Spectrum is working with health researchers at Wilfrid Laurier University, in partnership with the AIDS Committee of Cambridge, Kitchener, Waterloo & Area (ACCKWA), on a new grant funded research project called the “Waterloo Region 2SLGBTQ+ WELCOME Study” led by Dr. Todd Coleman, Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. This project aims to assess 2SLGBTQ+ needs in Waterloo Region, given that our community has largely been ignored in the context of health research. We wish to better understand the needs as well as the health and well-being of our community and offer programming and policy solutions to improve health outcomes.
The research will include a 40-minute survey and a qualitative interview to understand 2SLGBTQ+ experiences about community health, health status and behaviour over the life-course, healthcare and social service access, safety, and social support. It will also include consultative engagement with health system stakeholders.
The Waterloo Region 2SLGBTQ+ WELCOME Survey is part of a multiphase grant funded project aiming to conduct a 2SLGBTQ+ needs assessment to advance the current understanding of the general health landscape of 2SLGBTQ+ identifying persons who live, work, or reside in the Waterloo region. The results of the survey will help inform the latter phases of the study and be disseminated to our constituents as part of our knowledge translation activities in different formats.
Once the information has been collected, analyzed and distributed (e.g. at community meetings, reports, academic publications), the research team hopes to work with the community on initiatives that promote the health and well-being of 2SLGBTQ+ populations in Canada
We are seeking participants who:
Identify as 2SLGBTQ+
16+
Live, work, or reside in Waterloo Region
If this is you and you’d like to take the survey, . Note that the password is “welcome2023”. If you have questions or would like to be considered for an interview, please connect with Robert Chin-see (he/him).
This study has been approved by the Research Ethics Board at Wilfrid Laurier University (REB# 8419)
Please note that from October 3, 2023-November 17, 2023 there is construction happening around our building that might make it more challenging for you to find us! In particular, the bus stop at Duke & Victoria may not be available. The closest alternatives are Weber & Wellington or Central Station.
In Spring 2023, Waterloo Region Family Network (WRFN) and Spectrum Waterloo Region’s Rainbow Community Place (Spectrum) came together to assess the need for supports for the trans-autistic community. Trans and autistic communities face their own unique challenges navigating society. Trans individuals might experience transphobia, barriers to accessing public spaces, and threats of violence while autistic individuals can experience ableism, lack of accessibility and/or accommodations, and other forms of systemic discrimination. When someone is both trans and autistic, the discrimination they face is compounded – meaning any support given to this community is incomplete if it does not consider the intersections of their identity.
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.
Our Objective
This collaborative project sought to acknowledge the increasingly visible intersection between autism and gender divergence, elevate the voices of autistic and/or trans community members, assess the need for programming, and establish next steps to implement potential programming.
Our Method
We connected with the trans-autistic community through three group interviews (one in-person and two virtual) and an online survey. All information collected was anonymous. We had a total of sixteen participants, some of whom were members of the trans-autistic community (either with formal diagnosis or without) while others were parents of individuals in this community. While we valued all insights, emphasis was given to voices of those within the trans-autistic community themselves.
Common Challenges for Trans-Autistic Individuals
When speaking with those belonging to the community, many common themes began to emerge:
Lack of overall support at the intersection of autism and gender divergence.
Uncertainty of where to access informed resources.
Difficulty finding others within the trans-autistic community.
Lack of racial diversity in community programming.
Lack of safe, social spaces for the trans-autistic community.
Preference to engage in programming carried out by individuals with lived experience.
Preference for reliable, in-person, drop-in programming that requires little commitment.
When speaking to the parents of those belonging to the trans-autistic community, the following themes were identified:
Virtual programming made it difficult for their children to connect and engage.
A lack of access to resources and information.
Need for a safe, social space where their trans-autistic children feel represented.
When asked about the challenges they have encountered, those identifying as autistic and/or trans shared the following:
Society has a limited understanding of what autism is, thus contributing to the incorrect belief that all those with autism have reduced mental capacity.
Transness is often invalidated in the presence of autism.
Systemic discrimination, microaggressions, and stigma.
Navigating as non-binary in a binary world.
Fear of taking up space (i.e., not being trans or autistic enough to fit in with each individual community).
Lack of moderated gatherings and safe spaces to meet other individuals belonging to the community.
Lack of support in communication and accessibility needs.
Lack of racial and neurodiversity in community programming.
Need for Inclusive and Flexible Programming
Out of all autistic and/or trans participants, only five had experience with existing programming. Those that commented on their experiences with programming shared that they valued having the ability to learn about themselves and connect with peers in a safe space where they did not feel the need to justify their existence. In addition, these individuals shared the following critiques of their experiences with programming:
Cisgender folks have made formal attempts against programming in an attempt to have it disbanded.
