exhibition in Toronto earlier this spring. By interpreting participants’ everyday experiences of dressing as a form of worldbuilding, the project centres the creativity and wisdom of disabled folks as they use fashion to create the communities they want to see.

Tobin Ng caught up with three Cripping Masculinity participants—Sean Lee, Pree Rehal and CX—about notions of masculinity, what a crip utopia might look like, and more.

TOBIN NG: What does cripping the idea of masculinity mean to you?

SEAN LEE: As somebody who grew up visibly disabled and came into their queerness, thinking about crip as a reclaimed term that centres disability made me reevaluate my relationship with my body and my masculinity. Fashion played a big part in how I thought about the ways my body does or doesn’t conform to the ideals and standards that are often emphasized in queer communities, specifically in mainstream gay media. Because I’m queer, disabled and racialized, there are many ways in which my body doesn’t get represented in mainstream fashion.

I really resonate with the way queer and crip folks hack their fashion. They found a way to embrace fashion and own the stares that people give to bodies that don’t conform. I think of it as a form of crip drag or casual guerilla activism. It’s a way to question how bodily difference is taken, accepted or rejected by the mainstream.

PREE REHAL: Gender is fake, but our socially constructed ideas of masculinity are limited to a very small set of characteristics, especially in the West. Being big and strong and able-bodied is really central to what that looks like. So challenging masculinity is inherently tied to transness and gender diversity. It’s being our authentic selves, and really breaking away from white supremacist ideas of how we’re supposed to look and act.

For me, it’s also really connected to my inner child. What did I want to wear when I was being told what I had to wear? What did I wish I had when I didn’t have a concept of money, or when I wasn’t able to buy things for myself ?

CX: I’m excited by the concept of cripping masculinity. I love fashion, l love clothes, and I love expressing myself as a crip masculine person. Crip masculinity really speaks to my femme guy style and the ways in which being a femme, transgender non-binary, disabled guy can disrupt and challenge masculinity.

When it comes to fashion, it’s my way of not giving a fuck. It’s about protecting my body, making my body feel well in navigating the world.

TN: What does cripping masculinity look like in your everyday dress?

CX: I’ve started wearing wigs and exploring makeup. I love wearing lots of colour, and that doesn’t feel binary to me—it doesn’t feel masculine or feminine, it feels celebratory. It feels like an expression of myself as a crip person, as a queer person, and as an artist.

As someone who’s read, and sometimes mistreated, as a queer crip guy in the world, I use fashion as a protective force and as a way to express my resilience and fabulousness.

PR: I crip masculinity through the simple act of being. As someone who is autistic, my concept of gender is very loose. I don’t really understand the value of that kind of categorization for myself, and it’s the same thing with sexuality. I self-identify as being trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, agender, a demiboy—my experiences fall into a lot of different things under the trans umbrella. So anything I do is cripping masculinity, because I’m crip, disabled and transmasc. A lot of times, it looks like cargo pants and sweatsuits, but it’s still that when I’m wearing a tank top and if I decide to wear a dress. It’s inherently anything that I wear.

SL: It changes all the time, and I think that’s part of it—freedom to do what you want. For me, it started off as a way of rejecting the ways in which men’s fashion was so built around a particular type of body. As an artist and curator, I learned about things like crip aesthetics and disability aesthetics, and how they shifted our understanding of perfection and beauty. My fashion sensibility centres around embracing the disruption that disability can bring into a space, and thinking about difference as a generative place to question what we think about aesthetics. There’s so much value in finding different ways of expressing things like gender and sexuality and a crip sensibility.

Long ago, I was wearing a lot of flexible clothing and dresses. Instead of trying to conform the body to a certain ideal, those shapes work with the body, emphasizing aspects of difference in ways that could be interesting and beautiful, or my version of beautiful. As a disabled person, my back curves, my shoulders aren’t even and I’m quite short. A piece of clothing worn by a six-foot model walking down a runway is going to look very different on me. But rather than thinking about clothing as being suited for one particular body, I’ve been trying to see how clothing can adapt to different bodies.

TN: What connections do you see between queer and crip identities?

PR: Something that stood out to me from the Cripping Masculinity project was a conversation I had with a researcher about queer flagging. Back in the day, when homosexuality wasn’t as accepted as it is now, folks would use bandanas or handkerchiefs in specific colours to subtly let others know about their sexualities and preferred positions, and if they were interested in cruising. Today, when you see someone with a carabiner on their belt, you’re like, ‘Oh, maybe they’re queer?’ or ‘That’s somebody who’s a bit fruity.’

