Megan W 

all right, okay, I think, I think we're good to go, perfect. So welcome everybody. We are so, so excited to have you all joining us again for our third this is our third clinical rounds that we've done, and we have Eddie and Silas here today, who will be presenting for us. They will be talking about dragging mental health out of the closet by bringing queer visibility to the forefront of practice. So a little bit more about Eddie. Eddie is a dedicated Child and Youth Worker with a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters of Arts in Child and Youth Care, offering valuable experience in both child and youth mental health, from roles in live in treatment centers and hospital crisis settings. Their work provides deep insights into the realities faced by young people living with mental health challenges grounded in a youth centered anti oppressive and trauma informed approach. So we're very excited to hear from Eddie and along with Silas, who has a Bachelor's of Arts honors degree in psychology from York University. His area of interest pertains in researching and supporting LGBTQIA2+  populations. Silas believes that every person is unique in their needs expression and support. He takes special care to have an inclusive intersectional mindset that aligns with flourishes commitment to a holistic approach. And Silas is thrilled to be a part of a workspace that is actively committing to helping and respecting clients of all identities. So we're so, so excited to hear from you today, everybody you know, we have a special place in our heart for Silas and Eddie, because we have the pleasure of working with both of them every day. So I could not be more excited to hear your presentation and take it away whenever you're ready. I will mute myself, but I'll monitor the chat if there's any questions and admitting more people in.

Silas 

Thanks so much. Megan, yeah, no.

Marie 

Sorry, just one. I just want to jump in and just say that any resources that are mentioned, or anything, we will send the follow ups. Thank you. Sorry. Go ahead.

Silas 

Perfect. So we're talking about dragging mental health out of the closet, bringing clear visibility to the forefront of practice.

Eddie 

It's going to switch over. There we go. Before we start though, we want to do a little bit of an acknowledgement and a bit of a privileged statement, because we're going to be talking about queer communities from a little bit of an umbrella approach. So before starting this presentation, it's important to note that we are currently on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe Haudenosaunee and Huron peoples, we acknowledge in our roles that we are continuing to benefit from a colonial society. Throughout this presentation, we will use the term queer to refer to all folk who identify as part of the 2SLGBTQIA+ plus community. This includes anyone who identifies under the trans umbrella as gender non conforming, sexual minorities, racialized queer folk, or anyone else who feels they live on the margins in a heterosis normative world. Using a queer epistemology lens, we recognize the systems of power embedded within our own queer realities, and hope this presentation acts as an opportunity to find solidarity together among and within.

Silas 

We also did an introduction, but this has gone over with Megan, so we'll do something a little bit more personal. So Eddie, go ahead.

Eddie 

Yes, we wanted to start off by sharing a little bit about our own queer stories. As you're hearing us talk about a little bit throughout this presentation, queerness has been something that traditionally, we don't really associate a history or story with, because so much of it has been erased, so much of it has been misunderstood, and we often don't have perspectives that allow us to understand history from a queer lens. So what we're aiming to do today is to kind of share our own stories as a way to be able to move forward with that. So I'd like to start off by just reading something that I put together before coming today. My name is Eddie, and I am a child and youth care practitioner. I identify as queer and fall under the trans, non binary umbrella, while today's presentation has been developed from a youth centered approach, I plan to use my own story as an entry point into this conversation, as embedded within my own practice, vulnerability plays a large role in visibility, while my story may not be the same as yours and others within the queer community, I extend my hand as an invitation to walk this road with me and drag ourselves out of the dark to a space where rainbows have no end, where validation is not a privilege but a right, and you are free to dance with the sounds of The wind. Well, I personally grew up as someone with supportive environment and with parents who allowed me to be myself, the world around me decided otherwise. Once a young person full of energy, creativity, harmful systems continued to beat me down and teach me that being authentic was dangerous. Being myself was the root of my pain, and in many ways, the solace my identity could provide me was stripped away by the political, sexual and stigmatized undertones we often assert to queerness. Interactions with peers, teachers and those who should have been there to champion me only made things more confusing, as I didn't understand why I was being punished for being alive and being myself, being punished for the same joy I now find love in in many ways, I couldn't understand how my interest in dress up, playing with girls, singing, dancing, gymnastics, made me something less than I am. And while I could sit here today and talk to you about how these experiences could make me more prone to what we might consider risky behavior, suicidal thoughts, mental health challenges, homelessness, the list can go on and on. That's not what I'm here for today. Instead, I'd like to talk to you about what got me to where I am now, what has given me the courage to stand in front of all of you today as a proud queer person, proud to be in this body, proud to be a part of such a beautiful community and proud to be given the opportunity to redefine queerness in situations like we're in today, to create spaces where my truth, your truth, and their truth hold meaning in the in between, where youth are free to find joy in their identities and move forward to a future where queerness is not a burden but a gift for you are the question and the answer, and queer youth deserve the opportunity to understand themselves as beautiful, brave, creative and unstoppable.

Silas 

Heck yeah, I'm going to be less eloquent. I'm Silas. I identify also as queer, but I'm trans masculine, or a binary trans man. My pronouns are he, him. I was raised assuming that my social identity would be a woman and a female. I personally transitioned when I was 24 it was my third attempt to come out of the closet. By the time I was able to actually start my medical transition, I have done the whole gambit of different identities. And I'm really glad to be where I've landed today, and we are going to discuss about the fluidity of identity and queerness itself. But as you can see, today is about going to be about queer Joy information, and I hope that we all are open to that today.

