PILOT: "Don't Worry, You're Going to Be Okay."
Welcome to TransCanada Stories. I'm Cynthia Sweeney, and I use sheher pronouns.
Emma Stanley:I'm Emma Stanley. I use sheher pronouns.
Emma Stanley:In this podcast, we go beyond the binary coast to coast, telling the stories of trans people as people. Cynthia and I have been working together since fall twenty twenty one. We create workshops and presentations focusing on trans and non binary inclusion.
Cyndi Sweeney:Inclusion everywhere. In businesses, both small and large, in non profits and in schools, right starting from primary all the way up.
Emma Stanley:But as we're talking to trans and cisgender professionals across Canada, we've recognized a common need. Not trans people as role models and heroes, but just stories from trans people just being part of the Canadian experience from a trans perspective.
Cyndi Sweeney:A little later in today's show, we're going to
Emma Stanley:be joined by Felix Vandergrift. Felix is a self described open book in the spirit of joining community, supporting one another, and building bridges within that community. They're also laser focused on the current state of the nation as it impacts the lives of trans people.
Cyndi Sweeney:They are very interested in pushing forward protections, but also joining community and having a unified voice. So we're pretty excited to connect with Felix. But first, we wanted to kind of take you down about how TransCanada Stories has evolved and how Emma and I came together in the first place. So as Emma had said, we met, gosh, it was like a year and a half ago now, two years ago at this point. And it's funny because up until just this past January, so seven, eight months ago, Emma and I had never been in the same room together.
Cyndi Sweeney:But we had been working together for a year and a half virtually. You were in New Brunswick and then Thailand. And I had never dreamed that Emma would be here in Canada and working with me in this tiny little office every single day. But here she is.
Emma Stanley:Yeah. No. I found it was interesting interacting with someone with such a different experience of the trans community. I know that one of your children is trans and so you're coming into this space from that perspective. And I'm coming in from a very different way.
Emma Stanley:I am transgender and I transitioned fairly late in life from one perspective. I transitioned when I was in my mid thirties, so I had the experience of doing my full sort of young adult phase in presenting as one gender and then switching that presentation when I was sort of established as an adult, which gives me sort of a unique perspective on being trans and having sort of explored both sides of that.
Cyndi Sweeney:Yeah. And as a parent of a trans child, I learn so much from Emma every single day. How you can perceive the world as a cisgender person, as somebody who is not under the choice LGBTQ plus rainbow. And I think you learn from me as well from my perspective as a parent and trying to navigate allyship and where that falls and what is good allyship and maybe what is maybe overstepping. And so we're learning all the time and we wanted to create this super fun podcast to connect with other trans people from across Canada or even beyond and just share stories, have a chat and talk about how we're all kind of just navigating this unique and fabulous world, sometimes challenging.
Emma Stanley:Sometimes horrifying.
Cyndi Sweeney:Sometimes slightly terrifying. But you know what? Finding a light at the end of the tunnel, finding that glimmer around the rainbow. Where I kind of come to working with Emma is I'm the founder of Simply Good Form, which is a consultancy, an educational production company that produces workshops and presentations, elevating the voices from within the trans community in the spirit of educating with first person voice through lived experience. Emma and I, we've been debating constantly for weeks about this podcast and even this morning.
Cyndi Sweeney:So Emma wants part of this to be, you know, a spa day for trans folks. Of course, we, you know, there's a lot of, like, heavy shit happening out there in the media, right? And, like, we just wanna have some fun and some good stories.
Emma Stanley:A huge part of supporting the trans community is showing stories of people who are like just vibing. They are trans and or non binary or part of the queer community but also and separately they are just successful in living their lives. But the fact is that if you are part of queer community, sort of one of the cornerstones of that is just being alive is a political act. And so we we can't escape from a certain amount of activism. And I don't think we should always escape from the activism.