With disability, I think there’s a similar kind of signalling we do with our community members to be like, ‘I’m one of you, we’re the same.’ It comes up when you see someone with a cane, or when you hear someone speak and you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s something dyslexic about that,’ or ‘That feels really similar to the way that I talk, think or identify.’ If I see someone at a workshop and they’re using a heating pad, it gives me the idea that they may also experience chronic pain or fibromyalgia. I’m going to go sit with that person as opposed to everyone else that’s sitting upright or in cliques.

SL: For me, crip and queer identity are inherently linked. There’s a disability activist named Mia Mingus who talks about how ableism has to be embedded in our analysis of oppressions, because it upholds the other ways oppression is articulated. An ableist society imagines only one type of body, creating a mythical norm against which other bodies are judged. That norm provides a foundation for other forms of oppression. For example, ableism is used to justify heterosexism by casting queer bodies as undesirable. Recognizing this connection between disability and queerness can help us reject narratives around masculinity and other things we’ve been taught.

CX: My queerness relates to an openness in my body, my sexuality, my gender, and my artistic practice. I enjoy being around the uniqueness of other people in queer, crip communities. It supports how I am. I gain energy and nourishment from uniqueness, and I learn so much.

In that way queer and crip have similarities. My queerness, my gender, my disability are interrelated. As an artist, the art in me is informed by my queerness and my crip identities all at once.

TN: What does a crip utopia look like to you?

CX: I have lots of fantasies of a crip utopia!

A crip utopia for me is visionary, is fantastical. As a visual person with cognitive disabilities, bright colours help me navigate life. Things would be brighter, more colourful, and less boxy. There would be lots of graffiti and colours and animals. Instead of cars everywhere, we would see more wheelchairs and bicycles. Different ways of moving around, different choices.

Our bodies would be celebrated, not defined by or against those who are able-bodied and minded. Disabled people would make greater decisions about where and how we live, and be prioritized in how the world is designed. The people leading society would be disabled, creating crip- friendly places to exist in everyday life—from grocery stores, to living spaces, to streets.

We would all have things to offer. We could cocreate things that are fabulous and wonderful. We could acknowledge our history of being hurt. We wouldn’t be afraid of each other.

I feel love and strength being around people with disabilities. It wouldn’t be such a big deal to be disabled. We wouldn’t only be in communities with other people like us, but we wouldn’t have to hide. Those with and without disabilities would feel empowered to take a lead. We’d be open to mingling with each other. We would be interdependent, naturally. We would offer each other help and support and care without question.

My crip utopia feels very outside of the world we live in right now, which is so directed by a capitalist mindset. This isn’t accessible for crip communities. But anything is possible within my realm of a crip utopia. It’s all about more people being free.

PR: I feel like a crip utopia would look like those memes about artists wanting to go live in a forest or on a farm with their 10 friends. But in reality, when I’ve had the privilege of going on trips with some of my disabled and chronically ill family, something I’ve noticed is that we actually do need a lot of other kinds of considerations and support. So I don’t think living out on a farm would be the best thing for us, because a lot of us can’t really do that kind of labour. But I think some kind of community living that is independent but also interdependent, and doesn’t shut us away from reality would be ideal. I know that crip utopia would definitely be centred around community relations, and it would be led by the most marginalized in our community, and definitely by Black and Indigenous disabled folks.

SL: I love the idea of utopias, because they’re sites of possibility. There’s a queer theorist named José Esteban Muñoz who talked about the idea of queerness as a horizon. It’s this notion that as long as heteronormativity is present, queerness is an ideality. We may never fully be queer, but we can feel this warm illumination of queerness on the horizon. I really think about that application as a crip horizon—elsewhere and elsewhen, as Muñoz would say, in which disability is not only imagined, but embraced and dwelled in.

It’s a complicated horizon because there’s a diversity of disabled folks. There’s so many different ways of thinking about access and how those identities and lived experiences come together with a tenuous throughline to create a whole disability culture. The question is, what’s the culture that can be expressed in the future? The horizon represents a place that we don’t fully know or understand, but one where we can fully be ourselves. And fashion plays such an important part in imagining what that’s like.

We as disabled folks are unruly and noncompliant. We don’t fit into a lot of the structures that have been imagined for only one type of person, that state you have to behave and act in certain ways in order to be part of society. But the idea of a horizon rejects the story of disability as having no place in the future. We’re never going to be at the horizon, just as we’ll never be ‘fully accessible.’ But we’re always moving toward it.