Organizations often assume what the community needs without getting them involved in the conversation.
Difficulty in meeting criteria for in-person programming (e.g., formal diagnoses, non-binary exclusions).
Next Steps
Through our collaboration, interviews, surveys, and research gathered by Cayden, it is clear there is a need in our community for a specialized program for the trans-autistic community. WRFN and Spectrum will continue to work together to build a program to address the unique needs expressed by our local trans-autistic community.
As Cayden highlights, effectively supporting this diverse community involves constantly revising current practices and seeking ways in which they can be improved. With the guidance provided in Cayden’s report, we aim to create programming that is led and informed by those with lived experience where others can feel understood and have access to reliable resources.
A $61,800 Resilient Communities Fund grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation will help Spectrum Waterloo Region’s Rainbow Community Space to build its resilience and sustainability by engaging expertise from The Fundraising Lab to improve its fundraising capabilities.
“The impact of this Ontario Trillium Foundation grant will be long-term,” said Scott Williams, Executive Director of Spectrum. “Spectrum has grown and transformed considerably in the past three years, but at this stage we need assistance to improve our fundraising practices.”
This grant allows Spectrum to contract with The Fundraising Lab. Founder and CEO, Cathy Mann, has a wealth of experience in the charitable sector spanning more than three decades. The Fundraising Lab will conduct a database, systems and process review and also work with Spectrum to craft meaningful messaging that can be used to attract more donors. Cathy says, “we’re excited to be able to work with Spectrum to help them become a more sustainable organization.”
Spectrum provides more than 30 different groups and events for 2SLGBTQIA+ people across Waterloo Region each month. These include peer support groups for newcomers, older adults, and transgender people, a monthly circle for Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people, and a variety of recreational programs including a Multi-Sport Drop-In that takes place at three different community centres across the region. They also have new programming for 2SLGBTQIA+ children aged 4-12 that is delivered in partnership with all four library systems.
“We’re doing more than we have ever done before,” says Williams, “and we do it without any annualized government funding. We rely on generous donations from individuals and businesses in the community, and on grants that we apply for to make our work possible.”
As Spectrum does more, they need more space, more resources, and funds to pay more employees. They currently have 51 active volunteers and three full-time employees. The organization will look to increase their fundraising revenues so they can better serve 2SLGBTQIA+ people in Waterloo Region.
Founded in 2012, SPECTRUM offers over 30 different groups and activities each month. SPECTRUM is an organization that serves, affirms, and supports the well-being of 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals in Waterloo Region and the broader community through peer support, community partnerships, education and training, resources, and events.
The Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF), an agency of the Government of Ontario, and one of Canada’s leading granting foundations, celebrates 40 years of grant-making in Ontario and making a lasting impact in communities. Last year, OTF invested over $110M into 1,022 community projects and partnerships. Visitotf.ca to learn more.
UPDATE! The Trans Peer Support Groups will return to the second and fourth Mondays of the month starting October 9th!
We’ve had some questions about recent changes to our transgender peer support group schedule and wanted to provide an update.
Our general trans peer support group is currently meeting on the first and third Thursdays of the month. We don’t currently have enough volunteer co-facilitators to run the meetings that we used to have on the second and fourth Mondays of the month, but we hope to bring them back in the near future.
Our Beyond the Binary group meets once per month on the fourth Tuesday of the month.
Our transmasc group is currently on hold as we look for volunteer co-facilitators. Ideally, we would also like to have a transfemme group, but again we’d need the volunteers to make it happen.
Our Cambridge transgender peer support group continues to meet bi-weekly on Thursdays.
For transparency’s sake, we schedule two volunteer co-facilitators to run every group. Our volunteers are required to take training in accessibility, health and safety, racism, and our own Rainbow Diversity Training. They’re also required to have a police check for the vulnerable sector, be familiar with our policies and procedures, and participate in additional training as we identify other important opportunities. Not everyone who applies to be a volunteer is well-suited to facilitation of a peer support group. We interview people and check references to make sure that our volunteers will be able to commit to running the groups at specific times and have strong facilitation skills.
We currently have four volunteers on our trans peer support team, and three of them are relatively new. Special thanks to our volunteers for making these groups possible! If you are interested in volunteering with us you can complete the application here.
We will provide more updates as the program evolves. We know how important these groups are to participants and we will provide as many of them as we safely can within our resources.
Spectrum strongly opposes the 1 Million March for Children who spread anti-2SLGBTQIA+ hate under the guise of protecting parental rights.