Cyndi Sweeney:Yeah. I mean, it's typical. Part of the extremist transphobia that we're seeing all across North America and right here in Canada at the moment, it's focused on trans youth and it's focusing on transitioning and the policing of all of that. And so I think we would be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit about that. Even this week, while you're off on holidays, I had a couple of interviews with two different CBC reporters just around exactly what is unfolding here, talking particularly about what people should know around the importance of giving space for young people to shine as their true selves in a really sort of scary and vulnerable time for parents and caregivers of trans children and youth, but also for trans people themselves.
Cyndi Sweeney:And I can put a link in the show notes to those particular articles. But today, we'd love to talk a little bit about demystifying transitioning from our own sort of point of views. But we'd love to hear if there's any listeners out there who too, after listening to this show, you might like to share with us a bright light moment as it relates to your own journey as a trans person and what transitioning means to you. And I don't mean that as any kind of one particular moment in time because as we know, there's many, many trickles of moments in time over a person's life. So thinking of that, Emma, I totally remember when you first shared part of your journey with me.
Cyndi Sweeney:And honestly, that gave me goosebumps. It invoked great and deep emotions for me as a mom of trans child Because you shared with me this beautiful moment sort of behind the curtain and just thinking of your own resiliency and bravery, but also the connections, the really unique connection that evolved even between your mother and you during that period of time. Yeah. So my story it's always the trouble when I tell this story. So to give listeners a little bit
Emma Stanley:of context, I do workshops. So telling parts of my story, sometimes really intimate parts of my story, is kind of part of my job. It's part of the way that I have decided to bring people into this community and give them perspective inside. And it's something that I personally don't mind doing. And I hope by sharing my story online, I'm not encouraging or promoting the idea that trans people do have to give the intimate details of their lives to strangers.
Emma Stanley:But frankly, I'm a hot gay mess and I love oversharing. So here goes. The other problem with telling the story, and it happens in workshops a lot is I'm never really sure where to start because where's the start of a story?
Cyndi Sweeney:Once upon a time Emma was in Thailand.
Emma Stanley:Oh but it happened so much before Thailand right? I realized I was trans in my late 20s. I couldn't really do anything about it until my mid-30s. I was living and working as an English teacher in a few different countries across The Middle East and Asia and sort of Southeast Asia and eventually moved to Thailand for surgery, which it was amazing because I was in this immensely privileged position where I could do that privately. I didn't have to go through very much in terms of Medicare systems.
Emma Stanley:And the recovery process, for those of you that don't know, at least with the hospital that I went to, is you get a hotel for a month. Nurses come every day and you just are trapped in a hotel room. And if you're very lucky, you have someone there with you, and I was. My mother was able to come out to Thailand. It was, I think, the third international trip that she's ever made and probably the the longest she's ever been away from my dad.
Emma Stanley:So it was pretty scary for her and pretty scary for me. I think the strangest part of it for me was my dad wasn't there and he decided not to be there, not because he wasn't supportive, he's extremely supportive, but because he knew that this was a chance for my mother and I to really realign our relationship, and that was a very intense experience, everything changed. Please keep in mind that I again had been teaching for a really long time, for six or seven years at that point. I had minimal face to face contact with my family because they were back in Canada and I didn't get home much. So they hadn't been given the opportunity to see or participate much in my social transition.
Emma Stanley:I went away one person and the next time they saw me, was a very different person both in appearance and manner. And so it was this brilliant time for us to share stories and reconnect and reconnect under this new context mother and daughter. I found the process of bottom surgery to be so similar in experience to the stories that I've heard about childbirth. Obviously, I've never been there, but the loss of your sense of owning your own body because you've got doctors and nurses prodding at places that you never thought they would. Trapped in a bed for way too long.
Emma Stanley:The boredom of it was mirrored when I talked to my sister and my mom about their experiences with that. It did have this sort of literal rebirthing vibe to it.