Last spring, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and six other suited-up politicians held a press conference announcing a long-awaited change to Canada’s blood donation system. Given that the change they were making—eliminating the blood donor screening question that deferred men who’d had sex with other men in the last three months—was really a matter of a few words, six people trading places at the microphone for nearly half an hour may have seemed like overkill. Those words, though, had both a long history and far-reaching implications. Forty-three years prior, they had emerged in their first iteration as a lifetime ban on blood donations from “men who have sex with men” or, in its most reductive but more common phrasing, “MSM.” The Canadian Red Cross, which was responsible for the blood supply at the time, imposed the ban when fears around the newly discovered HIV, which was spreading rapidly in Canada, were colliding with pre-existing stigmas. While the myth of HIV as a ”gay disease” had been debunked by then, the “blood ban” remained in place when Canadian Blood Services (CBS) took over Canada’s donation system in 1998.

Over the years, many queer activists spoke against the policy, saying it was unscientific and blatantly targeted the queer community. Students at universities across the country played a major role, writing letters and petitions and protesting Héma-Québec blood drives, and 2SLGBTQ+ organizations called for CBS to re-evaluate. In 2013, CBS changed the policy to a five-year ban. In 2016, Christopher Karas, a gay man, brought a complaint about the policy before the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Eventually, the ban was lowered to one year, and then three months.

Now, finally, the question that had historically excluded many gay and bisexual men, as well as trans women, would be replaced with a set of gender-neutral questions about sexual behaviour. It was Seamus O’Regan, Canada’s minister of labour, who described the change in the most grandiose terms. “Now each of us are afforded the benefit of the doubt,” he said, “and each of us must answer to the same questions.”

The move to gender-neutral questioning around sexual behaviour is inarguably a significant milestone. However, a closer examination of CBS’s donation policies suggests that O’Regan’s sweeping declaration of equality is premature. Beyond lingering issues with how current sexual behaviour screening affects queer people, it would be a mistake to think that the removal of a single question could fundamentally change a system that has historically excluded the most marginalized within the queer community. Stepping back from the MSM question, it becomes clear that CBS needs to continue addressing how its past and present policies have stigmatized not just gay and bisexual men, but trans people, Black queer people, and 2SLGBTQ+ sex workers. Until that happens, no ban will have been lifted.

What was announced on that day in April, and went into effect in September, was the removal of one line of questioning from CBS’s blood donor screening questionnaire, and the addition of a series of replacement questions. A change like this can only happen when CBS applies to its regulator, Health Canada, and gets their approval. However, CBS must initiate and gather the required research to support any changes—so while Health Canada gets the final say, CBS sets the agenda. After Health Canada approved the change, all potential donors, regardless of their gender, are now asked if they’ve had new or multiple sexual partners in the last three months and then, if yes, whether they’ve had anal sex in that period. If they answer yes to that, they are ineligible to donate. Health Canada and the Canadian government both framed it as a historic move away from singling out the queer community.

On the surface, this policy no longer excludes gay and bisexual men. However, Trevor Hart, the director of the HIV Prevention Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, says that it’s unclear how many queer men actually became eligible. “What it ends up doing is excluding anybody who had anal sex,” says Hart, with the notable exception of gay and bisexual men in monogamous relationships. Still, says Hart, “that is a big chunk of men who have sex with men anyway.” The three-month deferral period is also a barrier, possibly a bigger one than the science warrants. It’s widely acknowledged that there is a window of time where a newly acquired HIV infection may not be detected by tests, and would therefore go unnoticed. However, the CBS itself says that window only lasts about nine or 10 days after the initial infection.

And while the focus on anal sex does have its basis in research—anal sex carries the highest risk for HIV transmission—Hart notes that there’s a limit to this distinction. The current policy screens exclusively for anal sex, which means that donors with unlimited new vaginal sex partners are eligible, but donors with a single new anal sex partner are not. “That’s not consistent with the science,” says Hart. “We know women engaging in heterosexual vaginal sex, for example, are contracting HIV.”

There are also two major advancements in HIV prevention and treatment that current CBS policy does not account for. The first is the development and availability of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a highly effective medication taken to preemptively lower one’s chances of contracting HIV. Right now, CBS chooses to defer donors who have taken PrEP in the last four months, saying it interferes with their ability to detect the presence of HIV in blood. “Well, yes, it probably would,” says Hart, “because it prevents somebody from contracting HIV.” Secondly, anyone who has a sexual partner who lives with HIV is also deferred from donating for 12 months. It’s a policy that ignores antiretroviral treatment, which allows many people living with HIV to have undetectable viral loads. Antiretroviral therapy, in the form of a daily medication, can prevent the virus from making copies of itself—when taken as prescribed, a patient’s viral load (the amount of HIV in their blood) becomes so low that standard tests cannot detect it. It is globally recognized that when this is the case, HIV would not be transmitted through sexual intercourse, which would prevent someone with HIV from passing it on to a sexual partner.

