Illustration by Olivia Thomson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by HAPPYRICHSTUDIO via Adobe Stock

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We practiced saying no in class. If a boy wants to have sex with you before you are married, you must be ready to steer the ship away from troubled waters.

If you loved me, you’d have sex with me. If you loved me, you’d know I was waiting. Why? We’re just having fun. I really like you. I like you too, enough to have respect for myself and my boundaries. This feels too good to stop. Well, we must.

Leave room for Jesus. I practiced in the mirror until my room went dark.

I grew up attending private evangelical Christian school, in Calgary, from Grades 1 through 12, on the basis that my education there would be more well-rounded. When your kid has ADHD and profound anxiety at an early age, sending them to the Christians just makes sense. My parents came from that early aughts holistic spirituality point of view—the Oprah way—and their faith was utterly distinct to themselves and certainly not in alignment with the militaristic and authoritative evangelical teachings of my youth. As the years passed, they struggled with me being in the school they’d once deemed the best fit, but once I had drunk the Kool-Aid, I couldn’t bring myself to leave, even though I was struggling too.

At evangelical Christian school, questions are not tolerated. Why would God allow suffering? Because. Why can’t science and faith coexist? Because. Why would God create gay people if it’s a sin? Because. Stop asking. By the time I graduated in 2014, I felt like my faith was radically different from that of the people around me, and I could not call myself a Christian anymore. But I couldn’t say I was agnostic or an atheist either. So what was I?

All that felt certain was the shame that had been drilled into me throughout my school years, right into my marrow. You are not worthy. You are disgusting. You are unholy. You are sinful. You are disruptive. You are disappointing. You are not your own.

They taught us that sex is for marriage, to have children. No exceptions. I didn’t even know what a condom looked like until I was well into adulthood. Pregnancy loomed its swelled shadow on my psyche from the time I learned what a period was: the body purging the unused eggs, each cell a soul. Tick, tick. Another egg wasted. Another soul wasted. Time is running out. Have a baby to experience what God designed you to do. This is your purpose on this earth.

They taught us women are cursed with pain because of Eve’s trespass. A shiny red apple, a ripe, plump, juicy pomegranate. All the blessings of God and man and she threw it away to know? For some fruit? Thus, pain in childbirth. Thus, pain from lack of child to birth. Thus, pain. She deserved it. You deserve it.

From the time I first felt that pain that defies all language in my abdomen, pain was with me wherever I went. Each month, I would keel over, stopping whatever I was doing to grit my teeth and wait until the stabbing—or radiating, or sharp, or throbbing—pain was over. I learned to accommodate this pain, let it dictate how much or how little I did. This was a practice well established at school, at church—the rare times I would go—to become one with your pain. The burden, the cross, to bear as a woman. Eve’s sin, your fall.

When I was older, I realized that outside my evangelical bubble, people didn’t respond to pain like it was a tool to sharpen belief. They didn’t use their pain as a badge of honour, or as a form of sacrament as I was taught to do. Pain was just a puzzle to solve—something that could be fixed, cured with a couple pills or a visit to a doctor. University exposed me to the reality of my pain, a chronic illness wrapped in the cloak of women’s penance, and gave me absolution. I take little white pills now, and my pain is manageable. It was the first time I realized that I had a body I could control. It was the first time I realized I had a body at all; not just a collection of parts that made me ashamed, lesser, worse. It was mine, and I should never have been taught that it wasn’t.

There is a concept in Christianity, born in the early 1990s—although some would argue that it gets its structure from the Bible itself—which has shaped contemporary evangelical Christian doctrine since. “Purity culture” refers to an ideology that “attempts to promote a biblical view of purity [following the example in] (1 Thess. 4:3-8) by discouraging dating and promoting virginity before marriage,” states Joe Carter, an associate pastor who writes about modern faith. According to Linda Kay Klein, an author and self-proclaimed “purity culture recovery coach,” central to this ideology is a belief in rigid gender roles, heteronormativity, nationalism and white supremacy, and the inherent sinfulness of women.

In 1992, the slogan “True Love Waits” was coined by Richard Ross, a youth minister consultant at LifeWay Christian Resources, a publishing conglomerate that prints Christian educational content. “True Love Waits” refers to the concept that waiting until marriage for sexual activity of any kind is the best choice for both parties, male and female, and is God’s design for sex.

“Waiting” can take on a variety of meanings, including abstinence from sex, but also kissing, hugging, and dating. The extremity of purity culture is exemplified in the television show 19 Kids and Counting in which the Quiverfull Duggar family didn’t allow their children to date without being accompanied by a parental chaperone. As a result, most of the kids married their first crush very young and all had their first kiss on their wedding day.

