Cover illustration by Mollie Cronin; Design by Valerie Thai

I think about bodies all the time. As a person who lives with chronic illness. As a newly plus-size person. As a person who got pregnant in an unconventional way. As a person who grew up in a mixed-race family. As a parent with a kid entering adolescence.

I think about bodies in a political sense, too: trans rights, fat liberation, disability justice, access to abortion. I think about people who have willingly put their bodies on the line as part of their activism; about the people in prisons who lose so much bodily autonomy through incarceration; about sex workers demanding the right to decide what they do with their bodies; about labourers who exert their bodies in order to provide for themselves and their families. I think about the bodies that haven’t been valued through the COVID-19 pandemic and the bodies that weren’t valued through the AIDS crisis. There’s so much bound up in bodies.

There are also many ways in which I have not had to think about my body when I take up space: I grew up independently mobile, on the thin to curvy spectrum, cis, and white. When Sarah Charles writes about entering a space knowing she is, on some level, representing all Black women, I know this is not an experience that’s been mirrored in my life in any way. When Lorri Neilsen Glenn talks about being overlooked as an older woman, I know this is coming (unless things radically change), but it’s a bodied experience I’ve thus far only learned from, not shared.

While some experiences may ring true to some readers, there’s opportunity to learn from other people’s experiences of their bodies, and their work with bodies, throughout this issue. Dorcas Marfo talks about growing up as a dark-skinned Black person with eczema, and how her experience interplays with the need for more BIPOC, specifically Black, dermatologists in Canada—and more education about melanated skin in the dermatology field. Jacqueline Salomé introduces readers to death doulas, who support people at the end of their lives and work to demystify death. Samantha Nock talks about scarcity when it comes to clothes for fat bodies, and how in her teens she was unable to really discover her personal style, or authentic self, because of this. Samantha Peters talks about new legislation that’s supposed to support judges being more educated around sexual assault. But, she argues, this framework still relies on the idea of a “perfect victim,” and might not really serve those of marginalized identities.

We didn’t go into doing an issue on bodies thinking of it as a “hard” topic, like mining, or prisons, or elections. But our bodies, and the bodies around us, have so much to do with how people are treated in the world and within institutions. When people talk about bodies in the mainstream media, it’s often seeped in diet culture and white supremacist beauty standards. Granted, this is changing, and we’re thankful for it, but it’s going to take a lot of work to undo decades of damage. We dedicate this issue to everyone whose body has been disrespected, marginalized, or seen as “other.” To us, these are the bodies that should be making headlines.

Illustration by Chelsea Charles

No joy is more fulfilling for me than shattering the expectations someone has of me. To be unpredictable is to be individualistic. And in my skin, standing alone as an individual gives me the chance to take solace in myself.

Because I am an unambiguous Black woman in a predominantly white community, escaping the stereotypes that are attached to my looks is not something that I usually get to do. I’m always aware. Being visible as a dark-skinned Black woman has never been an individual feat. When I enter spaces, I enter them with my sisters beside me. The unspoken rule within my community is that one of us represents all of us and it’s filled with messy contradictions. This leaves Black women under immense pressure to perform exceptionally—if I mess up, it will be a failure for all of us. My identity does not belong to just me, and I do not have the same privileges white people have when they underperform.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been conditioned to be aware that my actions don’t hold consequences only for me. When I was growing up my mom would say, “now they’ve ruined it for everybody,” whenever someone who looked like us performed the stereotypes that were expected of Black people, specifically Black women. This played into the aspect of being predictable. The truth remains that Black people, women specifically, are not encouraged to fail and offered grace to try again. Whenever we fail it is met with beration, humiliation, and the assumption of predictability.

In my eyes, predictability was just as bad as failure.

Naturally, messing up means that next time you can disprove it. That you can shatter the expectations you’ve created by the mistake you’ve made. For me, walking into a room where people have made up their minds on my character birthed more pressure to change their minds. Inevitably, this pressure to disprove turns into a constant burden that we, as Black women, have to carry. We find ourselves being thrown into a balancing act of expectations from society while simultaneously being admired for our endurance. This leads us to be independent in the face of pain, putting our wellness at risk.

Race and class play a pivotal role in the ways one’s failure or, in my case, predictability is dealt with. There is a large amount of undeserved grace and forgiveness granted to white people. Black women do not get this kind of compassion.

The reality is that Black women are not seen as equal to our white peers, coworkers, and friends. We are judged and criticized harsher within education, the workspace, and even within our personal relationships.

My work is to disprove. I used to mistake my desire for acceptance as an act of resistance. Many Black women choose this avenue. We take it upon ourselves to work twice as hard just to get what non-Black individuals are given for doing half or less of the work.

Constantly being on alert that my presence as sometimes the only representation of all Black women in a room is an indescribable type of exhaustion.

I’ve conditioned myself to deprioritize my individual needs in service to the image of Black women that I embody. My own reasons to not be absolutely exceptional are selfish in comparison to the opportunities I may be compromising for Black women who come after me.

When I have conversations about performance and the amount of effort it takes to navigate the world as a dark-skinned Black woman, desirability politics are always brought up. Black women have high standards in beauty as well as our character, which directly influence each other.

Having dark skin specifically comes with certain expectations, most of which are prejudices that are descended from slavery. There is a standard of being less beautiful, less educated, and even being less desired in relationships. There are real-world consequences that are linked with these standards for Black women, such as receiving longer or harsher prison sentences than our lighter-skinned counterparts.

