Illustration by Sabahat Ahmad

As a half-Pakistani person, I often cozied up on the couch for Bollywood movie nights with my family growing up. These nights were more than a tradition—they were a rite of passage. I’m a fair-skinned South Asian, and this was a way for me to connect to my culture when I didn’t necessarily present as such on the outside. I idolized the actresses in these movies, awkwardly shaking my preteen hips and listening to soundtracks of films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Aśoka on my CD player days later.

I first visited Toronto in 2015, when I was 24. I came to heal from a bad breakup in my hometown of New York City. A year later, I met my now-husband and fell for him immediately, permanently moving to Canada. He also has a South Asian background, and it made me feel less homesick to experience the comfort of Bollywood nights with my in-laws. We’d throw in our own sassy commentary, poking fun at the soapy love scenes and dramatic dance routines while being enamoured by them at the same time.

My move to Canada was not only out of love for my husband, but love for the city. Toronto has a massive South Asian population (nearly 385,000 as of 2021). It’s also the place with the highest number of South Asians in Canada. In Scarborough, where I live, our cultures are celebrated like nowhere else I’ve been in North America. Despite growing up in a place as diverse as New York, I’d never experienced such a normalized and integrated Indian and Pakistani culture, with aunties walking around in saris and Desi aromas like masala wafting through the streets. As a result, Bollywood carries some heft as a mainstream art form here, and a more diverse range of Bollywood and South Asian films are more present on Canadian Netflix than they are in the States. It’s heartwarming to see the classics of my childhood not just in their own dedicated section but in Netflix’s most-watched films, validating and serving the viewing preferences of the population.

But in the decades between the beloved films of my childhood and Bollywood movies today, not much has changed. The very same thing that brought me comfort is also holding us back as a culture. Only years later, as we watched these movies with my husband’s nieces, did I fully understand the unrealistic beauty standards they presented. European aesthetics are put on a pedestal, and actresses are cast accordingly, sending the message to young South Asian girls that fair means beautiful. As I watched my nieces regularly straighten their gorgeous curls, I reflected on the fact that the wide range of beautiful South Asian women is and was often underrepresented onscreen.

In Canada, these same issues of colourism and racism persist despite the country being globally recognized as a place where all cultures can thrive and coexist harmoniously. This shows us just how pervasive British colonialism remains in India and beyond. In searches for Canadian Bollywood actresses online, starlets like Sunny Leone, Nora Fatehi and Lisa Ray are the first three to pop up. This is in part because they’re the most popular, but it’s no coincidence that they also have fair skin and European features. It makes me feel as though darker-skinned South Asian women are set up for failure. I worry that young Canadian girls like my nieces will inherit these Eurocentric beauty standards, negatively impacting their self-esteem and making them want to fit into an unrealistic mould rather than appreciating what makes them so unique.

In January 2024, I read that Ed Westwick (everyone’s favorite toxic drama king from Gossip Girl) was marrying a Bollywood actress named Amy Jackson. She looked suspiciously Western to me, and with the name Amy Jackson, I knew I had to dive deeper. Was this the case of a name change or something more? She could have been racially ambiguous; as someone who is overtly conscious about being perceived as fully white when I’m not, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I saw the dark hair, olive skin, and light eyes not unlike my own and assumed she must also be of mixed-race heritage. But after a not-so-deep dive online, I discovered that she was, in fact, an English-speaking, British white woman who was somehow ludicrously popular in Bollywood films. I had the same moment of disconnect when watching one of my favorite shows a few years back, Made in Heaven, and discovering that one of the actresses, Kalki Koechlin, was also a Caucasian woman, despite being raised in India and speaking Hindi, which has helped her fit in when she takes on these roles.

In the past, South Asian actresses who passed as white were showcased and picked first. Today, it’s enough to be white and speak the language. I don’t even think I would mind if these actresses openly acknowledged their skin tone. But the fact that it remains hidden and requires some digging begs the question: is this Brownface Lite? Is it cultural appropriation? Or is it okay if these women were raised in Indian culture and consider India their home? It’s tricky to know where to draw the line.

I’m not trying to downplay the acting skills of talented, lighter-skinned South Asian women. It’s their right to take up space in their industry of choice. But I do find it troubling that these light-skinned and white women skyrocket to fame with such ease and are sought out by directors and producers in Bollywood while thousands of talented actresses with South Asian heritage are cast aside.

Bollywood has a history of giving priority to lighter-skinned actresses, and it perpetuates the harmful side effects of the caste system in South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Skin-lightening creams are frequently advertised in India by major stars like Shah Rukh Khan, and it’s always seemed gross to me.

These messages are already too strong in South Asian culture. I attribute much of that to the brainwashing of the British Raj, which dates back to the 1850s, nailing in the mentality that if you have Eurocentric features and traits, you’re bound to succeed. These sentiments are still fully normalized and accepted.