Since gay and bisexual men still account for the majority of new AIDS cases in Canada, these questions are likely to disproportionately affect queer people while also having a dubious scientific basis. “The straight person who isn’t taking nearly as many precautions to protect their sexual health is able to donate, whereas queer and trans folks who are taking so many precautions are not able to donate,” says Tyler Boyce, who, after years working in HIV care, is now the executive director of Enchanté Network, a 2SLGBTQ+ advocacy organization. “To me, that doesn’t sound like a blood ban has been lifted.”

Boyce’s own first interaction with the blood donation system was accompanying his mother to an appointment when he was about 10. On the way to their local CBS in Ottawa, she explained to him how one person’s blood could save another person’s life. He was surprised, then, when she came out of her appointment in a hurry, visibly offended. Later, he would learn that she did not donate at all that day—in fact, she was turned away due to the lifetime ban on donors born in Africa. Boyce left CBS feeling small and disempowered, and with the knowledge that he would have to navigate the blood donation system as not only a queer person, but as a Black queer person. “You’re pushed into a situation of advocacy,” he says.

Conversations around a “blood ban” in Canada often revolve exclusively around the sexual behaviour screening questions, but this laser-focus reveals how narrow our understanding of the queer community can be. If we step back and look at the CBS donor questionnaire as a whole, it becomes clear that there are other significant barriers, past and present, that further discriminate against the most marginalized members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community.

Like queerness, Blackness has long been associated with stigma around HIV and AIDS, and that’s been borne out in CBS policy. From 2005 until 2015, CBS asked if people were born or had lived in Africa since 1977, and whether they’d had sex with someone or received blood products from any African country since then. This question unscientifically lumped together the rates of HIV in all 54 African countries. While that policy was removed, the effects have been lasting—just last year, CBS faced critical shortages, in part due to a lack of racialized donors. “We would be really naive to think that just because you removed the question, the systemic discrimination and anti-Blackness also disappears,” says Boyce.

CBS also has a long history of policies that target people who do sex work, something that, in Canada, trans and non-binary people are more likely to engage in than their cisgender counterparts. From 1977 until last year, there was a lifetime ban on anyone who had “taken drugs or money for sex.” CBS says that this is one of the policies that is undergoing an “incremental shortening of duration,” and it’s since been changed to a 12 month deferral. However, this is still notably longer than the three month deferral for other groups identified as high risk for HIV. Hart says the exclusion of these populations is problematic. “Does the virus work differently in people that are sex workers versus people who are not sex workers?” asks Hart. “I would question that scientific rationale.”

And, zooming out from the donor questionnaire itself, the policies behind simply registering as a donor also have implications for the queer community. Until 2016, trans donors had to register in the CBS system under their sex assigned at birth, unless they had undergone lower body gender-affirming surgery. While that policy has been eliminated, non-binary donors still have to register as either “male” or “female.” “It’s a form of discrimination and violence to radically shift your perception of yourself in that way,” says Cat Haines, the executive director of JusticeTrans, an organization that focuses on improving access to justice for two-spirit, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people in Canada. While CBS says it is looking into changes to the registration system, that’s not the only issue. “Beyond that,” Haines says, “we see at some CBS facilities a lack of gender-neutral restrooms or gender-neutral facilities.”

OmiSoore Dryden is the James R. Johnston endowed Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University’s faculty of medicine, and she studies blood donation and the experiences of Black queer and trans communities. She says the idea that a blood ban for queer people has been lifted reflects a limited and inaccurate view of queer life. “How is it a success that this question was removed when the systemic barriers to donation still remain,” she asks, “when no substantive apology or accountability has been made, and when sex workers and others have been sacrificed for this inclusion?”

Haines used to donate blood regularly, but after she transitioned and had partners who were also trans women, she found herself barred from donation because of the MSM policy and her unwillingness to register using her correct gender. While the screening questions have since changed, the damage done means she no longer wants to interact with CBS. “I was at a point of like, I just will never donate blood again,” she says.

When it was created in 1998, CBS was charged with safely collecting and distributing blood donations—but that wasn’t all. It was also tasked with educating the public about what a safe blood supply looks like. By enforcing policies that unfairly discriminate against queer people, CBS has perpetuated stigma that it has not, in the eyes of many, sufficiently addressed. “What happened historically has shaped the public view,” says Nathan Lachowsky, the research director at the Community- Based Research Centre, a non-profit that specializes in queer and gender-diverse people’s health. “The system should be accountable to the harm that’s been done.”