My role as the representative for Black women was made abundantly clear to me during my senior prom. During the typical routine of discussing hairstyles and makeup looks with my friends, I found out that one of my girlfriends—and another of a short list of Black women in our grade—planned on styling her hair in a way similar to several of the white girls. The details are absolutely important here. The reactions to their very similar hairstyles were dramatically different, and my friend, the only Black woman, was on the receiving end of more criticism than anyone else. These critiques were then generalized to be about all Black women. Negatively creating an all encompassing one dimensional caricature of the Black women within our circle.

From that point on, I knew that I would have to disprove the negative opinion that my peers held for us. These expectations that I held for myself are always still there and now I don’t know what life would be like if they weren’t. I can imagine, but it pains me too much to dream.

While there are some that are eager to reassure me that it is hyperbolic to assume what I do affects all Black women, this is never truly helpful. Being judged individually is a luxury that we’re not typically allowed. On the account that we are seen, they see all of us.

Having to be powerful undoubtedly remains in the act of disproving a stereotype or being able to change someone’s opinion, but having to be exceptional all the time is simply unrealistic. I want my peers, family, and those who look like me to be able to not feel that when they walk in a room they have to be exceptional to be accepted.

I used to see these expectations as being put on a pedestal, but now I see that sometimes people put you on a pedestal not to praise you, but to isolate you.

When you are constantly fulfilling the standards people have for you, they forget that you are human. The moment you make a mistake you are given a harsher reaction than anyone else. No room for error. No room for forgiveness.

My white peers who take up more space do not have to perform this way. They get to mess up, be mediocre, and thrive.

Black women deserve to be predictable, exceptional, strong, weak, struggling, and whatever we so choose. It does not define us or make us any less. It makes us humans, not the superheroes we have been so often pressured to be.

Design by Valerie Thai

Piercing through the chaos of chance and unexpected plot twists that we encounter throughout our lives, there is one stark and certain truth: we’re all going to die.

Yet, our death-phobic society has taught us to fear the only thing we know for sure. Even talking about death evokes superstitious reactions, as if speaking the word aloud is a death sentence in itself.

Death has surrounded us during the pandemic, with millions tragically losing their lives to COVID-19 worldwide. Though we hear about death daily, most of us remain detached from the experience. The whole thing is a terrifyingly mysterious taboo.

Death doulas think we can do better.

As part of a burgeoning death-positive movement, end-of-life doulas support people on their journey toward passing away. They fill a key gap in the typical medical dying process by offering a simple, yet radical, kindness that asks people what it means for them to die well, and makes their vision a reality.

Sue Phillips signs her emails quoting author Haruki Murakami: “Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life.” It’s a guiding philosophy for many death doulas.

“We just allow people the space to fully experience what they’re going through,” says Phillips, a death doula in Hamilton, Ontario, who found her calling after retirement. “[We are] really just trying to help people not be as afraid.”

By providing non-medical support and companionship from terminal diagnosis to death, end-of-life doulas like Phillips help the dying clear their practical to-do list and inner consciousness so they can cross the threshold with as much ease as possible.

They encourage clients to plan for what they want their deaths to look and feel like. They assist with paperwork, funeral arrangements and celebrations of life, and offer respite relief to primary caregivers. And they normalize conversations on death and grief through death cafés—informal gatherings where people can talk freely about topics related to dying.

For Phillips, the heart of the work is emotional, guiding clients to say what they need to say, forgiving and asking forgiveness before it’s too late.

“That might be something that a family would turn to a [death] doula for,” she says. “That person is going to advocate for you; that person is going to get you the information you need, or that person is going to sit at your side and let you talk about your emotional feelings, what you’re going through.”

Death doulas are self-regulated through the End of Life Doula Association of Canada, where Phillips sits on the board of directors. The Association connects death doulas across the country, overseeing quality assurance, continuing improvement, and providing education and networking opportunities.

Because the field is not officially recognized, death doulas’ services are not covered by provincial or private health care plans and insurance. Though this gives them flexibility to offer personalized care, there can be cost barriers and little awareness of their offerings.

Yet, without death doulas, many people die unsupported, with their goals for a good death unexamined and unfulfilled.

In Phillips’ experience, most people want to die at home surrounded by their loved ones.

“That’s kind of how it goes. They want to die at home, then hospice, then hospital. Long-term care is like the final choice. They don’t really want to go there,” she says.

Although 87 percent of Canadians wish to receive end-of-life care at home, the majority die in hospitals. The situation has worsened during COVID-19, where the proportion of deaths in hard-hit Canadian long-term care homes has been much higher than the international average.

Phillips says most of her clients don’t want to suffer, either, preferring medical assistance in dying if suffering becomes unbearable. But the medical system often defaults to acute care, seeing death as failure and prolonging it against some people’s wishes.

When Chrystal Toop’s beloved Métis grandmother passed, she was buried with tobacco in her coffin. Toop was angry and confused. Because her grandmother was a smoker who died of cancer, Toop felt like she was being buried with a symbolic weapon.

Toop, an Algonquin death doula from the Pikwàkanagàn First Nation in Renfrew County, Ontario, didn’t understand the significance of tobacco at the time. Colonization, systemic racism, and the legacy of the residential school system—of which Toop’s great grandparents were survivors—took many aspects of culture and language away from her family.

“It was around the end of my twenties that I finally started to make the connections of culture and [the tobacco] finally made sense. What they had done was ceremonial, and it was spiritual, and to show her that she had a safe journey back to the sky world.”

Her grandmother’s death had a lasting influence on Toop, encouraging her to bring cultural practices and plant medicines back to Indigenous people through her decolonial death doula work.

As demand for Toop’s services increased staggeringly during the pandemic, she turned to her mentors to co-found the Indigenous Death Doula Collective, serving Hamilton to Thunder Bay, Ontario. To widen their reach, the collective created Indigenous death doula training for youth, which Toop says is the first of its kind in North America.