A few notes on the Duggars and how their commitment to purity culture played out: one, Quiverfull refers to the theological position of viewing large families as blessings from God and therefore actively denying and abstaining from all forms of birth control and instead encouraging procreation. Your family stops growing when God decides it stops growing. Two, while the Duggars are known for their religiosity, they became more famous still when it got out that their pedophile son, Josh Duggar, not only molested his younger siblings but also has been found guilty on charges of possession of child pornography. Furthermore, he was involved in the Ashley Madison infidelity dating website scandal of 2015, the same year the show went off the air after these allegations surfaced.

By 1997, the seminal text on purity culture was released, Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Harris proposed that dating should not be pursued by Christian teenagers. Instead, Harris proposes “courting,” which in his view, means utilizing group settings for getting to know someone. There is no room for experimentation or dating a variety of people or seeing what you like. You develop feelings for someone, and you get to know them in group settings until you decide to get married. You are not alone until your wedding night.

The success of I Kissed Dating Goodbye allowed purity culture to enter the mainstream. Now, thousands of teens were taking pledges to remain pure and going to purity balls and buying purity rings. They signed documents, conducted rituals, cried as they made a promise to God—and crucially, their earthly fathers—to remain “pure” until marriage. When Disney became privy to the growing purity industry, the network’s teen stars started wearing purity rings too. Stories about how cool the Jonas Brothers were for wearing their rings, or how Selena Gomez was also totally down to be celibate, permeated the culture. If Selena could do it, why couldn’t I? Why wouldn’t I?

Of course, pledging purity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The message’s central conceit, that it will lead to less sexual activity in teenagers and lower the rate of STIs in young people, turned out to be a fallacy.

In a national study conducted between 1995 and 2002—twenty years ago—in the U.S., 20,000 young people were asked to share details regarding their sexual health. The study found that 20 percent of those surveyed had taken a virginity pledge; some of those were consistent in their pledge, and others were labelled inconsistent due to their changing answers over the years. Crucially, 61 percent of consistent pledgers reported having sex before marriage or before their final interview in 2002. For the inconsistent pledgers, that number was 79 percent. When it came to STIs, almost 7 percent who didn’t make a pledge got diagnosed with one. For the inconsistent pledgers, the figure was 6.4 percent. For the consistent plegers, it was 4.6 percent. The authors of the study found the difference in those numbers to be statistically insignificant, and so do I.

The religious fervour in which an entire generation of young people vowed to remain celibate had virtually no real world benefits. In the U.S., this fervour was well-documented, with countless TV specials, balls, televangelist support, and mainstream media coverage. Here in Canada, however, it was more interior, private. We don’t have nearly the same pull the evangelicals have on mainstream American life, with their bombastic television personalities and church celebrities. Instead, Canadian evangelicals are more guarded, exclusive. Vague.

The trend in reframing purity culture as “pro-women” is almost unique to Canada. Take the Harper government’s handling of sex work, following the so-called “Nordic model,” which targets buyers over sellers under the guise of “protecting women”—even though the law still stigmatizes the sex worker. Or, how some Canadian evangelicals are reframing the abortion debate as one of sex-selective discrimination against girls. This frames anti-choice rhetoric as guarding women’s rights while reinforcing evangelical purity culture, through the lens of political engagement.

This engagement is in reality no more than political dog-whistles designed to strip away rights from women and queer Canadians, by presenting the former as vulnerable and in need of male protection and the latter as sinners making poor “lifestyle choices.” With the recent overturning of a supposed mainstay of American politics, Roe v. Wade, Canadians should do well to be reminded how tenuous our own rights are. As these evangelicals continue to spread their message under the guise of support for women, while peddling the very ideology that devalues women over men, the threat of puritanical politics becomes more accepted and expected in Canadian politics.

Purity culture relies on the understanding that to engage in sexual activity makes you less than. Sex takes something away from you, every time, that you cannot get back. I’ll explain it to you like it was explained to me: a glass of clean water has spoonfuls of dirt added to it; who wants to drink muddy water over a cold glass of pure, undiluted water? A piece of blue paper is glued to a piece of red paper. The papers are then ripped apart, leaving the residue of red on blue, blue on the red. Who the hell will want you when you are leaving traces of yourself on another person? A rose is passed around, crinkled, crunched, crumpled. When it makes its way back to the front of the classroom the teacher holds it out, proud to be making a point so clearly. Who wants this rose now?

This rose is worthless.

Purity culture creates a sense of specialness that isn’t there. A girl needs to be harnessed, possessed, dominated. She is dangerous. Should she know what she wants or come into her sexual power, she would be fearsome indeed. So, instead, make it clear to her: you have no value outside of what you can offer to a man. You are not your own. You do not belong to yourself. You belong to three men, and three men only. God, your father, and your husband, in that order.