Anyone who watched Indian Matchmaker has probably heard the bevy of problematic things the show’s star, Sima Aunty, has said, often lauding lighter-skinned people as a great catch just because they’re “fair.” She would prioritize women that fit that colourist Bollywood aesthetic for many of the show’s eligible bachelors. My own fair-skinned grandmother would use the slur “kala,” a derogatory term referring to dark-skinned people. In contrast, as someone who is often perceived as fully white, I’ve been called “gori” which refers to a light-skinned or white girl. I’ve always hated this dichotomy. I’ve heard people within my community freely comment on the skin tone of children. This widely accepted language creates a hierarchy and promotes problematic beauty standards—whether it’s meant as a compliment or a passive-aggressive criticism—and it affects children, subconsciously or not.

It feels grotesque for billion-dollar industries like Bollywood to profit off the commodification of white faces in distinctly brown roles. It screams, “brown women, this is what we want of you. This is how you can be seen as a woman.” As if darker-skinned women with distinctly South Asian features are not equally worthy of earning a “vixen” role or being picked out in a crowded audition room.

If Bollywood showed women who represent the full spectrum of South Asian beauty, it would have a global impact, expanding beauty standards in South Asia and beyond. It would improve the self-confidence of women and girls while challenging the outdated norms of colourism and even make the worlds of beauty and fashion more inclusive, making way for a more empowered female population, which we need more than ever on a global scale.

While it might seem like not much has changed, we’re moving in a more positive direction. In Canada, I see hope in talented Canadian stars like Rekha Sharma, Kamal Sidhu, Uppekha Jain, and Parveen Kaur. It’s no surprise that Canada is leading the charge in showing the many forms that brown beauty can take beyond a skinny nose and pale skin, which will hopefully create a ripple effect in other countries.

Brown women will always remain at the heart of Bollywood, and if, as audiences, we can start to acknowledge how women internalize what they see onscreen, we can start to consciously change both the everyday lexicon we use to discuss beauty and the narratives we craft.

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.

Illustration by Valerie Thai

Now that my son is seven, our weekend mornings have gelled into a proper routine. He wakes up at some ungodly hour—earlier, by the way, than he gets up on weekdays—and plays for a while in his room. When he’s tired of that, he’ll grab a couple of granola bars from the kitchen and then find the family iPad. By the time I’m (finally) awake, he can usually be found sitting on his bedroom floor, his face creased into a frown of concentration as he swipes his way through whatever Netflix Kids is currently offering. His current favourites include a cartoon called Masha’s Spooky Stories and Teen Titans Go!, the latter of which made him think it was the height of hilarity to exclaim, “Look at those juicy thighs!” every time I wore shorts this summer.

I can remember the weekend mornings of my own childhood in the 1990s very clearly: the hush of our suburban neighbourhood, the ugly grey carpet scrunched beneath my bare feet and matched the colour of the pre-dawn sky, the impenetrable barrier of my parents’ bedroom door, which I was not allowed to breach until they were up for the day. Like my son, I would help myself to whatever food was available— usually Alpha-Bits, the plain kind, although I coveted the ones that had marshmallows. Then I would head down to our barely finished basement, where I would spend the next few hours watching cartoons. On the surface, this doesn’t seem so different from my son’s routine. But when I try to explain the details of it to him—the boxy old television, the five flickering channels we had to pick between, the fact that I had to wait a whole week between watching one episode of the Ninja Turtles and the next—I feel like I’m describing something so foreign that it’s hard to figure out the words to properly convey what it was like.

Where do I even start when some baseline words hold such different meanings today than they did three decades ago? When I’m telling a story about my child-self making a phone call, I picture myself talking on the big white rotary dial telephone that we had until I was 12; my son, by contrast, imagines me pressing the little green icon on an iPhone. For me, making calls is the raison d’être for the telephone; for my son, calling people is just one app among many. I blew his mind a few years ago when I told him that when I was a kid, phones didn’t have cameras. “But how did you take pictures back then?” he asked. And then: “What about walls? Did you have those? Were they even invented yet?” I can see his point: if this one thing that he considers to be a dependable and fixed part of the universe has not always been that way, then how can he know what to trust? The idea of a universe where phones can only do one thing—and not a very interesting thing, at that—both astonishes and disturbs him.

There is a part near the end of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1932 novel Little House in the Big Woods where she describes lying in bed in her family’s log cabin and listening to her father play “Auld Lang Syne” on the fiddle. When he finishes, she asks him what the days of auld lang syne are, and he replies that they are the days of long ago. As she considers this, she tells herself that the “now” she lives in will always be now; it could never be a long time ago. I remember reading this passage as a kid and trying to figure out the paradox it offered. The time that Laura lived in, with its calico print dresses and wood stoves and lack of indoor plumbing, had inarguably happened a long time before I was born. But even though it was obvious to me that Laura’s present had eventually become the past, I was just as certain that the clothing, culture, and technology of the ’90s would never feel old. Even when I became a parent, by which point the decade of my childhood felt like the ancient past, I didn’t consider the cultural gap that would exist between my son and me.