The wildly successful program intended to reach 20 youth, but has a waitlist of over 200, is informed by Toop’s personal philosophy that death work is life work that begins at birth. “Society is designed to kill us. It’s that genocidal reality of Canada for Indigenous people…. the reality is, we’re always fighting against our own early deaths,” she says.

What makes Toop’s death doula work unique is the fact that it isn’t only about guiding people to die well. Because the average life expectancy of Indigenous people is up to 10 years less than settler Canadians, her approach also relies on harm reduction strategies to fight against early death. “One of the things I say is that we have the right to die of old age,” says Toop. “That’s all we want. We want Indigenous communities to realize that fantastic reality of becoming an old person, because that’s not typical.”

At four years old, Kim Winnicky was choosing a casket and planning her funeral. But she wasn’t dying. Growing up with a funeral director father, she always felt comfortable knowing that death is a natural part of life.

“Holding space for all that is involved in the end of the dying process is really powerful work,” says Winnicky, an end-of-life doula and hospice volunteer in Whitehorse, Yukon. “I just feel called to it.” When Winnicky sits vigil at a person’s bedside as they die, she feels that power viscerally. “Sometimes the feeling is very calm … and sometimes it’s a feeling of fear and clinging,” she says. “My work is to ground into equanimity and steadiness … that seems to help temper those waves and just sort of bring this grounding radiance into the room.”

Winnicky treats the dying with healing touch—a therapy that balances a person’s energetic fields. Clients have reported profound impacts, including Winnicky’s own mother, who said it was more effective than morphine at controlling her pain from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Simple physical touch can be the comfort that someone needs to release into a peaceful death—Winnicky has seen it firsthand. But during the pandemic, with visitor restrictions in medical facilities and care homes, many have died alone without any loving touch at all. “That breaks my heart for everybody in that situation,” she says.

Everyone’s idea of what it means to live and die well is different. But for Jody Roberts, a death doula based in Coquitlam, B.C., there’s one common thread: love.

“At the end of the day, nothing is permanent but love. We have to ask ourselves, did we love well and were we loved? Did we love ourselves and did we love ourselves enough?” says Roberts.

It’s an influential aspect of Roberts’ work, encouraging clients to engage in these deep emotional and spiritual reflections well before they die. One of Roberts’ clients was a lawyer struggling with losing his identity late at the end of his life—an identity tied up with the achievements that he worked so hard for, but that he couldn’t take with him. It seemed to make his transition uneasy.

“It’s why we need to loosen our attachments before the end and stay attached to love. You can take love with you everywhere, but you can’t take people or things,” Roberts says.

With the help of death doulas, she thinks Canadians are realizing that a better death is possible, and that it actually starts by living fully. And for the living, recognizing that grief is a manifestation of loving what you lost can be a powerful way of moving through the hard feelings. “It’s about loving fiercely every day,” she says. “And loving life so you can end well.”

Death is with us every day—it’s a fact of life. And it feels more present than usual, with the pandemic dragging on and an anticipated increase in cancer deaths due to the pause in elective screening procedures.

But, while death is inevitable, having a tumultuous and fearsome dying experience is not. Death doulas know that the final chapter of our lives can be magnificently powerful, if we embrace it.

Design by Valerie Thai

Butterflies and flowers. Butterflies and flowers. Butterflies and flowers. I would repeat this phrase until I had forgotten that my skin was tingling for a scratch. My sister taught me this. She would tell me to think of lush green grass, with flowers too pretty to ignore and butterflies dancing with the wind. I stuck by it every time I got a glance of a triggering image, whether it was tiny holes or scaly surfaces. Hotter than usual environments and oily foods would also worsen my itch tolerance. A scratch fest would ensue and sometimes a bloody one.

As I closed my eyes and escaped into the fantasy I needed to believe, another tingle would run through the layers of my skin. This time it was a spot I couldn’t reach. The idea that eczema would always be a part of my life and desperately depended on Black Canadian dermatologists, of which there are few. That made me itch.

Since I was six months old, my skin condition, atopic dermatitis, also known as eczema, was the topic of worry among family, the reason I would cover up with long sleeves and turtlenecks, and a constant reminder that I was different from everyone else. As a young Black woman, I wondered why God gave me two battles to fight, both that involved my skin and neither of which I could change. As I grew older, I noticed there was more to my eczema than meets the eye.

Every dermatologist I was referred to had more than a white coat. Each dermatologist I visited was white. There was a tang of white superiority waiting to override the patient’s concerns and prescribe their opinion. The stark contrast between doctor and patient made me uneasy, even at a tender age. Every dermatologist didn’t take the time to educate me about my eczema; therefore, treatment was an outlandish concept to me.

Dermatologic care must involve educating the patient early on. According to Dr. Renée Beach, a dermatologist in North York, Ontario, eczema can be treated, but the skin stains. It undergoes post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, and that’s what brings the patient in again, claiming they didn’t get the proper care, Dr. Beach explains. Melanated skin produces more stain afterwards, and additional treatment is needed to minimize this, says Dr. Beach.

With darker skin, post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation is my reality. My eczema flares based on the Canadian seasons. Winter and summer usually tend to be the worst seasons for my eczema. The cold, dry winter weather doesn’t hug in the moisture that I desperately need. The hot, dry summer weather doesn’t believe in moisture, and stickiness becomes itchy and uncomfortable.

Dark, bold, and blotchy spots show up in the crevices of my body; inner elbows, backs of my knees, chest, neck, thighs, fingers, and more. They steal the spotlight in my photos that end up in my virtual trash can. They look like scars, dead or burnt skin. My post-inflammatory skin can get extremely dry, and moisturizing is a daily sport.

