Publications

Sexuality education rarely speaks to queer and trans young people, so this project let them lead. In a mid-size Canadian city, 22 youth, most identifying as queer and/or trans, joined a weekend community workshop centred on queer joy to evaluate sexuality education video lessons made by educators in a partner organization's training program. Fourteen took part in follow-up interviews reflecting on their own sexuality education experiences. Participants described wanting tailored content, queer pedagogies, youth-centric approaches, and affirming spaces. Against hostility in classrooms and public discourse, the workshop built community, knowledge, and solidarity, with memes used to resist erasure.

Men in Canada die by suicide at three times the rate of the rest of the population, and Two-Spirit, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer men are disproportionately affected. This scoping review searched five bibliographic databases and analyzed 25 articles on 2SGBTQ men's experiences with suicidality. Three themes emerged: how study designs, data sources, and sampling shape what is known; how anti-gay, anti-trans, and HIV stigma connect multiple social identities to risk; and how psychosocial issues including mental illness, financial precarity, and substance use compound social stress. The authors map research priorities and opportunities to inform targeted suicide prevention.

Drawing on the 2021 Canadian long-form Census, researchers compared how often people of different gender identities report activity limitations, including difficulties with seeing, hearing, mobility or dexterity, mental health, and cognition. Logistic regression models estimated adjusted odds for each group. Non-binary people assigned female at birth had the highest predicted probability of reporting any limitation, at roughly 76 percent, followed by non-binary people assigned male at birth, transgender men, and transgender women; cisgender men and women reported the lowest. The widest gap appeared for mental limitations. The authors call for targeted policy and culturally competent, transgender-inclusive health care, plus research into why these disparities exist.

Migrant life, labour, and care from the Philippines to Canada.  'Writing in the Margins' 2024 creative non-fiction winner. 

Does witnessing violence between parents set young people up to repeat it in their own relationships? Using data from TRAILS, a longitudinal, multi-informant, dual-cohort Dutch study, researchers examined 522 participants who reported childhood exposure to physical interparental violence and whose romantic partners answered questionnaires about dating violence. Controlling for childhood maltreatment, hierarchical logistic regressions found no association between that exposure and either perpetration or victimization of physical and psychological dating violence in young adulthood. The pattern held regardless of sex, socioeconomic status or antisociality. The authors read this as evidence of resilience against an assumed intergenerational cycle of violence.