It’s hardest for me to understand how the way we view information has changed. I don’t mean the ways in which we consume it and relay it, although those things are obviously different now than when I was younger; I mean the qualities we attach to it. By the time I was a tween, every bit of media felt so precious. If I wanted to watch an X-Files episode more than once, I had to make sure to record it on my VCR (and then make sure that no one else in my family taped over it). I kept a shoebox full of interviews with Tori Amos, each of which I had painstakingly cut out of newspapers and magazines. If I wanted to read up on the Black Death (I was a weirdly morbid kid), I had to go to the library, find the right keyword in their computer system, and then sift through the chapters of various books until I found what I was looking for. I would often photocopy things or write down quotes that seemed especially important; I remember feeling this urgent need to hold onto everything, because nothing seemed permanent. Once an article or a book or an episode of a favourite show was lost, there was a good chance that I would never find it again.

It’s not like that for my son, though. If he wants to know more about outer space, everything he needs is at his fingertips—YouTube videos, podcasts, articles written by actual NASA astrophysicists. And none of it is in danger of disappearing; after all, once something goes on the internet, it’s usually there forever in some capacity.

This might sound like some kind of value judgment about kids these days, but I promise that it’s not. Greater access to information is never a bad thing. Consider this: my great grandmother grew up in a house with two books (one of which was the Bible) and she probably treated them with a devotion that I wouldn’t be able to muster for any individual volume in my library. Books were, for her, a nearly irreplaceable treasure, whereas if I lose one of mine, I can usually find another copy quickly and cheaply. Would anyone argue that owning literally hundreds of times the number of books that my great grandmother did somehow means that I am somehow living a less wholesome or engaged life?

Like any parent, I have some anxieties about what changing technologies will mean for my kid, but most of them centre around how he will use them to interact with his peers. Will I know what to do if he’s being bullied on social media? What limits will be fair to set on devices that he uses for learning, entertainment and socializing? How can I know if I’m making the right choices, not just making it up as I go along?

Sometimes it can feel like these are questions unique to the past decade or two, but I suspect that every generation of parents has wrestled with them in some way or another. It’s tempting to try to find someone or something to blame for the ways in which the world is changing—over-indulged kids, lazy parents, the technology itself—but to look for a scapegoat is a way of refusing to deal with a fundamental truth about life, namely that change is not good or bad, it just is.

I feel the same way about social media and smartphones and streaming services; they’re a part of our world now, whether we like it or not. There’s no going back to how things were before. Our only choice is to learn to adapt as best we can and accept that the day will come sooner rather than later when our kids’ understanding of how to navigate technology and media outstrips our own.

It’s tempting to dread what you don’t know, and I certainly don’t know what the world will be like when my kid is a teenager or a young adult. But instead of giving into that fear, I’m trying to be excited about the brave new world he’s growing up in. My parents must have faced similar challenges, and someday my son will live through his own season of realizing that the phones, tablets, and computers he grew up with are clunky and obsolete. By then, maybe our respective childhood weekend mornings won’t feel so different from each other; just two more links in the chain of ever-advancing cartoon consuming technology. Until that day, I reserve the right to feel like an old crank every time he asks me to explain the exotic functions of the VCR.

For Erica Shiner, 2015 marked the year she first launched herself into the world of feminist activism.

That May, she started a petition to stop American rapper Action Bronson from performing at Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square for annual music festival North by Northeast, saying his lyrics “[glorify] gang-raping and murdering women.” After gaining more than 40,000 signatures, Bronson was pulled from the festival. “That kind of launched me into feminist activism, even though I’d always been, from a young age, doing silly art projects with Barbies in chains and had a pretty feminist mom,” says Shiner. “I was always engaged, but not as directly as I became after doing the petition.”

Later that year, she also joined Roncesvalles-based Revue Cinema’s board of directors. “It’s a community-run not-for-profit, so there’s always a lot of opportunity for doing fundraising stuff there,” she says. A year later, Bechdel Tested was born. The bimonthly series hosted at the Revue aims to screen women-centred, Bechdel-approved films about different industries, each preceded by a Q&A with industry experts. “I wanted to use cinema to bring people together,” she says. “It was really important to me to do something that supported women in their careers, because … we’re the first few generations of women who were even allowed to work in so many industries.” Through Bechdel Tested, Shiner wants to create a space where women can learn from each other—not only about how to enter different industries, but also how to overcome gender-based issues in those industries.

The Bechdel test was first created in 1985 by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel. In order for a film to pass the test, it has to have at least two women in it who talk to each other about a topic that doesn’t involve a man. It offers a more nuanced method of evaluating female representation—that women are not only portrayed on film, but that they are portrayed well.