Post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation and scarring in darker skin types was not the topic of my countless dermatologist visits. I tested numerous creams, oils, balms,

and soaps, and they’ve either given me a reaction or did nothing. Patients with darker skin types need a careful diagnosis. According to The State of Ethnic Dermatology in Canada, a medical letter penned by Canadian dermatologists Dr. Boluwaji Ogunyemi and Dr. Yvette Miller-Monthrope, “The effect of traditional treatments for common and uncommon dermatoses is also an important consideration in managing patients with skin of colour. Such treatments may result in adverse effects such as post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation or keloid scarring at a higher rate than in patients with fair skin.”

The article notes that skin issues such as psoriasis, seborrheic dermatitis, and acne vulgaris are visibly different in presentation with darker skin types. In addition, postinflammatory pigment alteration can present as darker or lighter spots in darker skin. Therefore, the difficulty in assessing presentation should rely on the patient and families’ reports to avoid dismissing concerns and thus undertreating.

According to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada database (RCPSC), there are seven Black dermatologists in all of Canada. Though, anecdotally, Dr. Miller-Monthrope, a dermatologist at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, mentioned that recently one has retired, and another has moved to the U.S. Dr. Beach says there are more factors than that to look at, specifically in the educational system. “It’s bigger than a lack of Black dermatologists,” says Dr. Beach. “In Ontario alone, the ratio of dermatologists is one dermatologist for every 53,000 Ontarians.” There are not enough dermatologists in Canada, period.

When Black dermatologists make up one percent of all dermatologists nationwide, it’s impossible to look after every Black patient in the country. “We need to spend time focusing on our training programs to ensure that all dermatologists, regardless of their own individual background, are qualified competent to treat patients across the skin spectrum,” says Dr. Miller-Monthrope.

Dermatology training materials need to be reassessed, says Dr. Miller-Monthrope. She says that although eczema and other inflammatory skin conditions are more common and severe in brown and black skin, the educational sector teaches more about Caucasian skin presentation. “Senior dermatologists train new dermatologists,” says

Dr. Beach. Yet, if they are not exposed to brown and black skin or have not treated enough darker-skinned patients, “there is a perpetual lack of sufficient training for a group that is growing in Canada and deserves just as great dermatologic care as everybody else,” Dr. Beach says. According to Dr. Miller-Monthrope, classical teachings are that eczema is red, scaly, bumpy, and poorly defined as a rash. Redness is not always the case with brown or black skin, Dr. Miller-Monthrope observes that different hues include purple, dark brown, or even grey.

“This can lead to delays in diagnosis, misdiagnosis, and obviously poor treatment outcomes.” Dr. Miller-Monthrope says. Treatment success is not about getting rid of eczema, but about ensuring the skin is even for darker skin patients, says Dr. Miller-Monthrope.

For Black dermatologists and patients, the insufficient dermatologic care taught and given is not on their shoulders to fix. Dr. Beach makes this clear, “Just like racism isn’t for Black people to solve. Nor is inequity for brown and black bodies to resolve. Neither is a lack of dermatologic care for brown and Black people,” she says.

Dr. Beach says, “Whether there’s three of us in Ontario, or six of us nationwide, to take up the torch and treat all Black patients, I don’t think it’s practical at all. I think what has to happen is the other 272 dermatologists in Ontario, as they would care for any other skin type, provide their best care for brown and black skin.”

Outside of Ontario, Black dermatologists are not where you’d necessarily expect to find them. Dr. Boluwaji Ogunyemi, a dermatologist and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Memorial University, practices in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Dr. Robin St. Clair Gray is also a dermatologist, and practices in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Dr. Miller-Monthrope teaches at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto and tells her medical students and residents that sometimes “skin can be a window to what’s going on inside. Recognizing what that is externally can help us look for and manage things internally as well.”

Eczema and holistic specialists on social media have also educated me on my skin. For example, in an Instagram post about eczema and leaky guts, Dr. Diane Angela Fong’s (@drfong.nd) caption reads, “When the gut lining gets damaged, toxins and other harmful chemicals leak through the unhealthy intestinal wall and are transported to the liver for detoxification. This puts a burden on the liver, which then shows up on the skin as eczema.”

It’s posts like these that I come across that make me weirdly excited, despite losing years of awareness of treatments. The excitement of learning at my own pace, remaining hopeful that there are better days ahead, and using education as a portal of understanding, is refreshing.

Also refreshing is the new work in the Black Canadian dermatology landscape. Dr. Miller-Monthrope says three of her colleagues, Dr. Marissa Joseph, Dr. Erin Dahlke, and Dr. Beach, have studied the competence in diagnosing skin diseases across the skin spectrum at the medical student level. Dr. Miller-Monthrope says that since her collaborative 2017 letter, two publications have looked at the deficit of black and brown skin images within traditional textbooks used across North America in dermatology residency training programs. Conclusions draw that these images do not reflect the population at large.

A 2015 initiative looking at this conversation is the Annual Canadian Skin Spectrum Summit, a number of diverse healthcare professionals looking to serve better dermatologic care to underserved and diverse populations. The summit, which began in 2015, is rallying awareness and resources and actively filing a void.

In 2013, the Women’s College Hospital opened the first ever ethnic skin centre in Canada, which was called Esru, but due to a lack of resources, it closed its doors in 2015. “The medical community at large realizes that we need patients to have good access to culturally competent care,” says Dr. Miller-Monthrope.

There is still work to be done, but agents of change exist in this Canadian dermatology space, both physicians and patients. I am an agent of change, both as a patient and storyteller. My dual identities are parallel to the duality my skin encompasses. My skin is scarred and Black. Both of these scars, racial and physical, testify to what my Blackness endures.

