• • Gender
  • Queeriosities
  • Recommended Reading

  Recommended Reading: In Transition (Ryerson Review of Journalism)

  January 7, 2013 • Julia Horel

  When even Canada’s top LGBT publication struggles to find the right words, will journalists ever accurately reflect the complexities within the trans community?

  The Ryerson Review of Journalism has a piece up about Elisha Lim, friend of Shameless, and their struggle to have their preferred pronouns used in queer media:

  “There was this one moment where I said I prefer the pronoun ‘they,’” Lim says. “It was kind of my shaky first attempt so I wasn’t too confident about it, and the interviewer sort of laughed and said, ‘We’re not going to use that. But anyway what about…?’ I walked away after the interview and thought, ‘Now wait just one minute, I think that I should be mad!’”

  The article also includes Shameless cartoonist Coco Riot:

  Riot, a Toronto-based visual artist and cartoonist for Shameless magazine, is glad the community made its disappointment known. Having faced similar constraints speaking to the Montreal Gazette and winning an apology from the newspaper for its pronoun misuse, Riot knew “they” was a pronoun worth fighting for—especially at an LGBT publication.

  Check out the whole article here.

• • Activist Report
  • Anti-violence
  • Indigenous

  Recommended Reading: NYSHN statement & resources on sexual assault in support of Indigenous women in IDLE NO MORE and all survivors of violence

  December 31, 2012 • Julia Horel

  The Native Youth Sexual Health Network has released a statement on the recent sexual assault in Thunder Bay, as well as offering support and resources for all Indigenous women in the Idle No More movement and all survivors of violence.

  Violence against Indigenous women and girls has been, and continues to be used as a weapon of colonialism and a way to undermine the strength of our leadership. For this reason, NYSHN sees raising our voices together against sexual violence and making change for violence against women to stop as an integral part of ANY movement. This is especially relevant given the fact that Idle No More was started by Indigenous women. The health and well-being of our communities depends on the health and well-being of our mothers - including Mother Earth.
  
  However, this is not only about ‘protecting women’ - it is also about protecting our men, Two-Spirit, Trans and gender non-conforming brothers and sisters and all our communities from the everyday violence of colonialism. Gender based violence, rape, and sexual assault are not ‘social issues’ that can be dealt with after the fact, they are real and happening NOW.
  
  Resisting all forms of violence, whether it is legislative assaults like Bill C-45 or sexual assault is EVERYONE’s responsibility because gender based violence affects us all. Laws not only affect our lands but also our bodies: there is a direct connection between the violence in these two areas. We affirm the right survivors or victims of violence have to be believed and supported unconditionally when they say they have been assaulted regardless of whether they report to police or media. Trust that survivors and victims know what is best for them, and support their decisions about what they would like to happen after an assault.

  Read the entire statement and see the extensive resource list here (PDF).

• • Event Listings

  Toronto event: STATE OF DISREPAIR: STATE VIOLENCE AND SEX WORK

  December 13, 2012 • Julia Horel

  What are the connections between sex work and colonialism, child apprehension systems (eg CAS, residential schooling), anti-immigrant policies, policing and poverty? All contribute to or directly enact violence against sex workers.

  Join Maggie’s on Dec 17: International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers for a roundtable conversation about how sex workers experience state violence and how the fight for the decriminalization of prostitution connects to these broad issues.

  Moderated by Jessica Danforth (Native Youth Sexual Health Network) featuring the premiere of “Remember The Living: Monica Forrester on Sisters in Spirit And Indigenous Sex Workers”

  When: Monday Dec 17

  Where: 519 Community Centre (519 Church St)

  Time: 7 pm

  Free | wheelchair accessible | accessible and gender neutral washrooms | tokens available | no cameras or recording equipment please

  Sponsored by Asian Community AIDS Services and Native Women’s Resource Centre of Toronto

  http://www.maggiestoronto.ca/ | 416-964-0150 | http://www.facebook.com/maggiesTO

• • (dis)Ability
  • Event Listings

  Reclaiming Our Bodies & Minds: Disability, Oppression, Action Conference

  December 12, 2012 • Julia Horel

  March 15, 16, and 17 2013

  Reclaiming our bodies and Minds: Disability, Oppression, Action! Is a collaborative space for communities to come together, learn, network and develop skills. As people with disabilities it is our time to reclaim our bodies and minds, take control of the services we use, and work with our allies to achieve the freedom and autonomy we deserve.