The series’ latest segment, Women in Religion, screened the 1983 film Yentl, starring Barbra Streisand and featured panelists like Cheri DiNovo, MPP and queer critic-turned-minister, and Farheen Khan, an activist and author. Attendees were served pink “Holy Water” cocktails from Swan Dive, a bar owned by Shiner’s sister.

Erica Shiner.

“We have sold out a few times, and our events tend to be pretty popular. I think that that speaks to the hunger for feminist programming that’s really thriving right now in our city,” says Shiner. “It’s sending a message to everyone that women can be central characters, that directors can tell their stories from a woman’s gaze.”

This month’s event, Women in Politics, will screen Election starring Reese Witherspoon. The panel will include Toronto city councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam and Michal Hay, Jagmeet Singh’s campaign manager. Shiner is mindful of having inclusive and diverse representation at the screenings—something she admits is more difficult with the films themselves. “It’s already hard enough to find films in a particular industry where women are central,” she says.

Bechdel Tested’s next screening is set for February 18. Shiner says future plans for the series are not yet public, aside from wanting to expand into areas outside of film.

“I really believe that the path to gender equality is in women’s solidarity … It’s just an important conversation, and that’s what’s valuable about it.”

CORRECTION (02/15/2018): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the series hosts their Q&As after screenings of their films. This regrets the error.

Stand-up comic Erika Ehler.

I take improv on Wednesday nights in a basement dance studio with floors so sensitive we’re not allowed to wear outdoor shoes on them. The ratio of men to women in the class is about five to one, which is pretty normal. It’s my turn to play.

On stage my scene partner stations himself at an imaginary computer, tapping the keyboard. He says, “It’s not working!” and I go over, put my hands on my hips and say “Hmm.” The teacher shouts to stop and we freeze.

“What do you think is happening in this scene?” she asks.

“Steph is coming on to him,” one of the male students says.

“Yeah,” another man chimes in. “Definitely something sexual here.”

In my head I’d imagined I was wearing coveralls and had a moustache. I wasn’t thinking about sex with a co-worker. Before I have the chance to say so though, the teacher shouts “Go!” and we continue the scene with the attributes we’ve been endowed with.

A week later, we’re working on an improv tool called “second beats,” where we take elements from previous scenes (characters, attitudes, objects) and play them in a new environment. A male player walks on stage and asks his female scene partner, “How’s your vagina?”

I immediately look to the teacher to see if he will stop the scene or give a redirect, but he’s silent. The woman on stage stumbles over some words. We make eye contact (I’m the only other woman in the room) but I don’t say anything either—I don’t know what to do. In the scene before, another male student complained about his sex life and his scene partner inquired whether his wife was wet. So, loosely, his question could be labelled as a second beat. I’d like to argue that unless you find yourself engaged in sexual activities with a person with a vagina, it’s probably never okay to ask that question.

Being a woman in comedy means you can’t just be in comedy. You can’t separate your identity from your hobby, passion, or place of work. In class and on stage, I make the same choices I’d make on the sidewalk and streetcar, in the bar and at the gym, but now everyone’s looking. Inseparably woman here, my choices are weighted by knowing I might have to teach a group lesson to a wily room.

Erinn White, a stand up-comedian in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., shoulders this responsibility in her material, which she calls “observationally political and explicitly feminist.” The 35-year-old has told men in her shows who believe (and vocalized) that they thought it was their job to heckle that they won’t be able to shut her up. “Because I’m older than the general comedy club crowd and look physically nonthreatening—like a history teacher,” she believes she can sometimes get away with calling people out.

But Erika Ehler, a Toronto stand-up, has had a different experience. “There’s no reward for doing the right thing,” she says. Ehler quit running an open-mic at the venue Smiling Buddha when a racist comic wasn’t fired or banned from the premises after his repeated behaviour. Both women have been accused of “being delicate” and told they “can’t take a joke.”

It’s why I didn’t stop the scene in class myself. I couldn’t decide if it was my job to stand up. It sometimes feels like women can’t do anything but just go along with dastardly behaviour without losing a room, friend, or gig.

“There are times where the people who have the power don’t see the problem or don’t care,” says White. “So who has the authority and the obligation to confront this stuff?”

In one way, it’s us.

Even though it’s uncomfortable, I won’t stay quiet the next time sexist behaviour plays on stage or in class. Stage lights play tricks and make some people think they’re as big as their shadows. But when I tell a sexist to suck it, or at least back off, it’s bigger than me.

F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminsim

In her first book, F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, Lauren McKeon, an award-winning writer, former This Magazine editor, and contributing editor at Toronto Life, investigates why contemporary feminism is deeply fragmented, and argues that we cannot continue to ignore women who practise an actively anti-feminist politic if we want to counteract their messages on a grand scale. In a manner that is both personal and unpretentious, McKeon deftly critiques more palatable “empowerment” and “choice” narratives of feminism, and demonstrates why our feminism(s) must be intersectional, embrace difference, and begin with compassion.

