Photo by Katie Rainbow via Pexels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustration by Olivia Thomson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On August 25, 2003, a transgender woman named Cassandra Do was found dead in her apartment on Gloucester Street in Toronto’s LGBTQ Village.

I don’t know much about Cassandra aside from some essential facts: She was 32, she did sex work, she was once in nursing school, she was Vietnamese. In one of the first Toronto Star articles about her death, her friends mentioned she had a “penchant for French antique furniture.” But her story remained untold.

Forensic evidence from the scene of Cassandra’s apartment suggested her murderer was someone who had committed a sexual assault back in 1997, targeting another Southeast Asian sex worker. The 1997 victim survived the attack and was able to provide the police with a detailed description of the perpetrator as a large cisgender man in his late 30s or early 40s. But from then to 2003, Toronto police did not make the public aware of it until he struck again.

As a trans woman of colour as well as a sex worker, Cassandra was at high risk of experiencing everyday violence, discrimination, and mistreatment by the police. In fact, for many sex workers and for trans people of colour, some form of police harassment is a regular occurrence. While national statistics on transgender people are hard to come by, provincial and local research illustrates what most of us already know: A 2010 survey of trans people in Ontario by Trans Pulse (a project collecting data on access to health care in the trans community) found that roughly a third of trans people who have been incarcerated reported transphobic harassment from the police; the same study notes roughly a quarter of racialized trans people and a third of Indigenous trans and Two-Spirit people reported harassment from the police due to racism.

Yasmeen Persad—an educator, facilitator, and community worker who provides training for racialized LGBTQ people and HIV-positive LGBTQ women in Toronto—encounters this regularly with those in the trans community. “When it comes to law enforcement, there are a lot of challenges,” Persad says. “Because of their identities, of who they are, by default it sets them up for more police scrutiny. Many [people I work with] are newcomers, immigrants, sex workers, living precariously, in the shelter system, under-housed—these people who are often on the fringe of everyday day-to-day survival have real challenges with the police.”

When they are targets of violence, both sex workers and trans women are often dismissed as victims of their of circumstances. Not having a fixed address, being potentially exposed to drugs, and subverting assigned expectations of gender and sexuality contribute to a public perception of carelessness and deviance that tells people and institutions how much they have to care about those they see as putting themselves at risk.

Talking about the lives of trans women is frequently a conversation about risk, and the kinds of risks that cisgender communities and institutions take for granted. Stories about Cassandra’s murder in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail focused on the details of her transition, her sex work, and her past in nursing school. According to the site Accozzaglia, a transgender history project run by long-time trans community members in Toronto, the message was clear: “Journalists fabricated a narrative on morality which could try to rationalize how Ms. Do probably brought this death on herself, because she was a woman of colour, trans, and had earned her living from sex work—throwing away a more ‘acceptable’ nursing career.”

The way that the police and the press treated Cassandra’s case was typical of their treatment of trans women at the time. That same year, a trans woman of colour named Shelby Tracy Tom was murdered in Vancouver by a man named Jatin Patel. Reports at the time referred to Shelby only as “an Asian transsexual prostitute.” Police took several days to inform other community members of what happened to Shelby, prompting harsh criticism from other sex workers who felt that withholding information unduly put them at risk.

We still don’t know the identity of the man who killed Cassandra. In February 2016, the police unveiled their new cold-case site, which aimed to publicize information about unsolved cases to engage the public in looking for new information. The next day, the police posted a two-minute video to YouTube describing her case, taking care to disclose the status of her medical transition. Interest in Cassandra’s case briefly renewed, 13 years after she was murdered by a man who had a history of violence against sex-working women of Asian descent. But it soon fizzled out. There was nothing new to be learned.

II: Deanna Wilkinson

Yasmeen Persad’s office at The 519, a queer community centre located in the heart of Toronto’s Village, the area surrounding Church and Wellesley streets. There, she leads the Trans-Identified People of Colour Project. “We work with a lot of trans women who in the summertime might be hanging out in the park because they might be accessing the shelter system, and during certain times of the day the shelter might be closed,” she tells me. “Police see them as troublemakers, like they just shouldn’t be there.”

The Church and Wellesley neighbourhood has seen some significant changes over the last few decades, particularly with how the area is policed. According to Patience Newbury, a scholar of transgender issues related to public space well-versed in the history of the Village, the 1990s saw numerous incidents of assault and vandalism where police would avoid getting involved, or admonish those living there who stood up for themselves. But around the mid- to late ’90s, things shifted. Cisgender people, mostly gay men, began to buy up storefronts and needed to work with police. They wanted cleaner sidewalks, less noise and sleaze, and fewer homeless people, so as to maintain the value of their properties.

Newbury says among the biggest losers in this new closer relationship between cis gay people and police were the trans women who lived and worked in the area. Property ownership in the Village that was accessible to cisgender people was completely out of reach for trans people, especially women, who are relegated to informal and unprotected work. For trans sex workers, the Village was, and remains, one of the key spots to conduct street-based work. The main stretch of road where many trans women make their livelihood is just east of Church and Wellesley, on a street called Homewood Avenue.

Business has taken a hit, largely due to changes in who formally occupies the space. And in the absence of good-faith regulation and worker protections, many sex workers are unduly put at risk as a result of law enforcement.