  Call for proposals

  We are welcoming proposals for all three conference streams:
  • Disability Activism and Resistance
  • Disability and Post-Secondary Education
  • Special Topics

  More information on how to submit a proposal or register for the conference is available at www.reclaimingourbodiesandminds.com

  Disability, Oppression & Action Conference

  Through a weekend of presentations, workshops, dialogue, arts and engagement, participants will gain skills and knowledge to apply to community organizing, self-advocacy, systemic advocacy, and experiences in post-secondary institutions.

  We will spend the weekend exploring concepts of freedom, autonomy, and empowerment in order to reclaim services, experiences and our bodies and minds!

  If we require additional accommodations for your participation please contact RyeACCESS at access@rsuonline.ca or 416-979-5000 ext 4504

  RyeACCESS is one of the five Equity Service Groups of the Ryerson Students’ Union which includes: the Community Food Room, RyePRIDE, Centre for Women and Trans People and Racialised students’ collective.

  

  

  
  

• • Arts
  • Event Listings

  Toronto workshop: ROOM: a poetry workshop for consumer-survivors

  December 4, 2012 • Julia Horel

  Room is a consumer-survivor initiative welcome 16- to 30-year-old women and trans folks who identify as and are marginalized by their history of mental illness and/or addiction.

  Our focus is on the inspiring and self-soothing qualities of art and the hoped-for experience of discovering, capturing and regaining the powerful concept of beauty in both the simple and awesome in the everyday life of a woman.

  Wednesdays - 2:00 to 4:00pm
  December 5th to January 30th
  Fort York Food Bank
  797 Dundas Street West (Dundas/Bathurst)

  Do you like to write? Have a poem to share? Come hang out with like-minded (probably awesome) young women your age and learn how!

  Join us this winter for an amazing 8 weeks of unadulterated poetry and limitless support, with or without the Kumbaya circle. You choose!

  Register now or contact us for more information:

  Room.In.Toronto@gmail.com
  647-708-1112

  Or leave your name and contact information with FY Food Bank - 416-203-3011

  [ed. note: though the graphic below is not explicit, the organizers have confirmed this workshop is trans-inclusive.]

  

  
  

• • Event Listings
  • Trans-

  International Transgender Day of Remembrance 2012

  November 20, 2012 • Julia Horel

  Today, November 20, is the International Transgender Day of Remembrance. Check out this link for international event listings.

  If you’re in Toronto, you can attend this event:

  7pm-9pm
  519 Church Street Community Centre

  Join us for this annual event which marks and commemorates those trans members of our communities who are no longer with us. This event serves as a memorial, a protest, an opportunity for reflection and a chance to see old friends and meet new ones.

  The 519 acknowledges not only transphobia as a root cause of violence in our community, but also the various forms of oppression in our culture that increase violence, and limit protections for many members of the trans community. We remember everyone lost to transphobia, racism, ageism, ableism, sex-worker stigma, classism, HIV stigma and homophobia.

  Violence has impacted our communities and is not only an intentioned act - it is also an act of neglect. Violence affecting trans communities includes cuts to social spending, and depleting the social safety net.

  Violence impacting trans people includes the ever decreasing pool of social services that leaves the marginalized members of society struggling on their own without affordable housing, without access to nutritious food, without access to necessary health care services, without sympathy from a Canadian government that deports trans women and men to their countries of origin even when violence will be waiting for them on their homelands.
  The impact of violence on the trans communities is pervasive. For many the vulnerability is constant.

  The 519 is a wheelchair accessible space, with accessible and gender neutral washrooms. Trans Day of Remembrance will be ASL interpreted for the Deaf and hard of hearing communities.

• • Event Listings
  • Race and Racism

  Toronto event: TORTURE AS PUBLIC TRUTH: The Case of Omar Khadr

  November 12, 2012 • Julia Horel

  University of Toronto Equity Studies Students’ Union Presents…

  TORTURE AS PUBLIC TRUTH: The Case of Omar Khadr
  Lecture by Sherene Razack, Phd.

  http://www.uoftessu.com/tortureaspublictruth
  

  [free lecture followed by Q&A session]

  In this lecture, focusing on the torture of Omar Khadr, Sherene Razack will explore how torture comes to be a public truth in democratic regimes. How is torture written on the social body?