Design by Valerie Thai

I was a certifiable emo kid in the early aughts, where scene queens ruled Nexopia, a low budget early form of MySpace, and I was their eager subject.

I yearned for skin tight jeans and layered stud belts. I saved my money to buy off-brand checkered Vans slip-ons and generously overlined my bottom lashline. Every morning before school I would stand in front of the mirror with closed eyes, whispering prayers to the big Warped Tour in the sky, that when I opened them I would be as thin as the girls I idolized. Grasping at the rolls of my stomach, I felt guilt and shame rise in my young body. There was a fat teen girl looking back at me wearing bootcut flare-leg blue jeans with rhinestones on the back pocket, and a men’s black hoodie from Walmart. The black eyeliner, cheap and purchased at the dollar store, made my small eyes look tiny and streaked down my big cheeks; cheeks on a face I inherited from my mother, passed down through generations of short, thick, strong, Métis women. I felt lost in the years that were supposed to be my most formative. This disconnect between who I was and who I wanted to be punctuates my life and has left me on the cusp of 30 just finding my own personal style and identity.

There is a scarcity of plus-size clothing. When I was a teenager growing up in rural northern British Columbia, Penningtons and Walmart were the only stores I was able to shop at, forcing me to attend much of middle and high school in my business casual best. I wasn’t shopping for what I wanted but, instead, for what fit my body. To be honest, most of the things I purchased didn’t even fit me that well, they simply covered my body. Could I pull the jeans over my hips? Perfect. Did it matter that they had fully bedazzled back pockets? Nope. Was the shirt large enough to drape over my stomach? Take my money. Shopping for clothes that simply fit, instead of clothes that affirmed my confidence and identity, meant that I never was able to outwardly express who I wanted to be. The joys of experimenting with fashion were lost in this experience and, instead, I was left wanting.

Part of admitting this feels superficial and trivial, after all, how important are clothes? We all have different ways of finding affirmation in our bodies. The euphoria of feeling that your outside matches how you envision yourself on the inside is a beautiful coming into being. To walk down the street truly feeling your oats is a phenomenal state of existence. When you live in a body that actively defies hegemonic desirability, these feelings of empowerment are hard to grasp. When we have the freedom to experiment, to try new things, and have the positive reinforcement of reaching that affirmation, we are able to piece together who we are as we age. Growing up in the absence of that left me without really understanding my own personal style, and by extension, who I was. I worked to find clothes that just fit in the same way I worked to create a life that just “fit,” but never ever fulfilled me on a deeper level.

During the first year and a half of the pandemic, I went from a size 18/20 to a size 22/24. My body has changed right as I am free falling into my thirties, waving goodbye to my twenties, and being smaller has led me to an internal reckoning. I had assumed that I had processed my internal fatphobia. I have been screaming for the last few years about radical fat acceptance without ever radically accepting my own fat body. My jeans no longer fit me, my favourite shirts are skin tight, I can no longer fit into some of my favourite outfits. I have had to step back and take inventory of not only my clothes, but who I am. My closet is a 2XL graveyard of all the people I tried to be in my twenties: nothing feels like me and there are so many cardigans.

I realize that in the last five years, I had felt affirmation in my body getting smaller. I was on a specialized diet because of gallbladder disease, as part of which I couldn’t eat anything that would cause an attack and send me to the ER. I lost weight and in the small, dark crevasses of my mind, I was relieved. In general, I am very neutral toward the ways others enact sovereignty over their bodies, but I have avoided people actively celebrating weight loss because it causes me to spiral into the deep hole of disordered eating. What I didn’t realize is that I was enacting this harm on myself. You can never actually self-actualize who you are when who you are relies solely on the size of your body. Thin and fat are not whole identities.

I was building a house on the unstable foundation of striving for thinness and now that my body has gotten larger, I realize just how unstable that foundation was.

Adorning my body in things that fit or finding things that are the What Not to Wear definitions of flattering never meant I was creating an identity outside of centering thinness. Even in my fat body, one that has never known thinness, I was allowing this to dictate how I built my identity. So now, four sizes bigger, I’m starting fresh and refusing to centre thinness. This refusal means that I am building from the ground up. To be fat means that you are constantly navigating a world that wants you to take up less space; to be fat and refuse to take up less space means navigating a world that is actively hostile to you.

I want to say that this revelation is refreshing, that I feel emboldened and powerful. To be honest, I feel a lot like the 14-year-old girl in the mirror praying her belly rolls away. I’m scared and I feel shameful. The options for exploring are still scarce. There are more options than Walmart or Penningtons but there is still a lack of variety and access. Thin people can walk into a mall and have 50 different stores that cater to different aesthetics. Fat people walk into a mall and beeline it to some godforsaken corner of a fast fashion store that has a rack of plus-sized clothes.

I no longer idolize thin white women. I purposefully fill my social media with beautiful, fat, people of colour. I force myself to sit in discomfort when I catch myself whispering life into my fatphobia. I make myself stare into all the things fatphobia brings with it—classism, ableism, colonialism, colourism, and anti-Black racism—and understand that there is no room for these things at my table. Building my identity around thinness means that I was actively building a life around white supremacy and colonial standards of acceptability: continuing to do so is not living with my integrity. Now, I am gentle with myself but loud in my refusal.