The onus is placed on the girls to put the brakes on any and all potential sexual activity. And that’s the key right there—potential. Sexual activity doesn’t even need to be happening, just a chance that it might and therefore you need to be ready. When I was in the sixth grade, I had to sign a covenant with God and my school. Firstly, I committed to being covered up at all times; modesty is important. No leggings, no tank tops, no spaghetti straps, no low cut t-shirts, no skirts shorter than one inch above the knee, no bare legs, no dyed hair, no visible underwear lines, no visible bra lines, no jewellery, no tattoos, no heeled shoes. Although not strictly enforced, there was an understanding about cosmetics too: no lipstick, no eyeshadow, no foundation, no glitter, no eyeliner, no, no, no, no. Secondly, never be alone with a boy. Never sit next to a boy on a bus, never be alone in a room talking, never walk alone, never eat alone, never, never, never.

The result is a total and complete fetishization of yourself, your friendships, your relationships. The result is a total and complete disregard for same-sex attraction, for those who live outside the gender binary, for those who are attracted to all genders. The result, ironically, is creating an idol out of sex and sexual activity.

The hashtag #exvangelical started to gain traction in 2016, after the Trump election. All of a sudden, the floodgates were open and people started to tell their truths about growing up in this environment, and what it does to you.

As Chrissy Stroop, an #exvangelical activist stated to Bradley Onishi, a fellow exvangelical writer, “those who associate with #exvangelical on Twitter are going to be in the vast majority of cases liberal to left. People who were harmed by patriarchal politics because we were queer, women, people of colour.” Indeed, by 2016 it became clear the Church wasn’t protecting their flock of all nations; they were pruning and protecting those who fit the image they wanted to project, one born of whiteness. The anti LGBTQ2S+, racist and sexist belief systems touted by Trump were quietly (and sometimes not-so-quietly) endorsed by evangelical Canadians too. Indeed, after Trump was actually elected, chosen by the very people who preach love and acceptance, there became a stark Before and After
in my life and the life of my friends.

I saw people I used to know in school, and once respected, pledging their support for conversion therapy, anti-immigration policies, and white supremacy. My former principal sent out an email appealing for parents to contact their representatives in order to block the proposed conversion therapy ban in Calgary. In the U.S., white evangelicals prayed for Trump to be re-elected, and held fundraisers and pray-a-thons all for him. I no longer wanted anything to do with any of it. I stopped calling myself a Christian. I dropped the phrase “spiritual, but not religious” from my vocabulary. What used to be vaguely annoying now felt sinister to me.

In the eight years since I graduated, I’ve run into old classmates and realized they have been prompted into leaving as well. “I just couldn’t stand by anymore,” is the constant refrain. Friends I open up to refer me to therapists that specialize in religious trauma syndrome. Friends have stays in mental hospitals. Friends divorce their spouses when they discover they’ve actually been repressing their sexuality, their gender, or their politics. The more evangelical Christians become synonymous with republicanism, conservatism, fascism, the less we can stomach it. As Stroop tells Bradley Onishi in their interview, “being an ex-evangelical is inherently a political position.” It becomes one for me.

Last year, a friend and former schoolmate said something to me, as the leaves were just starting to turn ochre, that I have been turning over in my mind ever since.

“When you silence a girl’s agency, sexually, when you say that you have to say no—” she pauses here. Blinks. “Not even that you have to say no. I would frame it as you cannot say yes. That’s saying you cannot consent. Because your decision is made for you. And when that decision is made for you, that you cannot say yes? It makes it that much harder to say no.”

This is what purity culture took from me. I have trouble saying yes, making decisions on my own. I need input, to think for a while, to measure out every angle to make a decision. I rarely know how I feel. When people try to get to know me, I find it easy to throw up barriers, to stomp out any potential connection. I have trouble saying no. If someone is persistent, eager, controlling, and perseverant in their quest to make me do something, I will stop saying no around the third time. I will take the hurt. And every time I talk to the others, the other women just like me, the more I see the recognition in their eyes, and the pain in their voices, and I realize I am not alone.

Faith may be the prison of belief, but it can also be a way forward. Having faith in each other’s stories and experiences, having faith that we can and will heal from this, has saved me a thousand times over.
I am born again.

Illustration by Michelle Simpson

I’ve been a high school teacher for 16 years now. That means I’ve spent roughly half my life in high school something I’d never have predicted as a teenager. All I wanted then was to get the hell out. I was a fat teen in the 1990s, when “heroin chic” was a fashion trend and when fat jokes were so common in pop culture that I didn’t even question how messed up that was until years later, rewatching Friends as an adult.

As a student, I learned firsthand school was a place where fat kids got bullied. I was called “Whale” and “Fatty,” and once I overheard a friend of my sister’s tell her she’d kill herself if she ever got as fat as me. I was maybe a size 12 or 14 at the time. As a teacher, I learned that fatphobia, whether institutionalized or personal, is baked into the school experience.

I hear my students in larger bodies make jokes at their own expense. It’s an old tactic: get to the punchline before a bully can. When I was in their shoes, I accepted bullying as just part of being fat—a consequence of sorts. I did it to myself too. I accepted the “wisdom” that I didn’t have enough self-control to lose weight, even though nothing could have been further from the truth: in high school I controlled food and exercise to an unhealthy degree. I remember “rewarding” myself with a single Fig Newton for swallowing a diet concoction my mother’s friend swore by. Let me tell you, the diet did not work, and in no world is a Fig Newton a treat.