Since 2014, some laws around sex work have changed in letter, though not entirely in spirit. Sex workers no longer face the direct threat of imprisonment as a consequence of their work. But the risk hasn’t disappeared: It’s still illegal to purchase the services of a sex worker, and to “communicate” for the purposes of doing so, which forces many people into underground and unsafe positions. Police also respond to neighbourhood complaints by stopping and questioning sex workers, a form of casual harassment. Most studies on the legal status of sex work have found that enforcement creates greater risk of harm for sex workers than otherwise, by forcing workers into worse-lit, less accessible, and more isolated locations to avoid police.

Trust in the police is understandably low among sex workers. There’s a long history of exploitation and sexual violence at the hands of law enforcement, especially against women of colour. Just last winter, a member of the Vancouver Police Department was exposed for allegedly exploiting vulnerable sex workers that they had been charged to protect.

“I think any sex worker is threatened by police,” says Monica Forrester, a program coordinator at Maggie’s, a safe community space and resource centre for sex workers in Toronto. She’s been involved in activism on behalf of sex workers and the transgender women for years. “The police will harass the girls mostly when there’s complaints. The girls work in an area where I would say more gay men live, and there has been some friction with the gay men in the area where they work. Police will respond to any sort of call—like that’s there too much noise, you know what I mean? And they’ll push women off of their corners, or tell them to go somewhere else—which can be dangerous considering that they’re trans.”

***

The Church and Wellesley neighbourhood has been in the news lately because police believe the area was the hunting ground of alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur, who, at the time of this writing, has been charged with six counts of first-degree murder. But McArthur is not the first serial killer to make a name for himself in the Village. That title belongs to a man named Marcello Palma, whose victims were three sex workers: Deanna Wilkinson, Shawn “Junior” Keegan, and Brenda Ludgate.

Palma murdered Ludgate, Keegan, and Wilkinson on the night of May 20, 1996. Of the three, only Brenda Ludgate was cisgender; Palma murdered her in the city’s downtown west end. Junior Keegan was only 19 years old when they were murdered by Palma, and while most reporters called them a “transvestite,” it is probably more accurate to describe them as genderqueer.

Deanna Wilkinson was a 31-year-old transgender woman. In the excited reporting days after her body was found, she was referred to only by her former name. Both Keegan and Wilkinson were shot to death on Homewood Avenue, where they worked.

I’ve been thinking about the Homewood murders for several months after learning of them through transgender and sex work activist Morgan M. Page’s history podcast, One From the Vaults. As she tells it, in the wake of the murders, trans women came together to develop a range of community programs designed to help sex workers go about their work with less danger—meal transports, meetings, safe sex supplies.

This was front of mind when I spoke to Persad, who told me about the programming currently underway at The 519. She’s doing good work, but it’s not without its challenges—particularly from police, who often mistreat the trans people of colour in her program. “There’s constant harassment,” she says. “Police see them often like targets, or disposable people who shouldn’t be there, who shouldn’t be around.”

Hours later, I couldn’t stop thinking about those words—targets, disposable. Palma was known to be violent with his wife, and admitted to his psychiatrist that he fantasized about killing street people and sex workers. Despite this, no one tried to intervene in the months leading up to the night Deanna was killed. In fact, Palma was able to freely amass a veritable arsenal of handguns, including the one he used to murder three sex workers.

III: Grayce Baxter

“Transgenderse are also ignored by the police,” writes Viviane Namaste in the 1995 edition of Gendertrash From Hell, a radical transgender zine made in Toronto. Edited by Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa, Gendertrash published a total of four issues in the early 1990s—an indie, alternative means of reaching community. In her piece, Namaste mentions three women to illustrate her point: Marsha P. Johnson, whom the New York police called a victim of suicide despite witnesses stating she had been targeted for violence; Tammy Ross, whose sudden death the Montreal police chalked up to suicide; and Grayce Baxter, who disappeared in Toronto in the early ’90s.

“If this is the first time you’ve heard these names and these stories, think about that for a moment,” writes Namaste. “Transsexual sex trade workers are too far removed from the suburban middle class, too marginalized to warrant media coverage, activist demonstrations, or commemorative ceremonies.”

Grayce was 27 when she was murdered in December 1992 by a corrections officer named Patrick Daniel Johnson. She was a sex worker, and Johnson was her client. When newspapers began covering her disappearance, Grayce’s work was just about the only thing journalists could focus on. Described as a “high-priced call girl,” a “prostitute,” and a “transsexual,” reporters conjectured that she was involved with hard drugs, and disclosed both the status of her transition and her former name. She was painted as a caricature, and it was assumed that Grayce’s murder was connected to a sensationalized depiction of what was supposedly a risk-taking, drug-using, party-girl lifestyle. Accozzaglia writes: “Ms. Baxter was murdered by a member of law enforcement. His motive was not drug-related. It related to his own impotence: his purchased time with Ms. Baxter expired before he could climax. So he strangled her to death, cut her into pieces, and dumped the pieces down the apartment tower’s trash chute.”

Community memory runs deep. Grayce’s murder at the hands of law enforcement and her case’s treatment by the police department and media set the tone for what trans women, especially those in sex work, could expect from cisgender institutions and the criminal justice system.

In the ’90s, the stakes for trans women who encountered the police while working were horrifically high. A criminal record could often disqualify someone from participation in gender identity therapy (which includes qualifying for subsidized bottom surgery). There is still only one medical centre in Canada where trans women can get bottom surgery, and the procedure is often prohibitively expensive, even with subsidization. If an encounter with law enforcement went wrong and a trans woman ended up with a criminal record, it would effectively cut off access to further transition-related health care.