The other day, I put on a pair of simple black leggings. My belly line was prominent and visible and you could see the cellulite on the back of my legs. I put on a baggy cream colour cable-knit sweater that made me look like a box. Over top of it, I put on a drop-shoulder oversized flannel jacket. I looked wide. The leggings showed how big my calves are and the mock neck of the sweater framed my double chin. I have never felt more beautiful, comfortable, and confident. The colours were pleasing to me, the fit was cozy, and I was emulating the aesthetic I wanted. Nothing about this outfit was flattering, and nothing about this outfit thrived for thinness. I want to go back in time and tell that 14-year-old emo girl that she will never be skinny, and that’s okay, because one day she’s going to be at peace.

Design by Valerie Thai

I am a non-binary Black queer femme survivor of sexual violence who has never gone to the police or engaged in a court process in order to seek justice and accountability. Every time that I have disclosed that I am indeed a survivor, I am seldom believed. Why would anyone do that to someone who is fat? Dark-skinned? Someone who looks like you? Why did you drink? What were you wearing? Why did you let this happen to you? These are some of the questions that have been asked to me by folks that I love and trust, so how could I entrust a system that does not even know me to believe my truth?

I went to law school with the aspiration to learn the law and then to use my acquired knowledge to develop the tools to transform it, because the current system, as it stands, is not designed to protect someone like me. While statistics on the rates of violence against Black women in Canada are not collected, movements like #MeToo, which was started by Tarana Burke, a Black woman, and #YouOkSis, which was initiated by Feminista Jones, also a Black woman, have illuminated the systemic anti-Black violence and misogynoir—anti-Black racist misogyny—that Black women and femmes experience all too often. And from the information that we do know and do collect, people who identify as queer, non-binary, trans, disabled and/or women, are more likely to experience sexual violence than those who do not. Moreover, according to the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety Statistics’s “Criminal victimization in Canada, 2019” report via Statistics Canada, they are most likely not to report because 25 percent of women feel they won’t be believed, 57 percent do not want to deal with the police, and 42 percent do not want to deal with the court process. So, the question remains: what are our options?

While in law school, I wrote a paper about making social context education mandatory in the courtroom. Social context education is “the social backdrop” of the issues and reasons why certain people enter the courtroom. That is to say, social context education recognizes that discrimination is not only individual, but institutional, systemic, and embedded in the law. When I wrote the paper in 2016, social context education for judges was not mandatory. It was simply at the discretion of a judge to take notice of an “ism” such as racism or sexism in the case before them. Throughout law school, I had read decision after decision where social context was not necessarily taken into consideration, and when it was, there were consequences.

In 1997, there was a case about a Black woman judge who was put on trial for acquitting a Black Nova Scotian boy accused of assaulting a white police officer. A Black woman judge who took notice of anti-Black racism in Nova Scotia was accused of having reasonable apprehension of bias. “Reasonable apprehension of bias” is a legal standard for disqualifying judges for bias whether it is real or perceived. For me, this case revealed a multiplicity of things. Regardless of attempts to characterize courtroom spaces as neutral and impartial, one can conclude that they are not. When we think about how spaces come to be, why spaces come to be, who controls the space, and who is controlled by the space, we know that spaces are certainly neither impartial nor neutral. “The double legacy of [this case] for me is that while it offers a small ray of light that race does count, it also confirmed that to make it count more often, we will need something more than a scientific study or two on the operation of racism in Canada,” writes Sherene Razack, a distinguished professor and chair in women’s studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research and teaching focuses on racial violence.

As a law student, I started writing and co-writing about my observations of the legal profession on topics ranging from legal education to representation in the legal profession. Following the Ghomeshi verdict in 2016, I co-wrote an article titled “The Ghomeshi Verdict: Re-imagining How Future Sexual Assault Cases Are Heard,” where I proposed “a re-imagining of future sexual assault trials” in order to respond to the realities of sexual assault survivors, while also respecting the rights of an accused based on some of the comments made by Judge William B. Horkin in his 26-page decision. My view is that a reimagination is indeed possible since specialized courts such as integrative domestic violence courts already exist. As such, I thought that for those who chose to seek justice within the court system, then it would perhaps serve them well to be before a judge that had a critical understanding of sexual assault law and its intersection with factors such as race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and so forth. This is because in sexual assault proceedings, harmful stereotypes are, and continue to be, thrust upon Black and Indigenous people without any critical analysis or understanding of the history and realities of colonization. In the case of Black women and femmes, stereotypes and assumptions that operate about accused Black men or white women survivors of sexual assault may not apply. As a result, this leaves us left in the background once again only to reveal the increasing need to apply a Black feminist lens and value to legal education, judicial notice, and testimony from subject-matter experts on sexualized violence against Black women, femmes, trans, and non-binary folks.

In May 2021, amendments were made to the Judges Act and the Criminal Code through Bill C-3, which has resulted in mandatory and continuous education for judges in sexual assault law and social context in order for there to be greater transparency in sexual assault decisions. According to a Government of Canada news release, these changes “will help ensure that the public has confidence that judges have the awareness, skills and knowledge of sexual assault law necessary to deal with cases in a manner that is respectful to sexual assault survivors and free from myths and stereotypes about sexual assault.” While long overdue and unclear of what that would look like in practice without access to the judicial education materials, the changes are supposed to signal the Government of Canada’s commitment to addressing a faulty system that has failed survivors in profound ways by treating survivors with “dignity and compassion.” And though the instinct is to be excited for this much needed legislative change, I am left with many questions.

What will this change mean for me, specifically, given my intersecting identities? I chose not to rely on the system to seek justice for many reasons and found other forms of accountability mechanisms in order to heal. In a piece that I wrote in 2020 for the WAVAW’s Rape Crisis Centre’s zine Recognition 2: Trans and Queer Writing on Sexual Harm, I noted that one of the reasons that justice for me operated outside of the legal system is because “to be Black and femme, adds a layer of oppression that is deeply rooted in anti-Black colonial history.” And because of this, how could I then trust that the colonial legal system would see me as anything more than a jezebel?

