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The President's Equity Taskforce invites faculty, staff and students to participate in a roundtable on Trans/Equity narratives of inclusion and community-building on Monday, November 19.

The purpose of this session is to create a space for an open conversation on challenges faced by the transgender and non-binary communities, and how the university can foster a more inclusive transgender and non-binary Equity Diversity and Inclusion culture on campus.

• When: Monday, November 19 from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m.
• Where: 61 Charles Street Building, second floor

Guest speakers include:

Aaron Devor, PhD

Dr. Aaron Devor, PhD, the founder and first holder of the world’s only research , has been studying transgender topics for more than 30 years. Dr. Devor is also the Founder and Academic Director of the world’s largest , and Founder of the international community/academic conferences. He is the author of numerous well-cited scholarly articles and four books:

• Transgender: A Reference Handbook (with Ardel Haefele-Thomas) (forthcoming in 2019)
• FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (2016, 1997)
• The Transgender Archives: Foundations for the Future (2014) (2015 Lambda literary award finalist)
• Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (1989)

He has delivered lectures around the world, including more than 20 major keynote and plenary addresses. He is an elected member of the International Academy of Sex Research, and a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. He is also an author of versions 6, 7, and the forthcoming version 8 of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) Standards of Care, and has been guiding the translation of the Standards of Care into world languages. He is an out trans man, a national-teaching-award-winning professor of Sociology, and a former Dean of Graduate Studies (2002 to 2012) at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Declan Frampton

Declan Frampton is in his final year of Nursing at the ºÚÁÏÍø, and plans on specializing in community outreach and mental health. He is a member of the university’s Advisory Committee on Sexual Violence Prevention and Support and is working with a group of students to get men more involved in sexual violence prevention.​ He is involved in creating educational initiatives around understanding and respecting trans people and is an advocate for making the campus more inclusive for trans and non-binary folks. He loves cooking and biking and is a proud bulldog dad.  

Karleen Pendleton Jiménez

Karleen Pendleton Jiménez is a writer and Associate Professor in education at Trent University in Peterborough, ºÚÁÏÍø. She has been a teacher educator for almost 20 years, as well as a community educator. She facilitated Queer Players, a creative writing and theatre group for queer youth in San Diego, California; Lengua Latina, a creative writing group for Latinas in Toronto, ºÚÁÏÍø; and also a creative writing group for women in prison. She publishes both academic and creative works, including journal articles such as Latina Landscape: Queer Toronto, and ‘I love Barbies…I am a Boy’: Gender Happiness for Social Justice Education. Her children’s book Are You a Boy or a Girl? (Lambda Literary Finalist) and award-winning film Tomboy (creator and screenwriter) are important curriculum resources for classrooms of all ages. For educators and parents she has published two books, Unleashing the Unpopular: Talking about Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity in Education, and Tomboys and Other Gender Heroes: Confessions from the Classroom. For the latter book, she delivered dozens of workshops in public schools, engaging students (ages eight to 18) in discussion and activities of gender and gender transgression in rural and urban communities. She identifies as a butch dyke and transgender.

Teddy Syrette

Teddy Syrette (Ozhawa Aanung Kwe - Yellow Star Woman) is a two-spirit, Anishinaabe person of Batchewana First Nation near Sault Ste. Marie, ºÚÁÏÍø. Teddy is of the Wolf Clan, and is an advocate and storyteller, bringing awareness to two-spirit/queer-trans Indigenous people and their communities. They travel all around Turtle Island advocating for inclusion, compassion and understanding for Indigenous people who identify as being two-spirit and for folks who identify as being queer-trans people. They have a diploma in Social Service Work-Native Specialization and their background is in social justice, theatre and bingo. Teddy currently lives, loves and laughs in Tkaranto and enjoys pugs, poetry and polyamory.

Syrus Marcus Ware

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. He uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including at the Art Gallery of ºÚÁÏÍø, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Windsor and as part of the curated content at Nuit Blanche 2017 (The Stolen People; Won’t Back Down).

His performance works have been part of festivals across Canada, including at Cripping the Stage (Harbourfront Centre, 2016), Complex Social Change (University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2015) and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (University of Winnipeg, 2015). 

He is part of the Performance Disability Art (PDA) Collective and co-programmed Crip Your World: An Intergalactic Queer/POC Sick and Disabled Extravaganza as part of Mayworks 2014. He is also a part of the Black Triangle Arts Collective (BTAC), a visual arts collective dedicated to exploring disability, racial and economic justice. His recent curatorial projects include:

• That’s So Gay (TSG): On the Edge
• TSG: Fall to Pieces
• TSG: Come Together (Gladstone Hotel, 2016, 2015 and 2014)
• Re: Purpose (Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2014)
• The Church Street Mural Project (Church-Wellesley Village, 2013)

He is also co-curator of The Cycle, a two-year disability arts performance initiative of the National Arts Centre.

He is a facilitator/designer at The Banff Centre, and for 12 years was the Coordinator of the Art Gallery of ºÚÁÏÍø Youth Program. He was the inaugural Daniel’s Spectrum Artist-in-Residence (2016-2017).

He is a core-team member of Black Lives Matter- Toronto. He is also part of Blackness Yes!/Blockorama. He has won several awards, including the TD Diversity Award in 2017. He was voted ‘Best Queer Activist’ by NOW Magazine (2005) and received the Steinert and Ferreiro Award for LGBT community leadership and activism (2012). He is working on a PhD at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies

Kira Williams, PhD

Dr. Kira Williams is a genderqueer trans woman (they/them) and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo. Their research focuses on international migration, global governance and analytical methodology. Kira recently defended their PhD dissertation in geography, which explored how states reconfigured spaces at sea to manage the movement of people and shift borders in the Central Mediterranean Sea. Their current research projects include studying right-wing populism in Canada, measuring the effects of gender and cultural diversity on business performance, and exploring and mapping the movement of unaccompanied minors through the European Union's maritime borders.