Though this is no longer the official policy, many women continue to face similar risks because access to transition-related care often depends on the training and biases of individual service providers and how they choose to interpret government regulation.

The fall 1993 issue of Gendertrash featured an interview with a trans woman and sex worker named Justine Piaget. She describes several instances of being attacked by clients, including once having to cut a man’s testicles “just about off” during a bad call in Montreal. The same issue also features a full-page warning about a dangerous man targeting trans sex workers in the Church and Wellesley area.

This was in 1993. But not much has improved. This February, Monica Forrester told me about her experience seeking police protection after a violent incident with an armed man. “When I was doing outreach, a few women were voicing a guy threatening them. Then he threatened me and he pulled a knife. I did a report, and then I hear, two months later, ‘Oh, well there’s nothing we can do,’” she says. “And they know where he lived, but they said they couldn’t get video surveillance—you know, just a bunch of crap to say, ‘We did what we can do,’ and that’s it.” She saw it as the bare minimum attention required to close the issue, but not to take an active interest in her safety as a trans woman and a sex worker.

Forrester believes that, if it ended up becoming more serious—if he had acted on his threat—we’d quickly see that police would get the necessary information to investigate him after the fact. “It just goes to show that with sex workers, their experiences are considered not as important as someone who might not be a sex worker or who might not be trans,” she says.

Police took two months to begin their investigation into Grayce’s murder back in ’92.

Her remains were never found.

IV: Alloura Wells

I tried three times to get in touch with the Toronto police for this story. When I finally got on the phone with Constable Danielle Bottineau, Toronto Police Service’s LGBTQ Liaison Officer, I was surprised by both her frankness and friendliness. Constable Bottineau had no illusions about the kind of history that Toronto police are grappling with in moving forward with the LGBTQ community. “Historically, as an institution, policing has never been good at being transparent and having those tough conversations,” she says. Because of this difficult history, combined with a failure by police to make known their processes and mandates, Bottineau worries there is a climate of misinformation in which people are quick to come to their own conclusions or fill in their own answers.

A lack of answers has been a recurring theme for the transgender community’s relationship with the Toronto police for three years now, starting with the death of Sumaya Dalmar in February 2015. Toronto police didn’t classify Sumaya’s death as a homicide and provided no further public updates. Many were unsure how to react.

The 26-year-old model was widely beloved both within and beyond her Somali community, and people were heartbroken over her loss. At that point in 2015, six trans women of colour had already been murdered in the United States, all under age 36—a rate of about one murder per week. Many felt afraid and vulnerable, unwilling to believe that Sumaya’s untimely death was not a homicide.

“I still don’t know what exactly happened with Sumaya,” says Abdi Osman, a Toronto visual artist. Osman knew Sumaya personally, and she was the subject of his 2012 documentary Labeeb, which explored gender and sexuality in the Somali community. According to Osman, many of her other friends are still in the dark. Because she had such an important place in her wider community, the silence that followed her death was hard to make sense of.

I spoke to another friend of Sumaya’s, whom I’ll call Shamir (he requested his name be excluded for privacy purposes). Shamir says Sumaya was the first in their circle to come out publicly, and her pride and excitement was infectious. Shamir was very close to Sumaya, and he was with her family the night her body was found. According to him, Sumaya’s family had requested privacy for the course of the investigation, and because family meant a lot to Sumaya, Shamir thought it best to respect their wishes. That meant no police announcements, no public follow-up, no feeding the rumours. “As much as we wanted to put pressure on the police, we wanted to respect her family’s wishes,” says Shamir. He had to become comfortable with silence.

Though it upheld her family’s requests, the silence around Sumaya’s death contributed to the impression that many share of the police taking a hands-off approach to the deaths of marginalized trans people.

Shamir contrasted Sumaya’s case and the police’s cautious silence with the case of Alloura Wells. People who knew Alloura described her as quiet but well-liked. But she was without a fixed address for years, making her part of a population that is at greater risk of death or disappearance.

According to research collected by anti-homelessness information centre Homeless Hub, trans women are overrepresented in the shelter system, especially as youth. Yet, one in three trans youth in Toronto are rejected by homeless shelters due to transphobic discrimination. Research reveals that homeless trans women and women of colour, especially those of Indigenous descent, are frequent victims of discrimination and mistreatment through the shelter system, though issues with data collection make exact statistics hard to find.

Still, reports by Toronto-based researchers found that police harassment of homeless people has remained disproportionately high over the past two decades, ranging from abusive language to physical assaults. In 1992, one in 10 homeless people reported having been assaulted by police, and a 2009 survey of homeless people in Toronto found that over half of the respondents (58 percent) had been victims of violence at the hands of law enforcement.

Alloura went missing in Toronto in July 2017. Folks at Maggie’s organized a search for the 27-year-old, but found nothing. In November, several months after the body of a transgender woman was found in a midtown ravine in August 2017, Toronto police were able to identify the body as Alloura’s.

“I think the situation with Alloura was just total police negligence,” Shamir says. “The situation with Sumaya wasn’t comparable in that sense.” He stressed that in Alloura’s case, he felt the lack of consistent outreach with the trans community only served to break down whatever trust had been built between trans people and the Toronto police.