Transformative legal shifts will result from this bill if—and only if—we make space for what I call “movement judicial education,” which is education for judges that is attuned to what’s going on in the community. That is to say, space for judges to engage in a transformative legal education that keeps a pulse on movements like #YouOkSis, for instance, and have that inform their judicial reasoning in the courtroom. If not, this new legislative change will only serve to benefit the seemingly perfect victim in cases of sexual assault, again leaving Black women and femmes to fend for ourselves.

WPCH members Rebecca Hume and Nickita Longman marching at the National Gathering for BIPOC Families Against Police Violence in November 2021 · Photo by Emily Leedham

Picture this: you’re ready for a good night’s rest. You crawl into bed around midnight, and just as you are about to fall asleep, thunderous juddering and whirring erupt above your house. You sit awake, startled as the Winnipeg Police helicopter circles around your neighbourhood, its bright spotlight creeping and surveying. This disruption is a regular occurrence for you, one that leaves you anxious, overwhelmed, and exhausted. According to the activist group Winnipeg Police Cause Harm (WPCH), this is a reality for many Winnipeg residents.

WPCH began its work in September 2019 after the murder of four BIPOC people at the hands of the Winnipeg Police—Chad Williams, Machuar Madut, Sean Thompson, and Randy Cochrane. The volunteer-based, non-hierarchical group advocates for the abolition of the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) and the reallocation of its funds to community-led alternatives.

“I think a lot of us recognized that there truly were no present organizations or groups or anything [in Winnipeg] pushing back on these things,” says Nickita Longman, an activist working with WPCH. “The reason why we all got together was because we really wanted to address that.”

Raising consciousness and community engagement are two key pillars at the heart of the group’s work. WPCH has presented to city council and the Winnipeg Police Board, distributed posters, created “Know Your Rights” wallet cards, and amassed a following of over 9,000 on Instagram alone as of January 2022. WPCH’s community efforts led to its designation as Winnipeg’s favourite grassroots group by local Winnipeg newspaper The Uniter in 2021, despite working under the pandemic’s restrictive parameters.

“There’s a lot of our work that does better in person and does better in community,” says Longman. “We had to really be creative with the ways we were present online.”

To address the community’s frustration over police helicopter disruptions, WPCH launched an online “Copter Complaints” campaign in February 2021. The campaign encouraged people to come forward with noise pollution and surveillance complaints.

Based on the survey’s results, WPCH created a map showing where the Winnipeg Police Service’s helicopter heavily circulated—predominately the north and west ends—in comparison to areas cops reside. WPCH shared the map with helicopter operating costs on its website, corresponding with its “Porkchop Prices” Twitter account to raise awareness on how the WPS’s helicopter use detracts from other valuable community resources.

“The cops have been saying only four people a year complain about [the] noise,” says James Wilt, another organizer with WPCH. “We know, based on the survey we did … hundreds of people care very deeply but just don’t have a mechanism to respond.”

According to Wilt, the police were giving complainants the runaround. If a resident had a complaint, the WPS directed callers to the 24-hour hotline at the airport where the helicopter is housed. When residents called the 24-hour hotline, the hotline would tell them to call 311. Then, when they contacted 311, 311 would direct callers to the non-emergency line.

When WPCH made their case to the Winnipeg Police Board, they read the anonymous complaints word for word. In response, the police conceded by posting an official form on their website that submits complaints directly to the head of the helicopter unit.

“Our hope is that we can eventually get hard numbers on people filing complaints,’’ says Wilt. “We didn’t get the helicopter grounded or sold, but we hope the outcome will raise consciousness.”

WPCH is eager to continue building its community presence. They hope to coordinate events in March 2022 on the International Day Against Police Brutality and in April 2022 to commemorate the deaths of Eishia Hudson, Jason Collins, and Stuart Andrews—three Indigenous people shot and killed by the Winnipeg Police over 10 days in April 2020.

Getting back into the community will also involve tabling at local events. Wilt shares that tabling has given WPCH the unique opportunity for face-to-face engagement with people who sometimes offer their opinions, stories, and experiences with the police.

“I think having the feeling that someone cares about what happened is really significant even if we can’t do anything about it,’’ says Wilt. “Just being a set of ears is helpful.”

For years, Ontario’s long-haul truck drivers have decried their unsafe labour conditions, among them the inadequate number of rest stops off of Southern Ontario highways. A petition for more truck parking in Ontario created by private policy group SPR Associates of Toronto aims to improve working environments and safety for the long-haul drivers on the road.

SPR’s 2018 study—No Place to Sleep, No Place to Rest—as well as its 2021 critique of the Ministry of Transportation’s (MTO) response, Asleep at the Wheel, noted a shortage of anywhere between 1,200 to 2,600 parking spots in Southern Ontario, with more needed in Northern Ontario as well. The study itself surveyed 2,300 North American truck drivers who used Southern Ontario highways. Since 2018, the provincial Ministry of Transportation has created an additional 13 overnight spots, with plans for 200 more over the next five years.

Aside from materially improving the conditions of labour for truck drivers, more rest spots mean less danger for everyone on the road. According to the Ontario Provincial Police, fatalities from truck collisions rose by approximately 40 percent from July 2020

to July 2021.

The petition is asking the province to commit to 350 more parking spots annually. For Gary Hazlitt, a semi-retired long-hauler with about 35 years of experience, even though the quality of the stops has improved with the decades, their quantity remains far too low.

“I can remember on more than one occasion after struggling with weather and road conditions, being extremely tired, coming back across the bridge into Canada, knowing that the first rest stop is Tilbury, which is 63 kilometers east of the Windsor bridge crossing,” he says. “All I was doing was fighting to keep alert enough to get to that truck stop rest area, only to get there and find there was no parking.”