Dryden says that the removal of bans on African and MSM donors is the bare minimum. It does not, Dryden says, take the place of removing unnecessary barriers for trans people and sex workers, nor does it take the place of a public acknowledgement of anti-Black racism and anti-Black homophobia in the CBS. (While CBS says it is working to increase participation from Black and otherwise racialized potential donors through critical engagement, no such statement has yet been given.)

Boyce says that bans on PrEP users and those living with undetectable viral loads of HIV remain in place because of long-standing stigma. “Science can only go as far as we let it,” he says. If diverse voices aren’t heard in the research process, the kinds of projects needed to make blood donation equitable won’t even be on the table. “Stigma is a huge barrier to the kind of science that we need to move towards an effective, low-barrier blood donation system in Canada and a strong, well-contributed-to, safe blood supply.”

CBS has initiated some of this work. They are seeking studies on the effects of PrEP on HIV testing and are in the midst of consulting with the trans community on registration software that accommodates a wider range of gender identities.

But the results remain to be seen. Given the decades of advocacy that took place before CBS removed the MSM policy, it’s unclear how long queer people will have to wait. “I would love for us to be innovators and really create inclusive spaces,” says Haines. “I would love to be able to go donate blood again. But with things where they’re at in this particular moment, it doesn’t feel safe.”

In Scarborough, Ontario, in Cedarbrae Mall, down the escalator and across from the Dollarama, there’s Frugo, a store that feels very much like a flea market. There you’ll find an assortment of items that range from vintage to essential. A few years ago, I found a small orange faux leather handbag and modelled it in the aisle. In that playful moment of dress-up, I tapped into a childhood fantasy: dressing like the women whose style I idolized in 2000s music videos. I didn’t buy the purse because I didn’t think it was in style at the time, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

To me, the Y2K fashion resurgence is a second chance. It’s an opportunity to embrace the looks of yesteryear that I desperately wanted to emulate when I was a child. Music videos were a peek into the life I wanted to live and the way I hoped to dress when I was grown. I really thought I’d grow up to look like Destiny’s Child circa 2001 – 2004. It never occurred to me that fashion would evolve by the time I was old enough to dress like the video vixens from Ludacris’ “What’s Your Fantasy.” But Gen Z’s interest in ’90s and 2000s fashion has brought back a lot of those looks, including fringe, string-tied crop tops, skorts, and faux leather everything.

When I imagine the looks I wanted to imitate, I think of the video for Destiny’s Child’s “Girl.” There’s a scene where Michelle wears a lavender cardigan dress set with a matching wide-brim hat, which was the kind of lavish, grown woman attire I aspired to. It’s also a reflection of the current interest in matching sets: think Missy Elliott’s tracksuits or Saweetie and Paris Hilton in Juicy Couture. I wanted to be in the club, like Toni Braxton in the video for “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” wearing tie-dye jeans and a cropped jewelled halter top.

Of course, my body and life in general aren’t what I expected them to be at age 28. 2000s fashion was designed around skinny bodies. Along with reintroducing low-rise jeans and gold chain belts, comes the scorn for fat bodies and anyone who dares flaunt their protruding belly. The 2000s was a blatantly fatphobic era. While people pretend that the body positivity movement has erased their discomfort with seeing fatness, fatphobia still very much exists within our systems today. We see this through people’s fear, including my own, of low-rise jeans. This fear is rooted in the belief that our bellies (and our fatness) should be hidden.

No pleasure comes from hiding. I haven’t completely eliminated fatphobia from my shopping experience—it’s hard to find clothing from your vision board that’ll fit over thick thighs and a round belly—but if I don’t dress like the video vixens I admire now, then when will I? As fashion evolves, the love for ’90s/2000s aesthetics will fade away again. And just as Allison P. Davis notes in the article “A Vibe Shift is Coming” in The Cut, some of us will “stay stuck at whatever makes us feel comfortable, and if that’s in 2016 or 2012 or 2010, that’s fine.” We’ll even create a lifestyle that accompanies that vibe. The only thing I wouldn’t say is “stuck.” It implies that we won’t incorporate new looks that complement our chosen era or challenge our fashion sense as we mature. Instead of being “stuck,” I’ve found a way to fulfill my little Black girl daydreams and perform my many personalities as I grow in age, body and imagination—from sensual video vixen to luxurious aunty.