Maggie’s Monica Forrester sees Alloura’s case as a prime example of police indifference to marginalized trans women. “They didn’t reach out to the community to see how to identify this person, they didn’t do any public awareness around this trans body. It shows you that trans people are not looked at as important or worthy,” she says. “And that’s something that’s still very prevalent.”

Forrester was in contact with Alloura’s father, and encouraged her family to file a missing person report with the Toronto police. But when her family reported her disappearance to the police, they claimed that police officers blew them off, giving them a non-emergency number and refusing to begin the investigation themselves. Alloura’s father says he was told that she was not a “priority” because she was homeless. Forrester was disappointed, but unsurprised. “They knew that this was a trans body they found. Because she was homeless, they really didn’t care,” she says.

In the days following, Toronto police announced that they would begin a review into how they handle sensitive missing persons cases. Police spokesperson Mark Pugash told the Toronto Star that it was “not the proper response from any part of this organization,” and said police had attempted to apologize to the Wells family.

Toronto is an increasingly unaffordable city; it’s hard to survive without access to protected employment, stable housing, and friendly service providers—a situation rarely available to the overwhelming majority of trans women.

When someone is lost, it becomes easy for institutions like the police or the media to dismiss them. Osman called it “victim-blaming.”

***

Everyone I talked to for this story spoke to a sense of feeling worthless in the eyes of police. And as long as we remain locked into a system designed by and for cisgender people that treats transgender women as disposable, that feeling is not going away.

What struck me when researching this story was how close many of the women were to each other. There are women who have had to bury multiple colleagues. They took care to tell their friends that they loved them, because there was no guarantee they would see each other again. That care spilled over into searches, memorials, protests, and news stories, demanding that their sisters be remembered with love.

This city is not friendly to trans women, especially not to those who do sex work, who don’t have fixed addresses, who have been exposed to drugs or violence, who need help and protection. Their disappearances are not the inevitable result of the risks inherent to being transgender; whether by murder, drugs, disease, suicide, or poverty, every trans woman’s death is the product of multiple interlocking systems of exclusion and marginalization.

Each one of them is a preventable tragedy. Each one of them is a priority.

Navigating Canada’s legal system is tricky for most people, but it can be even more challenging if you’re a member of the transgender community.

People who are transgender face higher rates of unemployment, discrimination, and violence. And since the median annual income of a transgender Ontarian is only $15,000, seeking legal counsel is often out of reach.

That’s where JusticeTrans comes in.

Launched in 2015 by Benjamin Vandorpe, a graduate from Osgoode Hall Law School and a trans-identified man, JusticeTrans is an app that provides access to up-to-date legal information about transgender rights. It’s free to download, and has province-based data about issues like housing, arrests, and name changes.

“There’s so much misunderstanding from society at large as to what it means to be transgender,” says Vandorpe. “I feel like the community doesn’t know where to turn.”

Twenty-six-year-old Vandorpe got the idea for JusticeTrans after taking a legal information technology course in law school, where he came across a U.S.-based app that informed citizens on their samesex marriage rights, based on each state. He thought the transgender community could benefit from something similar, and designed the app’s first iteration.

“All the legal issues that inadvertently come up because of discrimination, this app is really needed because of that,” he says. “Nothing else in the country exists on this scale.”

JusticeTrans has grown quickly in its first year. Vandorpe’s brought on a board of directors, and is working to partner with law firms across the country. In July, he was named one of six finalists competing for $50,000 in seed funding through the Ontario Access to Justice Challenge, a program that recognizes early-stage companies enhancing access to justice and challenging the status quo of legal services.

Vandorpe notes that it’s not only members of the trans community who benefit from the app. Social workers and guidance counsellors use JusticeTrans, especially when it comes to advising people on name changes. And while the resource is a strong starting point, Vandorpe stresses JusticeTrans only provides information—not official legal counsel.

“We also provide lists of legal service providers who are trans-positive or trans knowledgeable,” he says. “[Users] can refer to the app or the website first to see what legislation is behind them, if any, and then they can approach a legal service provider knowing that they’re safe.”

Yet, at the same time, rights on paper don’t always translate into lived rights. And, despite our reputation as a supposed LGBTQ leader, Canada itself is still missing important on-paper rights. Over the past nine years, our federal government’s actions when it comes to LBGTQ rights have been inconsistent—even confounding.

Here in Canada, for instance, queer youth are grossly misrepresented amongst the homeless population, accounting for 25–40 percent. Members of the federal Conservative Party have also actively blocked the advancement of trans rights at home with endless delays of Bill C-279, which seeks to give transgender people basic Charter protections. The back-and-forth doesn’t stop there: The feds cut funding to gay organizations, such as the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network in 2012 and Pride Toronto in 2010—yet a 600-person gay Conservative party called Fabulous Blue Tent was thrown in 2011 to bring gay Conservatives together during the Party’s convention. That same weekend, the Tories passed a resolution supporting religious organizations’ refusal to perform same-sex marriages. Previously, in 2005, Harper had campaigned on the promise to repeal same-sex marriage.