My book tour took me across Canada and despite being between 22 and 29 weeks pregnant with twins, it was nearly the same as travelling when I wasn’t pregnant. The only differences: I was deadly tired, I had to check my luggage because I couldn’t lug it around with me, and I had to anticipate well-meaning friends offering me terrible advice.

The advice ranged from you simply cannot travel, you will miscarry, to warnings that my travel days would soon be over. The night of the Vancouver launch, I poured myself a third of a tiny glass of wine. I was getting to the end and I was ready to have wine again. A male friend watched in terror, horrified that I might be doing something reckless.

The perception other people had of my abilities or capacities to operate while carrying twins was what I remember most from my professional life in 2013. People couldn’t believe that I wrote a book with so-called Baby Brain, or that I was capable of a book tour.

That’s why for the past few months I closely watched the NDP leadership race and how Niki Ashton was perceived, celebrated and, often, ignored. 

Each of the male candidates crafted a persona that balanced mainstream electability with edgy social democracy: Angus is a punk rocker who has got your back. Caron is an economist who seemingly ran to be the NDP’s first finance minister. Singh’s landslide victory was, at least in part, thanks to the image he crafted of a stylish, hip fighter who can go toe-to-toe with Trudeau—whether in the House of Commons or in a boxing ring.

But Ashton stood apart from the group—both thanks to her politics and, more insidiously, the limits of her gender and pregnancy.

Ashton’s pregnancy barely entered into the discussion about her candidacy. None of the male candidates made an issue out of it. But they didn’t have to. Once the first wave of articles announcing her pregnancy passed (and then the second wave, as everything comes in twos with twins), silence about Ashton’s capacities emerged, leaving the chatter to percolate on social media alone. This allowed for stereotypes and anti-parent rhetoric to dominate the discussion.

Qualifying the impact that anti-pregnancy bias has is difficult, but the comments I’ve seen are illustrative: questioning the period of time that Ashton would take off, wondering how Ashton would lead the party while also “feeding on demand,” how she would manage work and home life. Those questions could be legitimate, but a debate, whether in the press or among the membership would have to happen. The lack of open debate or discussion about Ashton’s pregnancy is indicative that many NDP members feared that if she couldn’t hit the ground running on January 1 as the leader because she’s covered in baby goo, she is a less desirable candidate than one of the men running.

The reason why I know that these questions aren’t simply innocent is because I’m an expert in what people who do not have twins think about people who do have twins. I, like probably every single twin parent in Canada, have heard it all. Did they sleep together? (Kind of.) Did I breastfeed? (Kind of.) Did I breastfeed them at the same time? (God, no.) Are they identical? (No.) Is it the worst? (Yes.) Is it the easiest way to have kids? (So very no.) How did you ever find time to work? (It was easy: I needed the breaks.) And so on. Buried in every question is an assumption that I’d gleefully puncture.

The conceptions that people have about having twins are usually all wrong. Everything that characterizes a singleton pregnancy flies out the window when you’re blessed with an egg mutation that unbelievably places two humans inside of you. You have no time for reading or practicing parenting theories. The list of issues that characterize the early days with twins is long and rarely fit into what people think it must be like: isolation, boredom, mastitis, double liquefied poo explosions, injuries, hair pulling, quadruple illnesses, travel challenges, daily laundry.

And it’s within this that the stereotypes of the mother’s role are most evident. New mothers are barely allowed to be whole persons; mothers of twins simply cannot be whole persons. They must be laying on the living room floor meeting every single need of their new offspring.

I saw comments like these posed on Facebook in relation to Ashton’s ability to lead the NDP, and they need to be aired and discussed. When silence replaces conversations about post-natal life, stigma and stereotypes about motherhood will take root.

Will Ashton double feed? Will she be up at night when one cries? Can she perform in the House of Commons on two hours of sleep? Is her partner serious about being present for 24-hour care? Can a father ever really replace a mother in those precious early days?

Ugh.

Parenting twins is about survival. In the beginning, all my partner and I did was ensure that the kids were fed, clean enough, and sleeping.

But we also continued to work. We went back to work immediately while our kids were hospitalized (because there was literally nothing for us to do otherwise) and, despite taking some time off, we were travelling again in two months, working on the edges once they were both home. We had the support and help from our friends to make it work. I clocked the most amount of cross-Canada travel for work in my life the year my kids were born.

Pregnancy forces us to re-consider the structures and barriers in place that prohibit participation in politics. And, if we don’t talk about them, we further entrench sexist and ablest barriers. Images of breast-feeding parliamentarians aren’t feel-good examples of women’s liberation. They’re dynamic pictures of how to parent on the fly while maintaining your own career—and every story contains lessons about how to make politics better for new parents.