I spent my formative years learning to hate my body. Is it any surprise I didn’t date? That I was suspicious of anyone who liked me? That I walked into a room and scanned to see if I was the biggest person there? I wish I could say I set out to change the narrative when I became a teacher, but the best I could muster in my first eight years of teaching was working hard to prove that I was a “good” fat person.

I’d casually mention in class how often I exercised. I ate “right” in the cafeteria: salads, low-carb meals, small portions. When my students wrote papers about the “obesity epidemic,” I cringe to think about how many times I said something like, “Not all people who are fat are unhealthy. I have perfect blood work.” I didn’t stop to question why healthiness should make someone like me more deserving of respect than a human who was not in good health; my internalized fatphobia remained completely unexamined.

I’m fatter than ever these days and things that didn’t affect me when I was what’s known in the fat community as “a small fat” are problematic now. Office chairs pinch my hips, and student classroom chairs are torture. I dread bus trips where I have to share a bench seat, knowing I’ll be hanging off the edge of the bench, half a butt cheek in the aisle. Professional clothing is hard to find, especially if I want to shop in a physical store. I miss the questionable privilege of my high school days, even as I recognize the things making me uncomfortable can and should be fixed.

Accessibility should be a priority in educational settings, though I rarely hear anyone talk about how accessibility includes bodies of all sizes. These discomforts, these small indignities, could be fixed by better design, by thinking about more than the “average” student or faculty member, whoever those people are supposed to be.

About 10 years ago, something shifted for me. I stumbled upon posts some friends had shared on Facebook about body positivity. I was suspicious at first: I should love my body, not hate it? This was the antithesis of everything I had learned.

Then, as my friends started having children, I thought of the things we hear our parents say that we internalize. I remembered my mother saying negative things about her body. I didn’t want these tiny humans to inherit our mess. So I dug deeper. I learned about body neutrality, and thanks to the work of fat activists, most of whom have been Black women, I worked on dismantling my own fatphobia and speaking up for myself and others. Today, I’m a better teacher for it.

I have asked for extended sizing in gym uniforms. I have set boundaries for myself around diet talk, asking colleagues not to talk about how great they feel thanks to intermittent fasting, or walking away when it doesn’t feel safe to speak up. I try to challenge student assumptions about fatness whenever they come up in class. I love to simply state “I am fat” whenever I hear a student make a fat joke. When they try to reassure me I am not, I tell them that I am, that it’s just a descriptor like “tall” or “skinny,” and I leave them to ponder this possibility, just as I once did.

However, fatphobia is institutionalized, and my small acts of resistance are not enough to make the system better in any significant way for all teachers and students. According to the Quebec Education Program, “Adopting a healthy, active lifestyle means seeking a quality of life characterized by an overall well-being and autonomously identifying the many factors that influence health.”

This definition doesn’t acknowledge the many factors that prevent individuals from attaining “overall well-being,” poverty, racism, and transphobia, to name just a few. Yes, I raise questions about how the education system shames fat people, with sympathetic colleagues and with my students, in spaces where I feel safe. But even with all my privilege as an educator, a white cis woman, and a midsize fat, I find myself staying silent more often than I’m proud to admit. Dismantling fatphobia is no small task.

I’ll keep taking up space in classrooms because I love teaching, but I do it knowing my body doesn’t fit. Changing this takes collective efforts. If we want to confront fatphobia in schools, we can start by advocating for policies that embrace a health-at-every-size approach, especially in physical education classes. We can acknowledge the variety of bodies in our classrooms and provide better furniture. We can teach allies to call out fat jokes, so their fat peers, or teachers, don’t have to. School shouldn’t be about learning to hate yourself—or others. It should be a place to grow into the best version of yourself.

Photo by ISTOCK/YNGSA

The thought only seems to come in the mirror. It plays out staccato, like a chess game, tennis match, sword fight.

It’s helping. No, it’s not. It could be. It’s obviously not helping. Look, the spot there, a bit back from the front, to the left—no, the right—it’s barer than before. OK. So maybe it’s not helping—but if I wasn’t doing it, it might be even worse than it is now.

I’m talking about the Rogaine. I’ve been rubbing its foam into my scalp—nominally twice a day, though, like any non-binary writer with ADHD and anxiety, I’m far from perfect at remembering—and have been for about a year now. To address My Problem, which people still call “male pattern baldness.” A box of three tubes—a three-month supply—can run you anywhere from about $100 to $150, but apparently no longer requires a prescription in Quebec, as it did when I first started using it. I still couldn’t tell you if it’s helping or not.