And, it doesn’t stop there. Here, we examine the Conservatives sad, confusing track record:

TRANS RIGHTS
Within the Conservative Party, there are LGBTQsupportive caucus members, but they are in the minority, despite the now-biennial Fabulous Blue Tent party. When Bill C-279—to grant transgender Canadians equal protection under the law—passed through the House of Commons, only 18 of 155 Tory MPs voted in favour. Conservative MP Rob Anders called it a “bathroom bill,” insisting its goal was to give creepy men access to women’s washrooms. All other party MPs who voted were unanimously in support of C-279.

The bill is currently sitting in the Conservative-dominated Senate, and will almost surely be killed at election time—having to retrace its process through the House again. Now more than 10 years in the making, this would be the second time the bill was forced back to square one. Yet, if passed, it will give trans people legal recourse against things such as being fired and being denied housing, and will also make sky-high rates of violence punishable as hate crimes.

HARPER TRIES TO MOVE BACKWARDS
Opposing queer rights is nothing new for Harper. Early on in 1994, he fought plans to introduce same-sex spousal benefits in Canada. In 2005, after same-sex marriage was legalized, he promised to bring legislation defining marriage as “the union of one man and one woman.” When this plan was defeated shortly after his election, he decided to leave the issue alone, saying, “I don’t see reopening this question [of marriage] in the future.”

FUNDING CUTS
After more than 20 years of federal funding, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network faced cuts in 2012 because it “may have used the funds for advocacy.” After receiving a “significant portion of its funding from Ottawa” over its entire existence, the organization sought renewal of the same funding but the Public Health Agency of Canada rejected 16 of its 20 proposals.

In 2006, shortly after taking power, the Conservative Party also cut the entire budget of a program called Court Challenges, which had made public funds available for individuals launching human rights challenges in court. Used by those making challenges on the basis of sexual orientation and more, the fund had helped homosexual couples secure spousal benefits and achieve equality protection. Harper’s chief of staff from 2005-2008, Ian Brodie, used his PhD to argue the program unfairly empowered homosexuals and other minority groups. The Conservatives had killed the program in 1992 originally, only to have it revived by the Liberals. Now the Cons have resuscitated it, but with a narrowed focus on only linguistic minorities.

PROGRESS, PR, OR SOMETHING ELSE?
Canada’s immigration office under Harper worked with Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees to fast-track 100 gay Iranians into Canada, saving them from possible execution. Harper also personally lobbied Uganda’s president in 2009 over a law that would imprison gay people for life. Canada even gave $200,000 to Ugandan groups to fight the law. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has made repeated international public statements condemning countries that criminalize homosexuality, and during the 2014 Olympics Baird and Harper spoke out against the Russian “gay propaganda” law that makes it illegal for anyone to distribute gay rights materials.

Yet, speaking against the criminalization of LGBTQ people is not the same as active support. In regards to Russia in particular, Ontario Conservative MP Scott Reid, who chairs the Commons’ subcommittee on international human rights, said it’s an issue of freedom of speech. Saskatchewan Conservative backbencher Maurice Vellacott said he believes LGBTQ folks should have basic protections, but that he wouldn’t want his kids exposed to “homosexual propaganda.” These attitudes offer insight into the mixed messages of the Conservative Party when it comes to queer rights. Whatever its motives are for this dissonance, the fact remains there’s a lot of work to be done in this country before queer liberation becomes a reality.

 Avery Edison ‏@aedison  Feb 10

For those asking – I overstayed my student visa last time I was here. Which is why I came today with a non-refundable return flight (1/2)

Avery Edison ‏@aedison  Feb 10

This is 100% my fault, but it still sucks. I feel so helpless and trapped.

The arrest, as Edison says, sucks (and some have questioned the rationale of detaining someone in Canada for previously staying too long). Yet, it’s what happened after the arrest that makes this incident truly WTF-worthy. Edison, a transgender woman, was sent to the Maplehurst Correctional facility for men.

Staff at the Pearson airport reportedly used the wrong pronoun repeatedly—insisting on calling Edison “him.” When her girlfriend, Romy Sugden, later inquired about the decision to send Edison to a men’s facility—despite the fact that Edison identifies as a woman and is also identified as such on her passport—she was informed in no uncertain terms that “male genitals equals male prison and it doesn’t matter.”

Both were told the standard procedure for sex-segregated institutions, such as prisons and hospitals, only allows transgendered women who are post-operational to stay at female institutions. Apart from that, policies state, each situation must be taken at a “case-by-case” decision.

This is a problem within the system—it forces us to treat gender as a binary existence. And the staff at Pearson airport were just following the rules: bad, outdated rules that help justify a disturbing lack of understanding of the trans community, and a callous disregard of Edison’s human rights as a trans person.

Sadly this treatment was continued while she was at Maplehurst, as the guards and staff there also insisted on referring to her as male. They did segregate her from the other inmates for her own ‘protection’. As Sugden tweeted:

 Was promised that she would not be put in a cell, “because she’ll get beat up or worse.” Yeah, thats only her nightmare, she knows—

If we can take one positive from this awful incident, it’s perhaps this: many people agree the treatment Edison faced is totally unacceptable. As Bustle commented in an article on the subject, “By refusing to recognize Avery Edison’s gender, Canadian immigration officials have opened her up to trauma and violence that is both unnecessary and unacceptable.”

Not only that but, as the airport staff had left Avery with her phone while they tried to figure out what to do with her, she was able to tweet her experience in real time, keeping the internet up to date with her traumatic experience.

 Avery Edison ‏@aedison  Feb 10

Initial interviewing officer is telling another about my depression, keeps switching he/she. MY PASSPORT IS FEMALE.