The silence about Ashton’s pregnancy only served one goal: to quietly convince the membership that a pregnant politician is a liability. As the candidate with the most audaciously left platform, writing her off her because of her pregnancy also meant not needing to seriously contend with any of her policies. Whether or not a majority of the membership supported her vision is one thing. Whether or not a majority of the membership were uncomfortable with her pregnancy is a wholly separate matter.

We have to talk about pregnancy in politics if we have any hope of making things better for politicians who want to bear children.

The latter woman, Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of New Wave Feminists (slogan: “Badass. Prolife. Feminists.”), was on stage. As part of a panel featuring “young leaders,” she sat with two other women. One was Alexandra Swoyer, another Ave Maria graduate and a Washington Times journalist who covered the presidential campaign for Breitbart. The other was Alison Howard, the director of alliance relations at Alliance Defending Freedom. Each had their cell phone out, fingers swiping and connecting. Moments earlier, by way of introduction, the moderator, Jill Stanek, the national campaign chair of the Susan B. Anthony List, crowed, “I have surmised that you all know that we won, right?” She went on to say that the anti-abortion movement must prepare for “the most evil tricks that we can’t even possibly imagine” and called feminists “perennial losers.” She cheered what she deemed feminism’s “generational in-fighting” and its “reluctance to pass the torch”—stoking the divisiveness within the movement. “My observation of the pro-life movement is exactly the opposite. We first demonstrate the love of our young people before they were even born,” she said, emphatically if not grammatically. She was so proud of the women on stage, she beamed. “These women are so precious.”

Herndon-De La Rosa had recently catapulted onto the national stage after New Wave Feminists applied to become a partner at the Women’s March on Washington and was, to her great initial surprise, accepted, and then, swiftly and much less to her surprise, rejected. The march pointed to its pro–abortion rights stance as the reason for its rescinded partnership, but Herndon-De La Rosa “invaded” the totally public march anyway (the audience applauded wildly at this, as if she’d infiltrated the Gestapo) and welcomed the publicity boost the controversy created. She went on to say there were no hard feelings and joked that she “needed to send them a fruit basket, because this is the best thing that’s ever happened.” I’m not sure what she said after that because the room erupted in laughter and clapping, drowning her out. A few minutes later, she won the room again when Stanek asked the panelists how they saw the movement’s future. “The future is pro-life female,” answered Herndon-De La Rosa, riffing off a popular feminist T-shirt with a similar slogan. She added that it was important for anti-abortion advocates to promote the pro-women narrative. “We’re not trying to control women or take over their bodies—that’s not it at all,” she told the crowd. “We believe that you should have control over your body from the moment it first exists.”

Yikes.

Moments later, after the panel ended, the audience voted to skip their washroom break—they were too engaged to stop. Hood, who emceed the conference, his face permanently pink with excitement, encouraged attendees to step out if they needed to, directing them to the men’s room. “There are restrooms,” he added, hesitating, before jovially breaking off to responding laughter and shouts of “good for you!” as he confessed, “I don’t know where the women’s room is.” A few minutes after that, the audience broke into another round of rowdy, gleeful laughter when John-Henry Weston, editor-in-chief of the website LifeSite: Life, Family & Culture News, jumped up on stage, holding his laptop, voice hiccupping in excitement as he interrupted Hood.

“Outside the conference room, teenage girls clumped together. The youth rally had ended at the same time. I was surprised to see how many of them carried signs that read ‘True feminists protect human life.'”

“Breaking news! President Trump just did it again,” he cried, emphasizing “again” with Shakespearian drama. “He once AGAIN called out the mainstream media for not coming to cover the March for Life.” Giddy noises rippled through the crowd. “He’s like our best advertisement tool right now.” Westen broke off into giggles that were answered with more laughter and riotous clapping. “President Trump is also confirming—officially, sort of—that Mike Pence is going to show up tomorrow.” At this, the audience lost composure, filling the room with shouts of “Wow!” He continued quoting Trump, and the audience continued mirroring his excitement, hollering victory.

What a fun crowd!

The blending of traditional conservatism and new feminism made for a strange but effective mix. In one breath, we got speakers who asserted things like “mom’s the real issue”—referring to the presumed superiority of the traditional family structure and the sanctity of motherhood—and, in the next, other speakers praised feminism and lamented what they saw as a you-can’t-sit-with-us mentality in the movement. Both, however, preached a brand of pro-women activism rooted in restriction, no matter how often it employed “dank memes,” risqué language, or Urban Outfitters–style (ahem, sorry, Pro-Life Outfitters) “All Lives Matter” shirts shilled on tattooed bodies. While it’s beyond my purview to define someone’s feminism for them, the more I became exposed to the Anti-Abortion Movement Dictionary’s meaning of feminism, the more I became convinced it wasn’t as advertised: a sort of modern feminism-for-everybody with a “pro-life” twist. Take one of New Wave Feminism’s memes, for example, a funky pink text on a black, distressed background: “We reject the failed feminism of victimhood and violence, for ourselves and for our unborn children.” In the corresponding Instagram caption, Herndon-De La Rosa added, “The fauxminists can have #victimhood if they want it. Real #feminism is beyond that.”