Of course, it’s embarrassing. Rogaine feels like such an awfully cis-het man product to me. It speaks, above all, I believe, to a male desire to be attractive to women. I feel like the gay community is relatively comfortable with sexy bald men, that it’s possible to be a sexy gay guy without the thick head of hair or the flowing locks. But, as I began to seriously confront the fact that my hair was thinning a few years back, the question of how this affected me as a non-binary person arose alongside it.

My first act as a non-binary person, after all, was dyeing my hair pink. I made the decision before I’d even come out; it was a statement choice, and a photo of my new ’do was the exclamation point on the sentence. Along with the cut, the colour cost north of $250, a bracing welcome to the world of femininity via professional hair care. My days of $20 barbershop cuts—in places where the men sometimes seemed like they were fighting to see who could say the most sexist thing—were over.

Though my gender does not line up with the sex I was assigned at birth, my experience with dysphoria has been a bit all over the place. I quite like having a penis, though honestly I don’t especially care for testicles, and I do dream at times of being able to try having a vulva and vagina—just as an option. I don’t mind being tall, but I do wish I was skinnier in a way that I recognize as feminine—because I, too, have internalized the idea that skinniness and feminine sexiness are inextricable from one another. I don’t crave surgery—but I wish I didn’t have facial hair or body hair, and if I ever had the money I’d probably look into laser hair removal. I think typically male modes of dress are largely boring, but it’s a boringness I feel comfortable in, and I have close to zero interest in wearing dresses or skirts. I’m curious about makeup, a little bit, and I wear eyeliner on occasion, and nail polish often, but most of it feels overwhelming. I’ve largely stopped wearing them entirely. I think about going on hormones every now and then, but they don’t call to me the way they do for many trans people.

On some level, then, I understood that hair was the easiest, best, most fun place for me to express my gender. Since the pink, I’ve gone back to get it dyed silver, pink again (though this time a subtler one), and, most recently, turquoise. Watching the colours fade over the first few weeks to a uniform blond, and then watching the blond hold tight while my natural brown sprouts irrepressibly up below it, has been fun. I’m 33 now, but for a long, long time—all through my teens and 20s—my hair was a place of conformity, one that, on some level, I longed to use for exploring, but didn’t know how to bring myself to. Coming out finally allowed me to confront, and satisfy, that desire. It felt, to use a word that comes up a fair amount in gender discussions, affirming.

One of the things I love about transness is its ability to subsume the world, the way it functions as a lens, the way everything can be considered in a trans light, in a trans context—even hair loss. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read is a sentence about transness I saw on Twitter. It was something like, “every person assigned male at birth has a potential breast size and they’ll never find out what it is unless they start taking hormones.” The idea that our bodies contain within them the blueprints for gender markers we do not claim as our own is a fascinating and unsounded depth of human thought, a beautiful, glittering pool whose bottom we have not yet attempted to touch.

American trans author Thomas Page McBee has at least done a jackknife dive into those waters. As he writes in his wrenching, gorgeous memoir, Man Alive, “In more anxious moments, washing my hands in single-stall gas station johns, I hoped that being a man would not feel like pretending. I looked in the mirror and tried to imagine myself into being. I could have a deep voice or a reedy one, I could become bald or not, I could be skinny or muscular, hairy or pimply. I was a mystery to myself, and yet my body knew what it needed. My body waited for me.”

I wondered what that might be like, the idea of anticipating a baldness, of awaiting it like one might await a child, that your body failing you was somehow a sign of rightness, of success. It was a hopeful concept, but one I felt outside of. Did any older trans women rejoice to find out they could no longer achieve erections? At least going grey, and then white, is gender neutral.

Still, for what feels like the overwhelming majority of out trans and non-binary people today, the questions of bodily aging remain academic. The one fact about trans ages that I’ve seen cited often—that trans women die on average at the age of 35—has since been debunked in a 2019 article in The Stranger, though the study it stemmed from did shine a spotlight on trans women of colour’s alarming vulnerability to acts of (almost always male) violence. Elsewhere, there simply isn’t a lot of data on the subject yet, given that non-binary people are still fighting to be recognized in the medical literature to begin with. The figures that are available—and Canada made a big step forward on this account when it released data from the 2021 census, which contained a question about non-cis gender identities, in April—suggest that trans and non-binary people, as a cohort, are younger than the general population, seemingly in large part because younger people come out at higher rates than older people: Canadian Gen Zers are about six and a half times more likely to identify as trans or non-binary than those born in 1945 or earlier (0.79 percent of the age cohort versus 0.12 percent, respectively). And with a growing acceptance of transness leading to even young children coming out, it’s plausible that the median age for trans people is actually dropping even as our numbers swell.

At 33, I’m hardly an ancient trans person, but it often feels like I’m over a decade removed from where the action is. Which means, for better or for worse, that the embodied experiences I’m living through are ones that so many trans people haven’t encountered yet, and, in many cases, haven’t even begun to consider. And while many trans people will find themselves aching for a different kind of aging as they hit middle age, as their bodies begin to deteriorate and change in sexed ways that may feel like betrayals, there is simply no playbook for aging in a non-binary body. It’s a kind of freedom, of course, but also a form of aloneness.

