Thank you to UVic's Faculty of Social Sciences and Lansdowne for supporting this talk.

Transgender and gender-diverse youth are disproportionately represented among youth experiencing homelessness across North America. Transgender youth face unique challenges accessing safe, inclusive, and stable housing options contributing to mental health issues and overall health disparities. Dr. Abramovich will explore the intersection of gender identity, homelessness, and health outcomes among transgender youth and young adults. This presentation will foster a deeper understanding of the barriers and challenges experienced by transgender youth navigating housing and healthcare systems. Dr. Abramovich will discuss the main pathways into homelessness among transgender youth, including family rejection, discrimination, and lack of supportive resources. He will also examine the health outcomes among transgender youth experiencing homelessness and housing instability, highlighting the high rates of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality. Based on his research as Canada Research Chair in 2SLGBTQ+ Youth Homelessness and Mental Health, Dr. Abramovich will share evidence-informed recommendations for targeted interventions and policies that create safe, inclusive, and affirming environments and address the needs of transgender youth experiencing homelessness.

Dr. Alex Abramovich (he/him) is a Senior Scientist at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), and an Associate Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Dr. Abramovich holds a Canada Research Chair in 2SLGBTQ+ Youth Homelessness and Mental Health. He has been addressing the issue of 2SLGBTQ+ youth homelessness for over 15 years. Dr. Abramovich is an award winning and internationally recognized leader in 2SLGBTQ+ health and homelessness. The overarching aim of his program of research is to investigate the health and social inequities experienced by 2SLGBTQ+ individuals, with a focus on understanding and improving the health and service needs of 2SLGBTQ+ youth and young adults. Dr. Abramovich’s research has led to groundbreaking practice and policy reform, including the launch of Canada’s first dedicated transitional housing program for 2SLGBTQ+ youth. He has worked closely with all levels of government to develop policies and strategies that address the needs of 2SLGBTQ+ youth and young adults experiencing homelessness and is committed to research that successfully and ethically engages marginalized populations.

Games, both tabletop and video, have immense potential as a tool for decolonization, education, and social change. They are a highly engaging form of learning that allow players to deeply understand and connect with the content being taught. Looking at the role games play in decolonization efforts will help unravel colonial structures within today’s games and make gaming a more inclusive and rich experience.

Originally from San Diego, Camryn Riccitelli is a second year MA student in the Department of Geography working in the Geographic Indigenous Futures Lab. They received their BA in Geography and Environmental Studies from the University of Victoria in 2023. Their research focuses on the relationship between player and game and how games can be used as a tool for decolonization, education, and social change.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a number of trans people in the U.S became involved in the formulation, standardization, and provision of gender-affirming care—from funders of academic research (the Erickson Educational Foundation) to workers in referral and social service organizations (such as the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, based in San Francisco), to unofficial organizers and advocates for low-income and trans people of color barred from accessing care through official channels (such as members of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, based in New York.)

In this talk, I consider how some of these individuals conceptualized and discussed their roles within the then-burgeoning field of gender-affirming care given the complexity of their position. Specifically, I’m interested in how trans facilitators of gender-affirming care during this time period simultaneously experienced themselves as subject, object, and agent/critic of transsexual medicine discourse, as well as how this experience differed along axes of race, class, and gender.

Cam Cannon (they/them) is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at George Washington University and a 2024-2025 ACLS/Melon Dissertation Innovation Fellow. Their dissertation, "Standard: Trans Activism and the History of Gender-Affirming Care in the U.S.," is a cultural, institutional, and political history of diagnostic criteria and treatment protocols around gender-affirming care in the U.S., with a particular emphasis on how trans people have worked to variously support, resist, and influence medical guidelines.

In December 2020, the High Court of Justice in London ruled to place severe restrictions on the practice of prescribing puberty blockers (PBs) to gender dysphoric patients under the age of 18.

In this presentation, I use the Bell v. Tavistock court case to critically shed light on what I call the ‘suffering paradigm’ of the mainstream transgender rights movement: a particular politics of victimhood that makes the alleviation of individual suffering the key justification and moral basis for transgender rights and equality. I examine the unintended consequences of this narrative, showing that attempts to make the suffering of transgender youth intelligible and morally legitimate not only failed, but were turned against Tavistock in court.

Ellis Kokko (they/them) is a non-binary community activist and a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University. They are working on an ethnographic history of the ‘suffering transgender subject’, examining how shifting ontologies of suffering have held a central role in making trans lives and selves intelligible. Their research centres around questions of victimhood, identity and the intangibility of trans futures. Alongside their PhD, they run a queer outdoor project, and are working towards becoming a counsellor.