Cyndi Sweeney:Although unlike childbirth, you're not stuck in a room for four weeks afterwards with your mother. Although maybe I wish that I would have been. That would have probably been really beneficial for me.
Emma Stanley:Well, I mean, yeah, there was a lot of storytelling. There was a lot of reconnecting, but also this other thing happened. This is one of Cynthia's favorite stories.
Cyndi Sweeney:It's gonna
Emma Stanley:be a book. One of my favorite stories. Yeah. One of the interesting things about this hotel is that all of the recipients of surgery from this particular clinic were there at once. So we saw each other in the hallways as we limped around and there was this sort of quiet recognition there.
Emma Stanley:Even if we weren't saying hello, there was little nods in the elevator and these nervous little sort of half waves to girls at other tables because we were all carrying the same you have to sit on this pillow for a month. So you saw someone else with the pillow and you were like, okay, comrade. Someone who was about a week ahead of me in recovery, a woman that I will absolutely never forget, had gone to the front desk and asked if there was anyone who was sort of in this zone and they gave her my name. She knocked on the door and came in and I was at the worst part of it. You're really out of commission for the first eleven days.
Emma Stanley:There's a catheter, there's a lot of painkillers and it is no fun. You can't get out of bed? Not really. You can but it is not fun. She came in with this cardboard box.
Emma Stanley:It had stuff done all over the outside of it and the box was full of support. And the lady who dropped it off to me was just really, extroverted and really social. So she was, came into the room and put the box on my bed, introduced herself and just said, Don't worry. You're gonna be okay. This cardboard box full of love, it had board games.
Emma Stanley:It had pads. It had writing materials. It had notes and drawn on the box from all of the other girls who it had been sort of passed down to. Because what happened was this box was traveling room to room throughout the hotel. And that as much as reconnecting with mom was this this moment of feeling out this community and and feeling the first tentative touches of being connected to this huge group of people and this vast reservoir of love.
Emma Stanley:And it totally changed the way that I see myself.
Cyndi Sweeney:Was there one item that was in the box that you remember the most or that like was like the most important, like, moving
Emma Stanley:Honestly, it was the board game sequence. You and your mom played it? We did, and we have been playing it since I was a kid, because we had a copy of it at the house in Canada. And so it was something we'd done before, it was something familiar, and then suddenly we just had the opportunity to do that in this place where I felt very uncomfortable because of the situation that my body was in. And she felt very uncomfortable because she was in an entirely new country where she couldn't speak the language and she was sort of stuck in a hotel room with me, which she's a very outside person and she was suddenly transported to the middle of one of the biggest cities on the planet, Bangkok.
Emma Stanley:And so, yeah, some familiarity for both of us was something that was really positive.
Cyndi Sweeney:And so you don't have the box anymore?
Emma Stanley:No. I I passed it on. As it had been passed on to me, when I left, I made sure at the front desk that it was sent to another person who is in her first few days. And I'm not brave enough to barge into other people's hotel rooms. And, you know, there's there's a little bit of regret there, I guess.
Emma Stanley:I kinda wish that I had, but I left a note and and and made sure it was passed on. And I hope that it's still being passed around that that very strange hotel.
Cyndi Sweeney:I wonder maybe one day somebody will listen and say, I had that box too. And reach out to you.
Emma Stanley:I hope so.
Cyndi Sweeney:It would be beautiful.
Emma Stanley:Transition is not something that is an event. It is something that is ongoing. Sometimes I get frustrated with the language around transition because we are all transitioning all of the time. We move from one phase of our lives to the next. And in some ways, transition is no different than that.
Emma Stanley:You're just discovering a new part of yourself and expressing it the way people do with any number of partners or, subcultures. In each of those transitions, in every one of those transitions, finding community and that support is important to that process. Acceptance of transition is huge. And part of why we're going to talk to Felix today is about this idea of community and and being able to access it and how a lot of people are trying to block access to that exact feeling.