Avery Edison ‏@aedison  Feb 10

The fact that I haven’t been approached by officers about these tweets is a stunning indictment of their lack of Google-fu.

This resulted in the story becoming widespread on the internet overnight, and led to many movements gaining strength online, such as the #FreeAvery on twitter gaining huge support, and a planned public protest in Queen’s Park this Saturday which was organized through Facebook.

And, even better, the public protest against Edison’s treatment seems to have work. Randall Garrison, an NDP MP, tweeted on Tuesday:

Randall Garrison @r_garrison

@LadyJaya working on getting an immediate transfer for Avery, then a policy change so that trans rights are respected by CBSA in detention.

Avery was transferred to Varnier Center for Woman Milton on Tuesday night, and now has legal representation for her hearing scheduled today.

To keep up with the Avery case, please follow #FreeAvery on twitter

For more information about the planned protest this Saturday visit here

Anders’ view of trans people fits neatly with the trans bogeyman that has been a staple of television and film for several decades—from Psycho’s Norman Bates to Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. The trans killer trope is a consistent point of reference on popular TV crime dramas such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and CSI. Such caricatures have been countered recently with a number of positive portrayals of trans people in popular media. However, almost without fail, these portrayals fail to place trans characters within a broader context. The virtuous gender-benders of Boys Don’t Cry and Rent stand alone, while the trans characters on Glee and Degrassi have no trans peers. To some extent, even these television characters become tokenized—reduced to a single theme, which is hammered home, over and over again. They are either tokens of fear, or tokens of tolerance and social progress.

In reality, there are many intersecting stories within the trans community, and there is more to transgenderism than the popular sinner/saint dichotomy of virtuous joie de vivre and sadomasochistic perversion. In this article, you’ll read four stories, interwoven through the history of transgenderism in Canada. They all live in Canada—people I met through common friends, and whose stories I heard through a series of phone interviews. They all feel privileged. They are middle class, educated, employed. They have the luxury of homes and telephone access and leisure time. But for each, their greatest privilege—one that is rare and precious—is that they are alive.

SHOSHANA, 66

Sixty years ago, North American media extensively—and sensationally—covered U.S. native Christine Jorgensen’s hormone replacement therapy and sex change operations. EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY: OPERATIONS TRANSFORM BRONX YOUTH, screamed the front page of New York’s Daily News. While Jorgensen wasn’t the first person to have transition surgery, she was the first to become widely known for making the transition from male to female. Charming and articulate, she dove into public life, becoming a lifelong lecturer on the subject of transgenderism.

Despite the media sensation around Jorgensen’s groundbreaking surgery, there was a deep silence around transgenderism for decades, says Shoshana.* The world was brimming with new possibilities during Jorgensen’s time, but no one in Shoshana’s life was willing to acknowledge it.

Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1947, Shoshana first wore women’s clothing at the age of eight. “We moved to another house and there happened to be a woman’s sweater in the master bedroom. I went up there and put it on and it felt so comfortable. It felt right.”

Like many of her generation, though, Shoshana’s true gender identity would remain submerged for decades. In her experience, she says, homosexuality was taboo, while transgenderism was even further outside the realm of possibility. It was unthinkable.

Over the next four decades, Shoshana says she lived as a man, while still wearing women’s clothing on occasion. She married twice and divorced twice. In March 2005, after the failure of her second marriage, she hit upon this vein in a conversation with her psychiatrist. After doing a gender test on the internet, she went to see a therapist who happened to be a trans-man. “It was a big eye opener,” she says, “and I was honest with the guy.”

Things moved swiftly and Shoshana was on hormones by autumn. She had an orchiectomy in 2012—testicular removal surgery—and had her name legally changed to Shoshana in 2010. After beginning hormone treatment, she came into her own as an activist. “I used to be a wallflower,” she laughs. “Once I embraced who I was, instead of fighting myself, it was like I’m all there 24/7.”

She started to volunteer, and to speak out about her experiences. By 2008, she had given talks and presentations on the challenges of being an older trans person—aging gracefully in a world that often fails to understand her. She has faced down doctors, nurses, and medical technicians who disapprove of her name, appearance, and lifestyle. She fears that she will need to go to a nursing home later in life. After four decades of living as someone else, she isn’t ready to go back into the closet.

Listening to her talk about nursing homes is like listening to beat poetry. “Can you imagine being in a ward, and not being able to talk about your life experience? It’s like someone who has just lost a limb … I want to be able to talk about the kind of sex we had … I want people to talk about the parties we went to.

“You can’t do that. So you can sit there like a piece of wood. You can’t open your mouth because you’re afraid someone will come and judge you. Can you imagine the agony; the pain inside that the other person is going through?”

* We have agreed to withhold Shoshana’s last name

SUSAN GAPKA, MID-50s

Susan Gapka grew up in Trenton, a small town with a military base in southern Ontario. She says she had feelings when she was young of wanting to be a woman, but also had no way of expressing those feelings. Gapka was drawn to wearing women’s clothing, like Shoshana, and describes growing up confused, ashamed, and guilty. Also like Shoshana, she’d heard about Jorgensen, and remembers being interested, but also says she couldn’t find much information. “There were no role models.”

