Research and Publications

September 26, 2024

This guide is designed to help you to better understand what the process is like leading up to, during, and after feminization / augmentation top surgery. 

Disclaimer: This guide is meant to be a helpful tool for people considering receiving or preparing for top surgery but should not be confused with an actual medical document. Please make sure to listen to the advice of your doctors.

September 26, 2024

This guide is designed to help you to better understand what the process is like leading up to, during, and after masculinizing / mastectomy top surgery. 

Disclaimer: This guide is meant to be a helpful tool for people considering receiving or preparing for top surgery but should not be confused with an actual medical document. Please make sure to listen to the advice of your doctors.

June 24, 2024

We are pleased to share our new Rainbow Newcomers Toolkit! This is a guide to help 2SLGBTQIA+ newcomers with settling in Waterloo Region. This project began with Rhea Bhat (she/her), a Psychology major at Wilfrid Laurier University. Rhea received a Menich Award which allowed her to work with a not-for profit of her choice. It has taken a full year to develop and design this toolkit. That included a great deal of research and also getting feedback from our Rainbow Newcomers Connect team, and partners at COMPASS Refugee Centre and the City of Cambridge.

September 29, 2023

In Spring 2023, Waterloo Region Family Network (WRFN) and Spectrum came together to assess the need for supports for the trans-autistic community. Interviews and surveys were conducted to gather insights from the community to help inform the establishment of potential programming for the trans-autistic community. We were so fortunate to work with Cayden Genik on this project. Cayden played an instrumental role in conducting interviews, research and report writing. Cayden’s full report, Establishing Effective Trans-Autistic Support, can be found here.

July 18, 2023

Our community engagement project with Black, Indigenous, and racialized (BIR) 2SLGBTQIA+ people has come to an end — though this work will go on. As promised, we’d like to share our final report with the community. This report summarizes what we heard during the community engagement project and includes recommendations for things that Spectrum (and potentially other organizations) can do to better serve BIR 2SLGBTQIA+ people. Special thanks to all the organizations and community members who engaged with us during this project. We are grateful for your time and trust. Spectrum looks forward to being a more welcoming and safer space for Black, Indigenous, and racialized members of 2SLGBTQIA+ communities because of your engagement with us.

May 2, 2023

Spectrum is pleased to share our refreshed 2SLGBTQIA+ Terminology Guide! This was made possible thanks to the work of co-op student, Sarah Amoah. Our new 2SLGBTQIA+ Terminology Reference and Media Reference Tool covers a range of 2SLGBTQIA+ topics – from 101 terms to use and terms to avoid to 301 discussions of more complex topics. And while this guide is intended for writers, marketers, and event organizers – it can serve as a basic education resource for anyone who wants to understand what language is most respectful when describing people who experience marginalizations that they do not share.

October 18, 2021

Thanks to a generous grant from the Canadian Women’s Foundation, SPECTRUM was able to partner with Wisdom2Action to develop a Trans and Gender Diverse Mental Health, Wellness and Suicide Prevention Toolkit. The Toolkit is focused on mental health promotion and suicide prevention and designed to be used by transgender identifying folks (people in crisis), and mental health and medical health professionals and transgender allies (people who support those in crisis). On September 28, 2021, we held a community forum to share details about the information we gathered and the process of designing the toolkit. You can watch a recording of this session here.