Cyndi Sweeney:Time to take a break from this TransCanada Stories for a TD Connected Communities moment.
Emma Stanley:TransCanada Stories are your stories, and we're all about connecting communities right across Canada. We would love to hear from you. What topics would you like us to cover? Do you know someone who'd like to be a guest on the show? Follow the link in the show notes and share with us how can we make TransCanada Stories great for you.
Emma Stanley:That was a TD Connected Community moment because community matters.
Cyndi Sweeney:Okay. Well, we are welcoming Felix Vandergrift to the show. Felix is a researcher and works in governmental relations. He is an active advocate for TGNB, that's transgender and non binary rights, access to gender affirming health care, supporting to us LGBTQIA plus youth, harm reduction, and human rights. Felix is from Nova Scotia.
Cyndi Sweeney:And while he has traveled for work extensively, moved back here with his spouse in 2017. Felix recently underwent top surgery in Dartmouth, thanks to the plastics team at the QE2, and is continuing to push for more access to better gender affirming care for TGNV, transgender and non binary folks in the province. Welcome to the show, Felix.
Felix Vandergrift:Hi, I'm happy to be here. I'm excited to join you today.
Cyndi Sweeney:Well, we're super excited to have you too. And I don't think you've actually had a chance to meet Emma in person, even though Emma is very familiar with you from our Thriveworks program.
Emma Stanley:Emma. So nice to meet you and glad So to have you on the I saw from your bio that you're an active advocate. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Felix Vandergrift:Yeah, I think unfortunately we're still a little bit in a time period where most trans people I know are on some level advocating either for themselves or for their community. I have done a lot of work even starting as young as like 17 doing protests and going to school in Montreal was really an eye opener for that because Montreal students are on another level with protests and learned a lot there. But then as I've gotten older, a lot of my advocacy work has shifted to more behind the scenes stuff and being less on-site, although I do try to still be on-site and present, but into a lot of policy development. And I've learned a lot through work that I've done with indigenous communities on advocating and doing consultations with provincial and federal governments. And that has helped a lot in terms of like letter writing and proposal and grant writing and things like that.
Felix Vandergrift:So that's what I spend a lot of my time doing. And once you learn the language, because it is a different language when you're dealing with stuff like that, it's really easy to get people's attention.
Cyndi Sweeney:Have you had a lot of success? I know recently you just reached out with regards to trying to connect community around certain policies that are being proposed out in Saskatchewan and rolling back gender affirming rights for your students in New Brunswick. Tell us a little bit about where you're at there.
Felix Vandergrift:So I started writing a letter to our education minister and it accidentally, for better or for worse, turned into a bit of a peer reviewed literature review. And so part of my educational background is looking at peer reviewed journal articles for not only advocacy, but bias. Like, are they actually like peer reviewed or is there some like basically critical analysis and then taking those things and turning it into language that is easily transferable to other folks. So I did a bit of a deep dive into the protection of transgender, non binary and gender diverse students. And ended up with like an eight or nine page review on the topic and sent it to the education minister.
Felix Vandergrift:And I actually was scheduled in for a meeting with the education minister's people here, which was awesome. And we had a really good initial first discussion on sort of and it's going to be ongoing, obviously. So the meeting was good, but then the other side of things that is really awesome is just in personal networks, a lot of people have reached out for copies of said letter and have been copy and pasting some of that research into their own letters to then go to the minister and the premier, both in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. So that's been really nice and good to see both parents and other 2SLGBTQIA advocates.
Cyndi Sweeney:That's wonderful that you're really helping to bridge community. And perhaps if you'd like to share a copy of the letter, we can put it in the show notes for others who are maybe wanting to get involved and be proactive, but not knowing how to do that. They could perhaps use that letter as a starting point.
Felix Vandergrift:Absolutely. I mean, you get unfortunately working or fortunately or unfortunately, however you want to look at it, you get a little bit of an education when you start working in consultation. And some people don't even know where to send the letters to. So in that letter, have CC'd all of the people that I feel are directly sort of tied into that. And it's all MLAs or ministers responsible for youth or ministers responsible for the Human Rights Act, specifically the education minister because that is her wheelhouse.
Felix Vandergrift:But it never hurts to kind of spread it far and wide. I find that people, especially ministers tend to react more to letters that are written and not just a copy standard paste thing. So I advocate for people to take pieces of it, but then put their own anecdotes. Be it like you have a kid in your life who is trans that you want to protect, or you're a teacher, or you've been involved in the schools and somehow, or you are an LGBTQ person who wants to advocate for this and just put your own anecdotes in it. And you'll see in the letter that I'll happily share, put my own personal anecdotes about growing up here and going through the public school system and how it didn't make me less trans or less gay, it just took longer to get there.
Cyndi Sweeney:Right. Yeah. It was like not A to B, it was more A to C to B to
Emma Stanley:D and then to F, maybe back
Cyndi Sweeney:to Yeah. You had said in the bio that we were just reading out that you are just recovering from top surgery. And we've been talking about affirming care and a little bit about transitioning on the show so far. And you had mentioned about the importance of just having visibility for others that are coming up underneath to be able to look out and see other people that are positively living their lives and that maybe have transitioned or haven't transitioned but sharing experiences. So first of all, do you want to tell us how is the recovery going?
Cyndi Sweeney:How are you doing?
Felix Vandergrift:Well, recovery has been really well. My surgeons are very happy and I'm very happy. There was a first couple of weeks that were a little worth it, but definitely painful. But I'm now at the point where it's kind of, I think I'm almost to that three month mark. And you could still see me, like, I know it's a visual thing, but on the video I'm holding my chest because that's like a natural, like I did that so often.
Felix Vandergrift:I caught myself the other day running down the stairs and just like holding my chest. Yeah. But it's just starting to sort of like sink in that like this is the body now that I get to wear every day. That's kind of really incredible. And my brain is finally, you know, I get to look in the mirror and see kind of who I have always thought was there.
Felix Vandergrift:And that's kind of really wild, you know, when I first started transitioning, you know, those filter, the face filters, right? With the beard and stuff like that. I had so, if you go back through my camera roll, there's dozens of photos of me using those filters and it's kind of really, really intense and overwhelming in a very positive way these days to sort of see that person kind of coming out throughout the transition.
Emma Stanley:So I was doing a workshop recently, and I got asked kind of an interesting question. And I'm I'm curious what your response to it would be. The question was this. When you introduce yourself as a trans woman with the adjective, what are you hoping to get out of that? What are you trying to achieve?
Emma Stanley:And, like, it said it was such an unexpected question because it was a pretty focused workshop. But to rephrase it, what are you hoping to achieve by being so open about both being trans and the process of transition?
Felix Vandergrift:I think that, I mean, first of all, that's a really interesting question. And I always, I love when people sort of frame that as like, well, I'm just a cis woman or I'm just a man and I just exist, right? So why do you have to make it about being trans, right? Yeah. That's common and of course, there's a lot attached to that.
Felix Vandergrift:But what like to try and express to people is there seems to be a bit of a myth that trans people are new, trans trenders, it's new fad, know, it's a new thing. And you know, we know especially like working in indigenous communities that A) that's not true. Transgender nonconforming different ideas of gender and sex have existed for as long as humans have. The Mi'kmaq are earliest recorded, know, instances of Mi'kmaq in in in what is Mi'kmaqi now known as Nova Scotia is thirteen thousand years. So if if they've been around that long, well, we don't have sort of like paper
Emma Stanley:here. Yeah.
Felix Vandergrift:You know? But I suspect that, you know, these these are these are millennial millennia old ideas. Yeah. And, you know, you can find those in cultures all across the world. And then specifically, if you look at our more recent history, so my spouse is historian and specifically focused on the first and second world wars.
Felix Vandergrift:There was an entire institute dedicated to understanding trans health and mental health and medical transitioning. And it was specifically targeted, burnt down and destroyed by Nazis. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. And it's really important when you look at the steps that are being taken right now against sort of LGBTQ communities and specifically trans and gender non binary communities. Like this is a targeted attack and it is meant specifically to suppress and oppress those groups who are proposing opposition to fascist, white nationalism, racism, domestic terror, like that whole iceberg of individuals.
Felix Vandergrift:So when I talk about visibility and stuff and why I introduce myself as trans or why I'm trying to live very visibly, it's because I know, first of all, and most importantly, our elders, there's a reason they're not in abundance. There's a reason that we don't have an abundance of elders to look to. They were either killed, they unfortunately succumbed to suicide, homelessness, drug addiction, a whole plethora of things. Those reasons are deeply rooted in the fact that they were either not able to be themselves, they were jailed for being trans, they were murdered. There's so many historical reasons why we don't have elders.
Felix Vandergrift:And the elders we do have are very few and far between. And some of them still to this day don't feel safe living out loud. And so I look at that as it is my job to become an elder, a trans elder. It is my job to live to a ripe old age. Yeah.
Felix Vandergrift:And pass along those stories. So like, if all I do is exist out of spite so that I can pass on learned history, that's, you know, but then also looking to our future, right? Like, I grew up in Nova Scotia and I had zero access to trans literature. I had zero access to what it meant to be a queer person. I had nobody I knew in my life.
Felix Vandergrift:My babysitter had her brother who lived in Montreal. That was the only gay person I knew and he wasn't around very often. So I'm like proof in the pudding that just because you don't have access to those things is not going to stop you from being those things, but it is stopping you from finding community. And I look at our youth who are trying to come through in this sort of moral panic around transness. And there is no other word for it.
Felix Vandergrift:It is a moral panic because literally all trans people want to do is just exist. And there is kids that are coming up right now who cannot see themselves graduating high school. And that absolutely just brought my soul.
Cyndi Sweeney:Especially when we have the human rights in place, especially when we have, you know, Bill C-sixteen. And you know, it's like for me, I think it just such a contradiction when my child came and told me that they're trans and I did not know what that meant. Yet I had gone to post secondary school. I have two degrees. Try to be the best parent that I can be.
Cyndi Sweeney:And I wasn't able to support them for the first ten years of their life. And that enrages me. And also it just really upsets me that if I had known a little bit more and had the right information, I could have probably helped them sooner instead. And so if you're gonna live to be a ripe old age out of spite, I am so grateful for your spitefulness. It brings
Emma Stanley:me to another related question and that's, do you feel optimistic that in twenty years time, in forty years time, we will have elders, we will have the sort of support structures that certainly you and I were missing?
Felix Vandergrift:I hope so. But I
Emma Stanley:Is there an are there enough of us who are going to take on that challenge of of living openly out of spite?
Felix Vandergrift:Yeah. I mean, I hope so. And and I will do it for as long as I can, even if it impacts my safety, I will do it for as long as I can, for as much as I can, as loud as I can. But to bring it back to the point of like, if you look back, one of the reasons I say elders are important, my grandmother, unfortunately she's already passed, but we had a really interesting discussion on just even women's rights when they started in the country. And she was one of the first people that she knew in her friend group who got a credit card with her name on it because she was working and it was her money.
Felix Vandergrift:And when it first came, it said, Mrs. And then my grandfather's name and then the last name. And she called and was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And like, if you think about that right now, if you as a woman, regardless of whether you're married or not, you don't think twice about going and applying for a credit card because it's your money, right? So I'm kind of hoping as not only as adults, as we are living out loud and we're impacting and rippling out into our circles and we are changing mindsets of people and friends and family members and things like that, that as kids start to come up in through the ranks, we're also then spreading that like, you know, that joy because trans joy is resistance and trans existence is resistance.
Felix Vandergrift:We've always been here, we're going to keep being here, but how we exist here is what we get to decide. And I for one am, I will not stop hoping that I can make it at least a little easier reach one parent or I'm going to reach one teacher that is going to be gentler and more accepting kids that are coming through so that that kid can then go on and become the next elder. That's the whole goal.
Cyndi Sweeney:Firmly believe that because Stats Canada has only just started to even acknowledge transgender people and the number that exists is so low. But we're seeing statistics now like fifty six percent of Gen Zers know someone who uses theythem pronouns. Exactly. And at that, I said to these parents that are very worried for their own children that you know what? The numbers are so much bigger than people even know.
Cyndi Sweeney:And that these numbers are only going to keep growing as we have these conversations and as we have positive visibility. And so it becomes a lot more difficult to bully a population of people when it's a large group of people standing together. And so I kind of think, watch out because I feel like there's enough people that are standing up now that are really rallying in this time. See it Egal Canada, I see PFLAG Canada. I see smaller groups from across Canada that are just saying, no way, no, this is not happening.
Cyndi Sweeney:And we all deserve these equitable rights to exist in the world. So I'm hopeful. I am hopeful.
Felix Vandergrift:In my letter that I put to the minister and you can see it there, it's a really interesting anecdote that I equivalent transness and existing openly as a trans person with left handedness. In the early 1900s, being left handed in schools often got you ostracized. It would get you beat by teachers. It would be like, it's a big deal, right? Now, lot of that is rooted in Christian ideals.
Felix Vandergrift:That's not to say that all Christians are bad. I'm not saying any of that. But a lot of that is tied to the fact that left handedness was related to Satan being satanic or being evil, right? So kids would hide being left handed and force themselves to try and learn with their right hand, regardless of whether or not they were. And then in the 1950s, 60s, around that time, it became a normal thing.
Felix Vandergrift:And we saw the amount of left handed people just skyrocket. And everyone was like, oh my god, where are these left handed people coming from? Right? Like, they were hitting them. They've always been there.
Felix Vandergrift:An interesting thing happened is around the seventies, eighties, it plateaued and it just sort of stopped, like it exploded, but then it plateaued. And that's because regardless of whether people are being beaten or ostracized or whatever, they're still there. They just are not able to exist safely. I suspect and I am able comfortably conservatively saying about one to two percent of the population is trans. And when we look at these school platforms and these anti LGBTQ platforms, I think I mentioned this to you the other day, Cynthia.
Felix Vandergrift:One, two, maybe three kids in an entire school are going to be trans, non binary, gender non conforming. That might grow. I can't see it being like 500 kids in one school. And so, you know, I really want lawmakers, policymakers, researchers, parents, everyone to start thinking about it. It's like, so you're going to go about all of this for what, three kids in a school, four kids in a school.
Felix Vandergrift:You're going to really do all of that. Maybe in a few years, we might see more people identifying as trans, non binary, sure. But it will plateau once it stops becoming this very exhausting, potentially dangerous situation to be trans.
Emma Stanley:One of the common critiques activism for trans people gets is that it is such a small proportion of the population and everyone's being asked to do all this effort for a very small number of people. Now given the argument you just made about you're going to spend all this effort attacking this small number of people, what's your response to the idea that maybe this isn't an efficient way to spend our dollars and our time?
Felix Vandergrift:Yeah. I get that question a lot. It's like, oh, what? So we're gonna write in policy to protect one or two kids? Like, you know?
Felix Vandergrift:So that I would say using pronouns and names are free. Those things are free. That's harm reduction. And we have proven that's how, we statistical evidence to prove that that's harm reduction. Education ministers, anybody that's doing policy development, that's free.
Felix Vandergrift:That is an easy, easy win. That is totally 100% free. And you are then keeping those kids from suicidal ideation. You're keeping those kids from drug use, abuse, victimization. Why would you not implement something that is free, first of all?
Felix Vandergrift:And secondly, there seems to be an idea that we don't need to look after the very small groups of people. And that's not a trans experience exclusively. That is also disabled folks. That is also that's also black communities. That's also indigenous communities because they represent a small portion.
Felix Vandergrift:And I would say in that regard, if you add up all of those people, we might all have different backgrounds, ethnicities, gender ID, or sorry, gender expressions, that sort of thing. But the solidarity in that group usually means it's a much bigger group than just one or two people. And if we start having conversations with people around those one or two trans people and how it's very easy to just change a little thing in your language, right? Or use a pronoun differently. That ripples out into care for other folks.
Felix Vandergrift:So that ripples out into, well, why are we building a new building without any wheelchair ramps? Why are we building an airport on Mi'kmaq territory that has no art featured by or history featured about land that these people are, you know? So like there's those conversations snowball.
Emma Stanley:It's something that we teach in the workshops here at work where inclusion is a mindset. And regardless of your entry point into that mindset, once you get there, it's going to affect every single person in your life.
Felix Vandergrift:In a positive way. Yeah, absolutely. You're lucky if you do not have to write letters or you are not impacted by a policy, right? And how wonderful would that be to wake up every day and not be affected by climate change, not be affected by inflation, not be afflicted by chronic illness and not have a disability, not have Like we're all just trying to exist. Yeah.
Cyndi Sweeney:We're just trying to exist.
Felix Vandergrift:Right now, we're all trying to afford
Cyndi Sweeney:groceries. Wow.
Felix Vandergrift:What do say?
Cyndi Sweeney:Groceries? What are groceries? If
Felix Vandergrift:you can call Dwayne Johnson the rock or you can pronounce, you know, Anna Kournikova or like, if you're okay doing that and you're not okay using a trans person's pronouns, I have a lot of questions
Cyndi Sweeney:for you. And that's all it is though. Right? Felix, you've made so many awesome points here. I think that hopefully listeners have so many great pieces to take away and to think about.
Cyndi Sweeney:And I just hope that we can all kind of go forward. My biggest goal is I just want to leave the world a slightly better place than when I was there. I always like there's a book I used to read to my kids called The Lupin Lady. And she would spread seeds of lupins and didn't really think about what she was doing. But she was making the world a more beautiful place because after she was gone, all of these flowers came up and they would grow and spread.
Cyndi Sweeney:And so we're just about out of time here, but I wanted to give you an opportunity if there's anything else you wanted to share.
Felix Vandergrift:It's really important, I think right now, given the political climate for trans people to know, it's not so much misery loves company, but dysphoria, transphobia, all of those things tend to shrink when we're around other trans non binary folks and supporters who understand, who have been through similar things and community is so critically important. Don't let it be diminished if it's online, if it's through text, if it's on Instagram, that does not diminish that relationship at all. I think it's really, really important for cis people in their lives right now, check-in on your trans friends, we're not okay. We are going through it. But also, yeah, just it costs nothing to be kind, and it's it's a very easy thing to just be a little gentler and a little kinder.
Emma Stanley:Alright. Well, Felix, thank you so much for coming on to the show. It's been wonderful to talk, and, we'll have you on again soon.
Felix Vandergrift:Yeah. Absolutely. Anytime. This is Athena has my cell phone number, so I'm I'm never
Cyndi Sweeney:Oh, yeah.
Emma Stanley:Fantastic.
Cyndi Sweeney:Thanks, Felix. Have a great afternoon.
Felix Vandergrift:Thanks.
Cyndi Sweeney:It's the end of the road for this episode of TransCanada Stories.
Emma Stanley:If you'd like more information on our other programming, check out simplygoodform.com. We hope you'll subscribe to our podcast and that we'll see you again next time.
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