In school, when other boys started shaving, Gapka found that she had no facial hair, and instead shaved her legs. This seemed natural to her, not a big deal—until she told her classmates. Word got back to her teacher, who told Gapka, “No, we don’t talk about that stuff in here.” She learned to keep her feelings to herself. As a teenager, Gapka ran away from home and went to Toronto, after she encountered the book Once I Was a Man: Behold, I Am a Woman. The book, written by “Dianna” as told to Felicity Cochrane, is about Dianna’s life before and after her sex-change operation. Gapka read the book over and over and over again. But she still carried some misconceptions about gender identity and sexual orientation— how could she feel like a woman while also being attracted to women? She tried to push it aside and get on with life.

Gapka married, had children, and worked as a mechanic through the ’70s and ’80s. There was always a gnawing urge to live as a woman. Throughout the ’80s, her carefully constructed life began to unravel. Her mother, father, and sister all died. Her marriage broke up. At the same time, deep changes in Canadian society began to bubble their way to the surface, as the culture of silence began to dissolve. Gapka now believes the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a marker that divides her generation—those who grew up in an era where being gay was a crime—from those that followed. At the time, though, she only saw that her life was a mess. “It became too much,” she says. “I ended up homeless on the streets of Toronto.”

Many trans people at the time were (and still are) homeless and destitute. Death could come in many forms: murder, hypothermia, drug overdoses, disease. Especially disease. In 1982, the AIDS epidemic, which had been slowly burning its way through Africa for a decade, extended its long grey finger into Canada. The horror of those years is often glossed over. It hit the trans community hard. In a society where being trans was already stigmatized, those with further stigmas—of age, race, and class—were doubly and triply damned. Many of the survivors of the epidemic, who now live with HIV/ AIDS, are still living on the street.

This wholesale erasure of thousands of trans people across North America left a deep and lasting mark. The epidemic eliminated most of the marginalized radicals within the community, who were soon replaced by predominantly middle-class, white trans women. The trans community shifted inwards—away from political activism and towards support groups. It wouldn’t be until the early ’90s that trans activism would ascend again.

After roughly 10 years of homelessness, it was also a time of change and renewal for Gapka. In 1997, she managed to get housing and began seeing a therapist. She was surprised to realize the desire to be a woman wasn’t a passing phase, beneath the surface, after all those years. She began to distinguish between gender identity and sexual orientation—realizing that people who transition can be attracted to the same sex. She started to explore these feelings, and by September 1999, she was living and working full-time as Susan Gapka. “When I changed, I went [to work] one week as my former self, and came back the next week as Susan. My life hasn’t been the same since.”

The first name is after a high-school confidante and crush. The last name is part of her original family name. Although Gapka bears no love for her father, it connects her with her heritage and culture. “There’s really nothing I want to remember about my father.” She laughs. “My father was a son of a bitch. But one of my pillars of strength … emerged from my inner child, connected to my history.” Around the holidays, Gapka says, she literally feeds her inner child, with Polish staples, like perogies and kielbasa. “That connection to my culture and my heritage has helped ground me. Sometimes with a great deal of sadness, but it grounds me nonetheless.”

RUPERT RAJ, 61

Unlike many trans people his age, Rupert Raj began his transition as a teenager. Now 61, Rupert is a man of many stripes: psychotherapist, consultant, clinical researcher, educator, writer, professional trainer, and gender specialist. He has also been an advocate for trans rights in Canada and the U.S. for 42 years.

Like Gapka and Shoshana, Raj’s journey began in childhood with clothing. While sharing a room with his sister, he would experiment with dressing in men’s clothing. In 1968, at the age of 16, he told his father. “I didn’t know the word ‘transsexual,’” he says. “I said, ‘I think I’m bisexual.’” He told his father that he felt like a boy on the inside, a girl on the outside. In response, Raj’s father told him he’d take Raj to a psychiatrist who, his father said, could show Raj that the life of a girl can be rewarding.

Raj would see several psychiatrists, but his parents wouldn’t live to see it. Four months after their conversations, both of his parents were killed in a car crash. This was the start of Raj’s journey. Although two of the psychiatrists that he met through the Royal Ottawa Hospital were transphobic by omission, there was one psychologist who Raj says was non-judgmental, even though she didn’t know very much about transgenderism.

Raj started living as a man in September 1971 in Ottawa, at the same time that he started his bachelor’s degree in psychology at Carleton University. So-called homosexual acts had only been decriminalized two years previously, after Pierre Trudeau’s famous declaration that there was “no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

His first steps into the world of trans advocacy began around the same time, when Raj tried to start a support group in Ottawa. He applied for an advertisement in the Ottawa Journal, which was promptly rejected. Later that year, he went to the Harry Benjamin Foundation—founded by a sexologist and endocrinologist renowned for his medical work with trans people—for his first male hormone shot. In 1972, Raj underwent top surgery in Yonkers with Dr. David R. Wesser, a reconstructive surgeon widely known for his work with transgender clients. The next year, the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder (although it would introduce the “gender identity disorder” in 1980, which remains controversial today).

Despite his challenges, Raj says he has been fortunate: He has never suffered transphobic violence. He attributes this to his relative position of privilege in the community. Raj appears white (though he is mixed-race), is educated, and was transitioning into manhood. “I think trans men are more accepted because of our patriarchic society,” he says, “although there are individuals, of course, who are victimized by harassment, abuse, discrimination. But collectively, I think it’s much harder for trans women.”