Parental rights are not under attack. Religious freedoms are not under attack. Queer and trans youth are under attack.
2SLGBTQIA+ children and youth have the right to express their gender identity to whomever they feel safe doing so with. No one has the right to outa 2SLGBTQIA+ person to anyone else without consent.
Queer and trans people have always been here and will always be here. Queer Nation’s 1990 slogan “We’re here! We’re Queer! Get used to it!” was well chosen. 2SLGBTQIA+ people will not be erased or made invisible.
To the 2SLGBTQIA+ people – especially youth – who may feel hurt, or scared because of this coordinated hate movement please know that you are seen and loved. You are not alone.
Spectrum will participate in the Queer Youth Defence rally on September 20th at 9am. There is #NoSpaceForHate in Waterloo Region. We are grateful to GroundUpWR and the University of Waterloo Solidarity Network for their work in organizing this event.
Find GroundUpWR’s Queer Youth Defence Safety Guide here. If you plan to attend the rally, please be careful and protect yourself.
Allies – this is your time. If you want to be an ally to 2SLGBTQIA+ people in your community then it involves more than putting up a rainbow sticker during Pride month. Amplify queer voices, and speak out against hate.
TAKE NOTICE that the Annual and a Special General Meeting of the Members of SPECTRUM Waterloo Region’s Rainbow Community Space (“SPECTRUM”) will be held on October 10, 2023 at 7pm virtually on Zoom for the following purposes:
1. Receiving and approving the Minutes of the 2022 Annual Meeting
2. Receiving the 2022 Annual Statement and Auditors Report
3. Considering and if thought fit, confirming By-law 1 – 2023 passed by the Board of Directors on March 19, 2023 which By-law replaces By-law 2021 as the general by-law relating to the business and affairs of the Corporation.
4. To authorize the Board to file Articles of Amendment to provide that the Corporation may have a minimum and maximum number of directors and to authorize the President to sign the Articles of Amendment.
5. To pass a special resolution of the members to set the number of directors at 10 until otherwise changed.
6. Electing Directors
7. To approve the waiving of the appointment of an auditor by way of extraordinary resolution in accordance with the Act.
Our community engagement project with Black, Indigenous, and racialized (BIR) 2SLGBTQIA+ people has come to an end — though this work will go on.
Spectrum would like to thank the Government of Canada and WAGE for investing in 2SLGBTQIA+ organizations. We would also like to thank Janet Egan (she/her) and Kerry Gervais (she/her) who were extremely helpful as WAGE Program Officers.
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.
We also acknowledge those community members who were not prepared to engage with us. We understand your position and will work to become an organization that you can trust.
We recognize this project as a first step in a journey towards becoming an organization that better serves all 2SLGBTQIA+ people.
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.
We have already begun working on some of the recommendations. You have told us that you would like a BIR 2SLGBTQIA+ program that is run by paid BIR co-facilitators. Our hope is to create a space in which racialized folks can feel safe to discuss and find support regarding all aspects of their identity. We will soon be hiring two co-facilitators who will work with us to create and deliver this program. Stay tuned!
We are not surprised by yesterday’s targeted attack of a gender studies class at the University of Waterloo. It is an escalation of the rise in hate speech targeting trans and non-binary people which 2SLGBTQIA+ people have been ringing warning bells about.
It is past time for our leaders to act for queer safety.
Coming as it does, on the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, this attack only further galvanizes us. Pride has always been a protest. Queer people have always been here, and will always be here. For decades, we have fought for liberation, rights, and safety. Our visibility is key to our safety and we will not be erased.
To our leaders, how will you now take action to make people in your community safe against this violence? A statement about hate having no place here is not enough. The queer community of Waterloo Region demands that action be taken to keep our community safe.
Retired Lawyer, Author, Speaker, Human Rights Advocate. Practicing law in Toronto led to involvement in many community organizations including establishing Metropolitan Community Church’s Christmas Eve Service at Roy Thompson Hall, and the Church-Wellesley Village Business Improvement Area (and the Alexander Wood statue). Involvement in many community organizations and the fight for human rights continues.
Congratulations on the twentieth anniversary of marriage equality in Canada. Detractors have said gay marriages would not last, but I am happy to say there are plenty of examples to prove them wrong. Life in Canada for sexual minorities was not always how it is today. Once we were hunted and persecuted.
Legislation penalizing homosexuality entered British statute law in 1533 when King Henry VIII brought in The Buggery Act, ousting the Roman Catholic Church in favour of the Church of England. This moved the regulation of sodomy from the ecclesiastical courts and burning at the stake, to the state and death by hanging and forfeiture of property.
This law changed over time. However, the Labouchere Amendment of 1885 brought the crime of gross indecency into British criminal law. Gross indecency could apply to almost anything, including holding hands, and was used to persecute homosexuals. It was brought into British law at the height of the Industrial Revolution ostensibly to curb prostitution. Prostitution meant independence and the industrial revolution needed workers and the British Army needed soldiers.
The laws of Britain were the laws of Canada. Following Confederation in 1867, Canada enacted the Criminal Code in 1892, by importing British criminal law. However, the law was changed in Canada to provide five years in penitentiary and whipping. In addition, conviction of being a “dangerous sexual offender” by having homosexual sex subjected a person to an indefinite prison sentence. This was the fate of Everett George Klippert in 1967.
This remained the criminal law of Canada until the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1969 adopted Britain’s Wolfenden Report of 1957, partially decriminalizing homosexual acts for consenting adults in private who were 21 years of age or over. This is the legislation that former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, while Minister of Justice, famously said “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” It was 2019 before the remnants of this law were removed from the Criminal Code of Canada.
I remember the cruel sensationalist media treatment of Mr. Klippert’s appeal of his conviction to the Supreme Court of Canada, which he lost. I also remember the fierce opposition to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1969. It was horrific, but as minimal as these changes were, they were huge step forward in the fight for equality. It meant homosexuals were able to meet and begin to organize with less danger of being raided by police. Political activism came out of the closet. The We Demand Rally in 1971, is credited with being the first such public rally and Jim Parrott was there in Ottawa. Patriation of the Constitution Act of 1867 and adopting the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which took effect in 1985, was another critical milestone.
More and more activism occurred during these decades. There were also many Charter cases after 1985, as we learned how the Charter impacted daily life in Canada and the dominoes began to fall.
Marriage, which is in the jurisdiction of the federal government in Canada became the battleground for equality because of the Charter.
In Ontario this came to a head on June 9, 1994, with the defeat in Ontario’s Legislature of the infamous Bill 167 the Equality Rights Statute Amendment Act. The defeat of Bill 167 resulted in a very large protest demonstration that evening. The demonstration filled the lawn in front of the Legislature. This was when I first realized just how many of us there were. It was amazing experience, even better than being with millions of people during World Pride in 2014.
From this insulting defeat of Bill 167 came the activism that resulted in our winning same-sex marriage on June 10, 2003. This is not the forum to mention all the activists and organizations and battles.
However, information came to the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto that in Ontario there are two paths to marriage. One is to purchase a marriage license from the Government of Ontario and the second is the older religious practice of Marriage by Banns, still allowed by Ontario’s Marriage Act. There are several criteria to meet, but those who qualify can have their marriages by Banns registered and obtain a Certificate of Marriage in Ontario.
On January 14, 2001, the first legal same-sex marriages were performed in Ontario in the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto by way of Banns of Marriage. Reverend Brent Hawkes married Kevin Bourassa to Joe Varnell, and Elaine Vautour to Anne Vautour.
On June 10, 2003, the Ontario Court of Appeal issued a Charter-based decision immediately recognizing same-sex marriage in Ontario, thereby making Ontario the first province where same-sex marriage was legal.
Same-sex marriage in Canada was progressively recognized in several provinces and territories by court decisions before being legally recognized nationwide with the enactment of the Civil Marriage Act by Parliament on July 20, 2005.
So, this has been a very brief synopsis of the fight for equality through same-sex marriage. This fight should have been unnecessary. It was too long, too hard, and too bitter. Following this victory, most of us married our spouses and hoped to settle into a quiet domestic life. However, the forces of hatred continue their opposition. Equality through same-sex marriage was achieved in Canada because of the combined actions of many activists and the provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We now have governments in Canada that casually use the Notwithstanding Clause to take away our rights and freedoms. These governments will not stop unless they are voted out of office. Your vote matters. I know politics is messy and difficult, but voting is vital. We see the right to equality eroding in many places throughout the world including the United States of America. It has always been up to us to fight for our lives and our families. The Charter remains vital to protecting us from negative legislation. Don’t stop now. Get involved with a progressive political party that will uphold the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and help to preserve the gains in equality we have made in Canada.
People like myself and Jim Parrott have been life-long activists but we are now twenty years older. Along with many friends and allies, we have managed to achieve great things. The day I married my late spouse was the best day of my life. Love is love. Nobody is going to do it for you. It is now up to you to defend our hard won human rights, including our right to marry, as we continue to build a better life for all Canadians. Happy Pride!
This post is slightly modified from an address given by Bruce Walker at our June 14, 2023 Celebration of Marriage Equality in Ontario event.