Well, now, doesn’t that sound familiar?

Outside the conference room, teenage girls clumped together. The youth rally had ended at the same time. I was surprised to see how many of them carried signs that read “True feminists protect human life.” (The signs were hot pink, of course, a shade so ubiquitous that day it might as well have been the event’s official color.) At the bottom of the sign, a pink banner highlighted the Guiding Star Project, accompanied by #NEWfeminism.

Curious about what, exactly, new feminism was, I hunted down the organization’s booth at the nearby trade show, where teenage girls carrying the signs were even more abundant. I scanned through a pamphlet at the booth, which was bordered by still more young girls, trying to master my poker face. “‘Old feminism,’” read the pamphlet, “is based on the idea that men and women are interchangeable and that women have been unfairly held back from achieving their potential in society because of their role as mothers in the home.” (Oh, geez.) “New Feminism,” the pamphlet explained, “views femininity through a lens of hope and joy. We honour the unique feminine genius—the way women think, perceive, and love as women—and celebrate that these strengths are compatible with the strengths of others. We know that true feminine success is measured by a woman’s love of others” [italics theirs]. Sure, fine, but I had just one question: by what bar is true masculine success measured? The pamphlet didn’t say, but I’d seen enough that day to guess.

I wandered through the trade show, checking out the other feminist-branded booths. For all their dismissal of “old” feminism, these groups tended to promote a feminism that was—well—musty, like first-wave, nearly-a century-gone, make-sure-you-have-mothballs-handy-because-it’s-so-old kind of old feminism. Non-profit Life Matters Journal, a publication of Rehumanize International, an organization that describes itself as “a non-partisan, non-sectarian/secular group dedicated to the cause of life,” displayed a giant mint-and-pink standing banner that asked, in lettering reminiscent of both tattoos and Pinterest, “Can you be Pro-Life and Feminist?” On it, they’d given Rosie the Riveter a makeover, rendering her face blank except for a piece of tape over her mouth that read “life,” a nod to the Silent Siege project, which calls its tactics a “divine strategy from the Lord”—a strange choice for a supposedly secular group. As the banner pointed out, early feminists, including Alice Paul, who spearheaded the battle for women’s right to vote in the U.S., and Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the U.S., largely protested abortion, at least in public. Still, as much as we owe a debt to these women, I’m not about to grab a petticoat and try to be them. I might picture myself standing on their shoulders, but it’s not in a straight and unwavering line. Rather, it’s an inverted pyramid that allows for pluralities and expansion, a rejection of this idea that it’s good to go backward.

Excerpted from F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism copyright © 2017 by Lauren McKeon. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions.

Photo courtesy of L’Euguélionne.

On a Thursday evening in May, about a dozen women gather around a large wooden table at L’Euguélionne, Canada’s only feminist bookstore. The Montreal shop is filled with chatter as the crew, participants in a zine-making workshop, sift through piles of paper. Since it opened in December 2016, L’Euguélionne has become a hub, hosting public events like this one, along with launches, discussion groups, panels, and intimate concerts nearly every night—and Montrealers have been quick to embrace it, says Stéphanie Dufresne, one of the store’s six co-owners. “I think it’s magical in that we’ve received a positive reaction from so many communities,” she says.

Located in the city’s gay village, L’Euguélionne carries about 4,000 titles—from sci-fi and graphic novels, to poetry, critical essays, and zines. While most material is in French, the staff hopes to expand their English inventory this summer.

Still, for the owners, launching a feminist bookstore was about more than just literature. While they’re aiming to elevate feminist writers and voices—particularly those who tend to go unrecognized like queer writers and writers of colour—they’re also hoping to fill a void.

Dufresne says that starts with the neighbourhood. “The discourse that surrounds the village is that it’s for LGBTQ+ people but when you look at who uses the space, who owns the businesses, it’s mostly gay men,” she explains. “We thought it was a somewhat political move to… create a space for women, feminine-identified, and gender non-conforming people.”

Lack of space is something she also sees throughout the city. While there’s been an increasing focus on feminist issues in recent years, Dufresne points out that there are still few designated spaces where communities can learn about and share feminist ideas. To her, having a building where others can reliably meet and access information is key. “Media discussions are temporary. A story breaks and disappears,” she says. “But books are more permanent and can provide context.”