When was the last time you saw a sexy bald woman? I don’t mean a woman with her hair shaved close, like Amber Rose or V for Vendetta-era Natalie Portman. I mean a woman with a Mr. Clean-style cue-ball head—or worse, the inescapably “male” look that mixes sheer baldness on top with hair around the back and sides. Mainstream conceptions of female sexiness are so wedded to thick hair flowing from the top of the head that it’s conceptually hard for many people to imagine a beautiful woman without it. So, while the first signifier of beginning to go bald may be that one is moving away from youth, to begin to go bald is also to move inexorably away from femininity, or at least from the possibility of expressing a traditionally feminine beauty.

For someone who was just coming into my appreciation, in a real way, of that potential in my male-presenting body, that was a blow. I was only beginning, it felt like, to become myself, when genes, hormones, the inscrutable hard-coded logics of the body were already robbing me of the fullness of that self. I would never be the me I could have been.

Of course, no one is guaranteed beauty, particularly if your ideas of beauty have been passed down to you by mainstream culture, as they have been for so many of us. We don’t deserve that narrow ideal of beauty, we aren’t promised it. That’s sort of the point—it’s more a measure of what some people have and most others don’t than it is any one set of visual standards. We see that in the way ideals shift. People love to parrot that old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what’s more interesting about it is that certain time- and place-specific groups of beholders all seem to agree on a specific look, only for it to fall out of favour as soon as you cross a border, whether between countries or between decades.

So, I think about wigs, another hallmark of trans life. They can make any kind of wig these days—they could make a wig that looks like the hair I wish I had—short and masculine in length, unmistakably feminine in colour. Do I have wig money? Do I have wig confidence? Do I have a certain wig je ne sais quoi? Would wearing a wig make me feel more like a sad businessman with a toupée or an over-the-top drag queen? Would wearing a wig feel non-binary to me?

Recently, I’ve seen several meme-ified variations of a phrase on Twitter: non-binary people don’t owe anyone androgyny. But that doesn’t mean some of us don’t feel like we do, don’t feel that we’re not being “queer enough.” Did I recently describe myself to a friend as “diet trans” for feeling like my transness wasn’t, as people say, “embodied” enough? I did. Do I feel guilty whenever I let my nail polish lapse? I do. And when an old friend offered to take me out to get my ears pierced and I took over half a year off before getting back to her? It ate at me. How will I feel when it’s too late for me, when the hole in the ozone layer of my hair grows too big to paper over and I need to embrace being bald?

I lied about the mirror earlier, actually. I also think about My Problem in summer, when I’m caught in an unexpected rain, fat droplets thinning my hair down to what feels like nothing, exposing the weak spots. Like I’m made of something sweet and sticky that dissolves in water. Spun sugar. Of course, no one is guaranteed beauty. I’m still in mourning for the body I wanted, will never be the me I could have been. But I hope the
next wave of non-binary kids gets to make the most out of their hair while they still have it. And with luck, maybe one day I’ll be the older non-binary person a younger version of me sees as a model for aging gracefully.

Dimitri Nasrallah’s Hotline (Véhicule Press) transports readers to mid-eighties Montreal when weight-loss centres were a burgeoning industry, and “body image” and “health consciousness” were terms just entering the vocabulary of self-care. Muna Heddad, a French teacher by trade, takes a job as a hotline phone operator at meal delivery company Nutri-Fort when no school will hire her. An immigrant escaping the Lebanese Civil War, she has little alternative if she is to provide a semblance of security for her son, Omar, following her husband’s disappearance from the war-torn streets of Beirut.

Nasrallah, who teaches creative writing at Concordia University, elaborated on his decision to set his novel in the heyday of hotlines.

“There’s always an unsophisticated idealism baked into the possibilities of new mediums,” he says. “A little later on, everyone comes to a consensus about usage and conventions. But there’s a window of time in which people are still figuring [out] what can be done, and that was when this era of the hotline became appealing. It’s an obscure technology now, but in its heyday it spoke to that universal need to connect with others in ways we’ve emulated since with the internet and social media.”

Known for his politically charged writing in books like The Bleeds, Niko, and Blackbodying, Hotline sees Nasrallah taking inspiration from his own childhood, articulating some of his mother’s experiences working as a weight-loss call operator.

“The people who call Nutri-Fort’s hotline and speak to Muna experience the shame that comes with fatphobia,” he says. “They’d dedicated themselves to meeting the many expectations Canadian life was throwing at them, and along the way they gained weight, which set them even further back from where they wanted to be—that consensus ideal of happiness that hangs over all of us,” Nasrallah says.