Passability—the ability to blend into the crowd without eliciting notice—is also a greater challenge to trans women. Among men, the absence of facial hair does not attract undue attention. Feminine features are dismissed as boyish. For trans women, however, the five o’clock shadow, strong jawline, and Adam’s apple are all potential betrayers. Lacking passing privilege can have serious consequences. In 2011, Halifax drag performer Elle Noir, was shot in the arm at her apartment by men who called her a “tranny faggot.” There are many more cases extending back through the years.

Unfortunately, there are no reliable figures on trans violence in Canada. However, the overall statistics for LGBT violence provide some indication of the problem. According to Statistics Canada, 13 percent of all hate crimes in 2009 were motivated by sexual orientation, and 74 percent of these crimes were violent in nature. This was far higher than the proportion of violent crimes motivated by race/ethnicity (39 percent) or religion (21 percent). Naturally, if someone is going to be attacked for being trans, they must first be identified as trans by their attackers.

As a result, the issue of passability straddles many natural fault lines within the trans community. Hormone replacement therapy and electrolysis can be expensive for those without insurance; and even when surgery is freely available, it has hidden costs like lost wages and travel expenses. Affluence and youth ease the transition, while poverty and age make it more difficult.

Passability, however, is a double-edged sword. It allows some to blend in and leaves others isolated. For some, the ability to pass as your true gender is marvellous. It’s easier to feel comfortable on the bus, at the office, walking down the street. But if passability is upheld as success—the completion of a journey—then those who fall behind, who cannot achieve passability, are necessarily labelled failures. Many trans activists are now tearing down the idol of passability in favour of a more fluid understanding of gender. New terms continually bubble to the surface—such as genderqueer, gender non-conforming, two-spirit, and ze/hir.

MORGAN PAGE, 26

It wasn’t until around 1992—when trans activist Mirha-Soleil Ross moved from Montreal to Toronto—that there was a resurgence in trans activism. A video maker and sex worker, Ross was among the new wave of trans voices in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic. Throughout the next decade, the trans movement would become increasingly political, with much of the organizing being done by sex workers.

Nonetheless, the trans community operated mostly beneath the public radar until 1995, when the issue of transphobia made headlines across the country. Kimberly Nixon, a B.C. woman who had attempted to volunteer with Vancouver Rape Relief, was rejected on the grounds that she was trans. Despite an initial victory at the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, Vancouver Rape Relief won on two separate appeals. The Nixon case politicized trans Canadians throughout the ’90s and early 2000s. With feminist groups across the country releasing statements on either side of the debate, it brought conversations about trans politics to activist communities across the country.

While the world of trans activism was changing, Morgan Page was going through her own struggles. Around the turn of the millennium, when she was 12, Page realized she was trans and queer. “I was what they would now call a gender-variant child or a gender-independent child,” she says. She began doing sex work and “a lot of drugs.”

Unlike her predecessors, there was no deep silence about the issue in her younger years. It was obvious to everyone in her life that she was queer, and possibly trans. She cultivated an androgynous appearance from the ages of 11 to 14. By the time she was 15, she had already been going to school in makeup and girls’ clothes, and was using a different name. Once the realization came—that she was a woman—she soon changed her name, started using female pronouns, and went on hormone treatments at age 16.

Her mother was mostly supportive, but acceptance at home didn’t mean tolerance elsewhere. Morgan was bullied so extensively that she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and suffered a nervous breakdown at the end of Grade 9. She dropped out of school. Her mother died when she was 18. Later, she became involved with a sex workers’ organization in Hamilton, doing drug outreach work, until she moved to Toronto.

Morgan’s introduction to activism was abrupt. In 2008, when she was 20, Morgan got a call from a friend. The Homewood Maitland Safety Association, a residents’ group, was harassing trans women sex workers who were working in their neighbourhood. There had been reports of physical assaults. She went to that night’s protest against the HMSA, and quickly became one of two leaders of six weeks of counter-protests on Friday and Saturday nights.

The next year, Page received her GED, and enrolled in George Brown College’s assaulted women and children’s counselor/advocate program. After a student placement at the 519 Church Street Community Centre—one of the cornerstones of Toronto’s LGBTTQ community—the centre hired her straight out of the program. Morgan has worked at the 519 for three years now, where she runs three programs—Meal Trans, Trans Youth Toronto, and Trans Sex Worker Outreach.

Transgenderism in Canada has come a long way over the past 60 years. The social networking age has made it easier for trans people to connect, as forums and message boards have increasingly given way to Facebook and Twitter. The anonymity of the internet—and its ability to unite like-minded people across great distances—is a far cry from the isolation of earlier decades. “We’ve seen online communities have become far, far more important to trans people than, I would say, any other kind of people,” says Page. “I basically met all my friends on the internet.”

Trans identity has changed over time and across generations, adds Page. In her line of work, she sees people who have been beaten down by life— poverty, homelessness, racism. Many transitioned later in life. They don’t see many opportunities for change. Transphobic violence still occurs in the streets and in homes. Bigotry persists in Canadian society, from the halls of government to the kitchen table. Surgery and services are often expensive and difficult to access. Trans Canadians face a mosaic of discrimination—from whispers on the street and discrimination in the workplace, to being held at the border when their passport picture doesn’t match their appearance. There is no shortage of issues to tackle, and it often seems like we lose as much ground as we gain. The future, like the past, remains dark and unresolved.

Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid.