Publications

Most digital health systems record gender and sex as a single binary field, which discourages sexual and gender minority people from seeking preventative screening and gender-affirming care. Over a one-year multi-method project, participants co-created an action plan to modernize how gender, sex and sexual orientation information is handled in Canadian systems. Seven actions are proposed: envisage an equity-oriented health system; engage communities and organizations; establish inclusive terminology; enable systems to collect, use, exchange and reuse standardized data; integrate that data collection within organizations; educate staff to deliver culturally competent care and explain to patients why the data matters; and create a central coordinating hub.

During Ontario's first COVID-19 lockdown, HIV-negative gay, bisexual, and queer men had to weigh pandemic rules against their sexual lives and PrEP routines. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 such men and a thematic analysis informed by the sociology of risk, this study traces a public health morality, a contested sense of what counts as responsible sexual citizenship. Shaping it were self-concern versus risk to others, anxiety and economic precarity, pandemic weariness, shaming of non-compliance, and echoes of HIV-era stigma toward queer sex. Men altered practices, stopping, restarting, or stockpiling PrEP, while reviving negotiated safety strategies from HIV prevention.

Online spaces let trans communities build knowledge together, and also draw lines around who belongs. This study uses critical discourse analysis of Tumblr posts to examine how trans users define who counts as trans, including how they understand gender dysphoria and its relationship to trans identity. Tumblr has become a popular gathering place for trans youth, and these debates run parallel to shifting medical and mainstream understandings of being transgender. While such platforms can support positive identity formation, the analysis shows communities may reinforce dominant narratives as well as disrupt them, amid an ongoing struggle for visibility, resources, and respect.

Collective memory work invites people to recall and analyze their own experiences together, linking personal stories to shared patterns. Six trans participants used this method during a four-hour focus group, examining their health care memories and reaching collective agreements about what those stories meant. The analysis describes a relationship with the health care system that participants characterized as toxic, even abusive. They described asking tentatively for services, unsure whether care would be provided, what its quality would be, or whether they would be treated with respect. Even positive encounters were framed mainly as fears not realized, and all involved some inappropriate conduct.

How do gay, bisexual and queer men understand the link between their drug and alcohol use and their mental health? Twenty-four interviews with GBM in Toronto reveal deep ambivalence. Participants described substances as therapeutic aids that eased distress, and also as corrosive to wellbeing, drawing a fine line between use that felt self-productive and use that felt self-destructive. Some framed their choices as problematic or unhealthy; others presented themselves as controlled, responsible actors simply doing what a normal gay man would do. The authors connect this ambivalence to polarizing community and scientific binaries around addiction, control and rationality.