“For Muna, xenophobia brings a similar shame, of not understanding the way the game is played here and the sense of being manipulated by circumstances [she doesn’t] yet understand. That shared sense of shame makes her sympathetic to the voices she counsels on the phone.”

Muna fears that her Quebecois clients struggling with loneliness and bereavement will sever their ties with her if they discover that she is a French-speaking Arab. This balancing act of appearing sympathetic to callers who would not deign to speak to her outside of a professional scenario is the lamentable if commonplace dynamic at the centre of the novel.

“The anxiety over these two forms of visibility—body image and race—were paired together for me by that situation,” Nasrallah explains. “It was only much later as an adult that I began to see how the two were linked and fit into this larger context of unattainable ideals that are a part of North America’s social fabric.” Nasrallah notes that fatphobia and xenophobia are both fears of the body. “Both come from the same intolerances and are hardwired into the social construct. Both devalue how people see themselves.”

At a time when borders are reopening and immigration numbers to Canada are beginning to rise following disincentives to travel, Hotline documents how social issues newcomers face have root causes that have not been completely addressed four decades later.

“In every historical setting in fiction, there has to be some resonance back to the current moment, something that connects the reader to the material and helps organize the story so that parallels emerge and serve to give the narrative layers of meaning,” Nasrallah says. “When we draw from the past, it’s to understand the present moment, and organize some understanding out of the parallels we see.”

Photo by XURZON; Design by Valerie Thai

At least 595 people died in B.C. from heat-related deaths during the summer of 2021. Most of these occurred during the province’s “heat dome” event, which took place from June 25 to July 1, and saw temperatures rise as high as 49.6 degrees Celsius. Many climate activists and researchers believe that was just a taste of what’s to come as extreme weather events cause mass death with increasing frequency.

When climate-related mass deaths come, they’re expected to affect disabled people in greater numbers. While a full coroner’s report detailing how many of those who died in the 2021 heat wave were disabled has yet to be released, Sébastien Jodoin, a Canada Research Chair in Human Rights, Health, and the Environment at McGill University in Montreal and the founding director of the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Program (DICARP), expects it to mirror the coroner’s data from Montreal’s 2018 heat wave. That event killed 66 people, 72 percent of whom were chronically ill.

“When you looked at the coroner’s report of people who died,” says Jodoin, “they found that a quarter had schizophrenia.”

Jodoin, who pivoted his research to looking at how disabled people are left out of climate planning after he developed multiple sclerosis (MS) at 33 years old, notes that a common medication that schizophrenics take makes them more sensitive to heat. However, he believes that what ultimately increases schizophrenics’ risk is that they are often poor, isolated, and harder to reach when it comes to government communication.

“They actually would have needed some sort of additional measures to be safe during this period and there was nothing in place to protect them,” Jodoin explains. “So, it kind of illustrates both that there’s vulnerability and … lack of planning.”

Climate change is currently affecting disabled people in Canada and around the world especially hard. Rolling blackouts caused by overtaxed power grids are disrupting the use of ventilators or other assistive devices, extreme temperatures and smog are causing flare-ups for people who have respiratory or autoimmune disabilities, and emergency response planning for extreme weather events often do not consider the needs or particular vulnerabilities of disabled people. Even increases in the toxicity of controlled drugs causing more disabled people to die from overdoses can be linked to the climate, since climate change has been linked to increased drug use. The climate future is likely to be filled with preventable deaths of disabled people. Yet, climate change planning rarely includes disabled people, many of whom are vulnerable in multiple ways because of poverty or other intersecting marginalizations.

Jodoin, who has analyzed climate adaptation policies around the world, found that disability was rarely mentioned in these critical national and international documents. What’s more, disabled people are sometimes physically excluded from the negotiation table.

“[Climate negotiations are] not accessible sometimes to wheelchair users,” Jodoin says. “There was an incident last November where an Israeli minister [Karine Elharrar] … was not able to enter the negotiation room because she was a wheelchair user.”

Jodoin notes that disabled people aren’t discussed in most of Canada’s national adaptation policies for climate change, the set of government publications that cover everything from policy frameworks, to platforms, to in-depth plans for specific departments or ministries. He says these frameworks do, however, often mention Indigenous people and women as potentially being more at risk.

That omission means that disabled people will be less likely to get centred in planning. But Susana Deranger, a climate and disability activist of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and a member of the Indigenous Climate Action steering committee, an Indigenous-led organization working to find solutions to climate change, also believes it neglects the fact that disabled people are disproportionately Indigenous.

“Systemic racism makes experiences of disability much worse,” they say. “Thirty percent of Indigenous people are disabled…. That’s an extremely high number.”

Deranger worries that climate change or climate emergencies will make it harder for disabled Indigenous people to access health care, traditional foods, and even medical care and supplies in remote Indigenous communities.

Deranger isn’t surprised that disabled BIPOC people are being left out of these plans. They believe that the same forces that motivate ableist beliefs that disabled people are disposable are also what led us to the climate catastrophe—the colonial belief that the land and people are important only in how they’re instrumental to capitalism.