  How does a practice so extreme come to be seen as a necessary part of our everyday world, a world in which even the spanking of children is regarded as grievous harm? She suggests that torture as practiced today by liberal democratic states in the West (often aided by elites in the East) unites the West against the East, turning the globe into a militarized zone.

  Torture is thus a racial practice that gives birth to white identities; identities experienced as simultaneously racial and national. As the story of the torture of Muslims circulates in the West, energizing some citizens and providing them with a heightened sense of their own racial superiority, it performs a psychic violence on those of us too easily racially identified with the tortured, reminding us of our own precarious status in the political community.

  ***

  Thursday, November 22, 2012 6:30PM
  Lash Miller, Rm 162
  (80 St. George St.)
  
  Refreshments and food will be served.
  ASL interpreters are available.
  Venue is wheelchair accessible.
  Gender neutral washrooms are also available.

  For more information, please contact ESSU at uoft.essu@gmail.com

  

  
  

• • All About Shameless
  • Recommended Reading

  Recommended reading: Caitlin at the Mamafesto

  October 29, 2012 • Julia Horel

  Our own front-of-book editor, Caitlin Blennerhassett, is featured [being awesome] in an interview at the Mamafesto:

  My feminism is always changing, as I engage more with the literature, and as I experience living in different communities around the country. My feminism changed radically when I took a class in my Masters degree where we read Peggy McIntosh’s famous essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack” and many other relevant pieces like John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me.” Acknowledging my own privilege and racism and doing everything I can to counter those racist and colonialst identities is a huge part of my feminism now. I was born in Nova Scotia but grew up in northern Canada, in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. It is only since beginning my feminist journey that I was able to grapple with the huge power differential that existed between many of my peers and I.

  Check out the whole thing here.
  

• • Bibliothèque
  • Body Politics

  Call for participation: Attention: People With Body Parts

  October 29, 2012 • Julia Horel

  Attention: People With Body Parts is a new international project that encourage people to celebrate body parts and their connections to ourselves and to others. The moving movement started this summer as the creator, Lexie Bean, collected letters from folks who have written to one of their body parts to unpack how different bodies are layered and connected—but far from equal and whole. The book version of this project was released in October, and is now available on Create Space and Amazon [ed. note: only on the US Amazon site].

  To increase the accessibility of the project, an online submission based initiative has been launched! If you’re interested in adding a love letter/treaty/oath/manifesto/poem to one of your body parts, please see the requirements below to join the movement! All bodies are welcome.

  Your piece should focus on one body part. Feel free to explore its relationship to other body parts and/or your body as a whole, or even it in relationship to others’ bodies.

  It can range anywhere from one paragraph long to three pages double spaced

  First person narrative

  Remember: it’s a letter to yourself, not about yourself.

  Feel free to write more than one!

  (more inside…)

• • Event Listings

  University of Toronto Equity Studies Students Union Presents… LINKED OPPRESSIONS 2012

  October 26, 2012 • Julia Horel

  November 6-9, 2012

  Linked Oppressions was born out of the realization that racism, transphobia and homophobia are deeply affected by one another.

  The ways that each of these spaces of oppression are experienced is deeply affected by how we inhabit and exist within the world. Linked Oppressions will be a week of events that are dedicated to speaking about the issues that affect us, learning and healing.

  “There is no such things as a single-issue struggle because we do not lead single-issue lives.” - Audre Lorde

  At each event, snacks will be provided and venues will be wheelchair accessible.

  There will be ASL interpreters at all events.

  There will also be gender neutral washrooms and a community cupboard.

  For more information, contact uoft.essu@gmail.com, or visit our website http://uoftessu.com.

  Calendar of Events:

  Tuesday Nov. 6, 2012 6:30PM
  Film Screening of Pariah
  Women and Trans Centre (562 Spadina Avenue)

  Wednesday Nov. 7, 2012 2:30PM
  Tour of the Village
  Meet at ESSU office (Wilson Hall basement 500-A, 40 Willcocks Street)

  Thursday Nov. 8, 2012 5PM
  Conversation Cafe: Reconciliation and Forgiveness
  Women and Trans Centre (562 Spadina Avenue)

  Friday Nov. 9, 2012 6PM
  Queer Art Showcase New College
  D.G. Ivey Library (20 Willcocks Street)

  

  
  

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