So far, L’Euguélionne has allowed many types of feminists to interact, Dufresne says. Parents arrive looking for books for their kids. Students come to purchase course material. A recent panel discussion between a number of academics was attended by a group of older women from a nearby women’s shelter, some of whom had participated in Montreal’s feminist movements in the 1960s and ’70s.

Moving forward, Dufresne says she and her fellow co-owners hope to continue to see patrons using the space to elevate and educate one another.

“My definition of feminism is, if it’s not intersectional what’s the point?” she says. “If you exclude people you’re just reproducing what you’re trying to fight.”

Tamsyn Riddle was excited to start her university courses in 2015. At the University of Toronto, where she majors in diaspora and transnational studies and minors in equity studies and political science, her academic successes would be appreciated in a way that they weren’t at her Peterborough high school. Plus, she could be a part of Trinity College’s elite culture, where many students dream of someday becoming prime minister.

But that excitement quickly dissipated in her first year, when Riddle says she was raped by a fellow freshman student at a quad party hosted by the college. She reported the incident to the school, having faith they would help her. Instead, the school spent more than a year on an investigation that let her accused assailant walk free.

Now, Riddle is trying to enact change. On April 4, 2017, she filed a human rights complaint against the school. The complaint outlines “[discrimination] against Ms. Riddle based on sex by failing to properly investigate and remedy the assault that she experienced and by failing to provide Ms. Riddle with a safe, discrimination-free learning environment.”

Riddle made her complaint public, sharing it at the Silence is Violence press conference “Survivors Speak Back: Confronting Sexual Assault at the University of Toronto” this April. There, she told media that she loved Trinity College and the University of Toronto, and it was hard for her to believe that the school loved her back as a survivor of sexual violence.

Riddle filed the complaint after the school took 16 months to finish an investigation into her and another student’s sexual assault allegations against a first-year male student. “The human rights complaint is for me, but it is also about changing the institution,” Riddle says.

U of T has not commented on Riddle’s case specifically in the media. “We can’t comment on the specifics of individual cases,” University of Toronto director of media relations Althea Blackburn-Evans told This.

In spring 2015, when Riddle says she was assaulted, she told a friend. Her friend knew someone who said she was assaulted months earlier by the same man. Riddle and the other woman reported their cases to school officials together. Riddle then heard her options. She could report the case to police, but there could be potential drawbacks, such as retaliation by her assailant or disappointment in police actions. Riddle was already aware about institutional rape culture and victim blaming in the state’s justice system and was not planning on reporting to the police before these comments.

Instead, Riddle decided to proceed with a hearing through the university. In a hearing, a school administrator decides what the process will look like and what evidence will be admitted. Because Riddle would be considered a witness to an alleged crime, she would not get a lawyer—but her alleged assailant would, and she could be cross-examined. In January 2016, Riddle received correspondence from the school that they were proceeding with a hearing. She tried to prepare for a hearing mentally and emotionally, educating herself on policy. But she says it was hard for her to keep focus on her studies with such uncertainty around her.

As per the university policy at the time, interim measures would be in place for a year: The accused could not lead any school clubs, join any Trinity College clubs (though any outside of the college were considered fair game), live on residence, take the same classes as Riddle, or eat in the dining hall. He also had to see a counsellor. Despite these measures she still saw him around campus.

After months of waiting, the hearing never came. On August 29, 2016, Riddle was informed that the university had settled the case with her alleged assailant and his lawyer. The resolutions the two sides had come to were deemed confidential.

Over the summer of 2016, while the school was dodging her calls, Riddle joined the University of Toronto chapter of Silence is Violence (SiV). The survivor-led group, according to its official site, “aims to radically alter the culture of institutional violence on university campuses across Canada.” Members of the group—Jassie Justice, Mira El Hussein, and U of T chapter founder Ellie Ade Kur—sat with Riddle when she announced that she was filing a human rights complaint. It was the first time Riddle says she found a sense of community on the campus since her assault.

In January 2017 universities and colleges legally had to make changes in accordance with Bill 132, Ontario’s Sexual Violence and Harassment Action Plan Act. The bill states that with student input every college and university must have a sexual violence policy that sets a process for how the school will respond to such incidents and complaints. But U of T’s policy—along with the policies of other schools—has been criticized as confusing. Riddle describes the language used in the 13-page document as vague. “If you are reading through it as a survivor, you would get tired,” she says.

The school, however, says students were part of the process to create the document. “I can tell you that we’ve been consulting with our community—including our students—very broadly over the last couple of years to develop our new sexual violence policy,” Blackburn-Evans told This.

Riddle’s recommendations in her human rights complaint are clear: She wants improved communication, timelines on action, automatically giving academic survivors counselling and help, and legal counsel for sexual assault survivors. “I’m looking for the university to start seriously addressing sexual violence,” Riddle said after announcing her filed complaint, “in a way that shows that it sees itself as being accountable to survivors at this institution.”