His next option was West Lorne, about another 80 kilometres up the road. That, or to pull into the shoulder to try to catch some sleep. Hazlitt considers the latter option extremely dangerous.

“When you’re laying in that bunk and you hear trucks going by you at 65, 70 miles an hour, never mind the cars,” he said. “No matter how tired you are, you’re not going to sleep because every time they go by your truck is rocking.”

Just how far apart are some of these stops? Hazlitt notes that if one was driving into Toronto from Windsor, the last rest area is in Cambridge—which he estimates has around 50 spots for drivers all coming into the metropolitan city.

At this point, you don’t really have any options. You’re already fatigued and, according to Hazlitt, many of the smaller towns and villages that dot Southern Ontario are hostile to truck parking. “No overnight parking” and “no truck parking” signs are seen “all the time.”

“So if the drivers aren’t familiar with the area, getting off the highway means you can get lost, you can get on a road that perhaps you can’t turn around, you can run into clearance restrictions,” he says.

According to the Toronto Star, 54 percent of truck drivers in Toronto are of South Asian descent; another Star article states that 72 percent of the trucking workforce in the Greater Toronto Area are immigrants.

The petition was made in collaboration with the Sikh and Gurudwara Council of Ontario, as well as the NDP Transportation Critic, Oshawa MPP Jennifer French. It also aims to introduce provincial and regional-level task forces, as well as other legislation for improving truck drivers’ labour conditions, like access to bathrooms.

“Overall, MTO’s limited response to the findings from the 2018 truck parking study is consistent with more than a decade of Ministry inaction,” SPR’s 2021 response reads.

Photo courtesy Afros In Tha City

“Our goal was amplifying Black voices,” says Ado Nkemka, deputy editor of Calgary-based media collective Afros In Tha City. The media collective is the only one of its kind in Mohkínstsis/Calgary, exploring topics relevant to the Black experience and supporting the voices of Black journalists in a hegemonically white media landscape.

Founded in 2016, it was originally events-based, offering community discussions, panels, and events and began writing and publishing in 2020, following the death of George Floyd in the U.S. and the racial reckoning that was happening in Canadian consciousness as well. The platform has come a long way since then and published its first piece in October 2020.

The topics covered by Afros In Tha City include music, lifestyle pieces, social commentary, articles about race-based data, environmentalism, artist profiles, and much more. Writers from the collective have gone on to publish on other mainstream platforms such as the CBC and Huffington Post.

“I think that there is a balance,” says Nkemka, “of, like, trying to be a legitimate business, but also not just spitting information out for the sake of spitting it out but [to be] intentional. I think intentionality has to come with that social consciousness that we’re trying to develop.”

An example would be Afros In Tha City’s use of slow journalism, a practice featured at another Calgary-based independent publication, The Sprawl, which Afros In Tha City is affiliated with. When journalists thoughtfully craft an article on an issue, it acts as a resistance to capitalist practices in mainstream journalism, says Nkemka.

“The reader reads through it and knows that,” Nkemka explains, “‘Okay, this isn’t rushed’. I took my time. This wasn’t some—and this is totally shade—but this isn’t some like, ‘Oh, I’m trying to get five articles out in a day type thing ‘cause, you know, business.’”

According to Nkemka, there may be multiple visions in the expansion of the media collective, including panel discussions, a podcast, a spoken word night in collaboration with other organizations in the city, and a future iteration in their ongoing collaboration with The Sprawl. All of these plans further the goal of cementing Afros in the Calgary arts scene.

“We’re hoping that through our work, and hopefully through non-editorial events where we can really engage with the community, people begin to trust us,” Nkemka says. “And not only support but feel like they can come share their stories with us and know that we want to do those stories justice.”

Image courtesy of Michelle Kosak

Michelle Kosak comes from a long line of artistic talent. Growing up, she remembers how her father inspired her and her brother to follow in his creative footsteps. Despite her artsy flair, she remembers kids at school bullying her about her appearance throughout her childhood. She eventually developed an eating disorder that stayed with her into adulthood. While attending Toronto’s OCAD University, she decided to channel her artistic talent into creating a series about insecurities, something she had dealt with first-hand but also something others could relate to. The series was titled Grotesque Gorgeous and featured several brightly-coloured and exaggerated illustrations highlighting how people’s perception of their flaws is warped and emphasizing the preoccupation people have on a “quick-fix” mentality to correct their flaws.

“What we’re insecure about, it kind of makes no sense.… No one else that looks at you sees that. So, I just kind of wanted to make it absolutely ridiculous,” Kosak says.

The series’ illustrations depict common insecurities people may have such as being too short, experiencing baldness, or having a small chest. When preparing for the series, Kosak realized how one’s personal insecurities are often unnoticed by those around them, but exaggerated in the minds of those experiencing them, especially with the presence of social media and influencer culture.

“Talking to other people and hearing what they’re insecure about, like, their nails are too fat, or their toes are too long… it’s like, I’ve never in my life thought about that,” Kosak says.

Now, Kosak is working on an upcoming picture book for adults, which she hopes to self-publish through Amazon by April 2022. The book, which is tentatively titled F*uck Yes/F*uck No: A Quick Guide to Life Decisions, will include comical illustrations to help individuals with their decision-making through life’s good and bad. The book will touch on issues of self-image and building one’s self-esteem among other topics, which Kosak hopes will encourage others to grow their self-love and acceptance.

“Everyone is worthy of love, and it starts with you… sometimes it’s hard, but it takes every day to just get a little better every day to embrace who you are, and love who you are,” she says.