“Capitalism and colonialism go hand in hand and are linked to everything that’s wrong,” they say.

Andrea McDowell, who works on air quality and climate change at the municipal level, believes more preparation needs to go into protecting disabled people from climate impacts.

“Disabled people are the largest minority group in Canada,” she says. “That’s a very large number of people who are being left out of important and even life-saving work.”

McDowell’s 18-year-old, Echo McDowell, has a rare form of dwarfism and worries about the ways she’s already being left out of emergency planning. Echo recalls an example where she was left behind during a school fire drill because no one knew what to do to get her to safety.

“I had to spend a while making specific plans with the administration so that they wouldn’t end up leaving me in the building,” she explains.

Being left behind in an emergency is McDowell’s fear for all disabled people. “You look at Hurricane Katrina and the people who died were often disabled and that was largely because the response didn’t take … the needs of disabled people into account,” she says. “If the response isn’t accessible, then disabled people will die.”

It seems like governments aren’t making evacuating disabled people a priority, are creating emergency shelters that aren’t accessible, are not planning for medical care or vital medicines, and are stockpiling food that disabled people with dietary requirements can’t eat. There are so few ways that disabled people’s needs are being included in climate emergency planning.

“[People often say] we need to consider disabled people. But there’s so little representation in the organizations and the committees that are making those decisions,” says McDowell.

While a diverse representation of disabled people should be centred in climate movements, disabled people are not just often left out—they’re also sometimes seen as the problem.

For example, bans on plastic straws have trampled over disabled people’s needs, single-use plastics that save disabled people’s lives are often demonized, and one Ontario doctor has called for a reduction in inhaler prescriptions to combat climate change. Climate movements often target the things disabled people need to survive—something that’s been referred to as “eco-ableism.”

“My life is dependent on single-use plastics,” says McDowell, who is a Type 1 diabetic (T1D). “So, I spent a lot of time thinking about the environmental movement … and ableism.” Due to the use of testing strips and needles, managing T1D requires the use of a significant amount of single-use plastics.

She believes that climate justice and environmental groups need to do more to reach out. “Look around the table. Recognize that there’s a very large and important constituency that’s not being included, and fix it,” she says. “We have completely overlooked disability for the past several decades or centuries. Maybe it’s time we find some local visibility initiatives relating to the environment or climate and support them.”

Deranger agrees that the environmental movement is not doing enough to make space for disabled people—or to include those who are marginalized in other ways and who are also disabled. Despite efforts to include more Indigenous people and people of colour in climate activism, they say it often leaves out disabled people in those groups. “There’s nothing like Braille or ASL or anything for them to participate,” they explain. “When they’re planning venues, they’re not thinking about disabled people. If there’s rallies and marches and people can’t walk very far with them, they’re never planned [for].”

Deranger doesn’t believe it has to be that way, citing an experience at a rally in Mexico where there was a truck participants could hop onto if they couldn’t walk or got tired. “But I don’t see that [here],” they say.

The movement loses out when it doesn’t include everyone, according to Deranger. “The solution to climate justice is to listen to Indigenous Peoples but listen to Indigenous disabled people as well,” they assert. “[Inclusion is seen as] another burden to fighting rallies, fighting marches, planning events.… It’s already overwhelming. So … we can’t add that on. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the capacity. Well, make it.”

In 2020, American disability activist Alice Wong gave a talk called “The Last Disabled Oracle.” In it, she discussed how disabled people sounded the alarm during the pandemic about the importance of masks, accessibility, and interdependence.

“It became very clear who was considered disposable and who was not,” she said in her talk. “The casual ableism, racism, and ageism went unchecked in debates around restarting the economy with terms such as ‘acceptable losses’ and ‘high risk’ as if those lives weren’t worth living or saving.”

Wong later tweeted: “Disabled people know what it means to be vulnerable and interdependent. We are modern-day oracles. It’s time people listened to us.”

Many activists are worried that the disregard public health officials are showing to the concerns of disabled people during the pandemic will be mirrored in the climate future. But, that future could be made easier if only more people listened to disabled people. Rather than being sidelined, many disabled activists argue, they should be leading government efforts to adapt to a changing climate.

“[As a disabled person,] you’re already existing in an environment that is hostile towards you, and that’s not an experience that abled people have,” says McDowell. “I think there’s a lot to learn there about the kind of adaptability and resourcefulness and problem solving that disabled people often need to do just to exist in the world.”

Deranger also sees disabled people as holders of wisdom others could benefit from. “Everybody has to realize that disability is … a social justice issue just like climate change is,” they say. “Listen to disabled people—disabled people live with and recognize climate change just as much as anyone else andif you want to learn about coping mechanisms and resilience, go to disabled people, listen, and learn.”

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

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

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

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

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

Cover illustration by Mollie Cronin; Design by Valerie Thai

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

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

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

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

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