Again, less eloquent, but here we go.

Eddie 

Absolutely. And part of putting together this presentation, we wanted to have a purpose, a message that we were able to leave you all with to kind of bring everything together and to make it a little bit more cohesive. And what that is is really situated around this quote that we've left up top by Jocelyn Parker, which is the idea that we will never be able to adopt the principles of what it truly means to be indivisible until every human is truly made visible. And what we mean by that is indivisible in a sense that something is so joined together that it can't be separated. A lot of what we do in this field is kind of working towards that, allowing somebody to become indivisible with themselves, with their family, with the environments around them. But what we're saying is that unfortunately, when we're looking at these situations from a straight, cisgendered, white, able bodied approach, it doesn't allow for everybody to meet feel visible. When we look at the intersections of queerness, race, ableism, sanism, it becomes our own identities that are the barrier to indivisibility. Being able to be with our families, with our loved ones, becomes a troublesome situation when our own identities are what's causing the weight. So what we want to be able to do today is to kind of focus on that importance of visibility as it's something very tangible that we can do as practitioners, to be able to create spaces for queer joy, to be able to look at it as something that we can learn from, learn from, celebrate and love. And what we hope is that in giving you these skills, that more young people are able to have the chance to understand queerness outside of the grip of heterosis normativity. Because ultimately, change begins somewhere, and today, we hope that it can begin with us.

Silas 

So what even is queerness? Is it a destination, an identity, a Lifeway, a community? Yes, and we're kind of saying ish with this, because we want you to accept queerness for what it is, what we do, what we'd like to do is invite you to forget what you know about queer identities, unless you yourself are queer. Could you speak your identity with you at all times? We want to be able to give you the openness to think about these not come in with the preconceptions that you might have seen in media or have thought of in other harmful aspects, and know that identity is not innate or essential. It's always evolving, as I even discussed in my own background. It's been pretty fluid in coming to where I'm at now. It's messy, it's misunderstood, nuanced, and most of all, it's beautiful,

Eddie 

Absolutely. So we wanted to be able to offer that as a way for us all to kind of start fresh, as we're going to be talking a lot today about both learning and unlearning, we thought it would be great to be able to kind of give ourselves that permission to start new. So as we move forward, we're able to create a new understanding of queerness that is from the bottom up. It's developed by queer people themselves. And in putting together this presentation and being able to bridge the gap between Silas's and I've research and lived experience, we've put together what we call the four pillars of queer visibility. For the purpose of today, we're only going to be speaking to the first two, which is community and Futurism, but I'll explain a little bit before we get into it about what these pillars are. To approach these pillars is to be able to acknowledge the in between. And when I say in between, I'm talking about that magical space between you and the person that you're working with, where experiences, knowledge and who we are is reciprocal. It's that magical space, and what we are offering is that these pillars can almost be a two part experience. They can be one, something that we can use as practitioners to be able to make room for visibility within our practice and have a very safe and tangible way to learn about queerness that is developed by queer people themselves, and what we also hope is the idea that it begins with us. This is a chance for us to be able to redevelop modalities, to be able to reassess how we approach queerness, and ultimately give a space for young people to be able to redevelop that understanding from a place of visibility and not trying to fit into a system that was never meant to fit in for us, and like Silas said, to be able to look at queerness as something that was never meant to be understood when we're looking at it from these views, to be able to give a little bit more of a background. community. This surrounds the importance of identities itself. This is in which the ways that we might find solace in our own bodies, how we might understand ourselves, our identities, our pronouns, and the importance of championing each other. And Silas will speak a little bit more to this as we go on, because he is amazing at being able to break down concrete ideas when it comes to queerness and pronouns and identities. Futurism, this is a little bit more of a theory oriented space, but it allows us to both understand the past as be able to move forward in positive ways, where queer people can define themselves and epistemology, this is a understanding that queer people are allowed to feel truth. A lot of the times, we are told that our identities aren't accepted, they're not understood, they're wrong. But what this does, it allows young people to have the opportunity to understand that their truth is their truth, and we have no role to be going in there and questioning how they're feeling. And the last one being connection with land, which gives us the opportunity to use land as a modality to teach mindfulness, to be able to teach coping skills, and have a tangible way to be able to break down some of these harmful ideals around queerness that continue to burden our community and lead to a lot of internalization of some very harmful ideas, because we don't often feel that space of visibility where we interact with this world. Okay, yes, all

Silas 

Alright, so I'm going to take it away with community, as you mentioned that this is more of kind of little aspects we want you to understand, like pronouns, gender, sexuality. I'm going to break it down for you, and hopefully we're going to build up from there to get to the theoretical. So I'm going to do some basics here. One term that a lot of people use is queer, and it's what we'll be using throughout the entire presentation. When you ask yourself, should you be using the term queer? It's kind of a nuanced answer. It's both Yes. It's a reclaimed term. It's an identity. Again, we both identified ourselves as queer, and it's a general term for queer communities, however, historically, it has been used as a slur. It's been used in violence against us, and that's a lot more with the older generation, especially so when approaching spaces, I would ask you to go in with curiosity. Ask what people want to identify with, and be especially cautious when it's someone of an older generation versus someone who would be like in their 20s or younger. So we're going to start with gender, one of my favorite topics. First thing I want us to understand gender isn't a binary. It's actually more of a gradient. It's not a sliding scale, like it is often shown for operonization or using it theoretically, sometimes we'll flatten it into a sliding scale between male and female and consider non binary in the middle, when really non binary exists outside of gender. And these two binaries aren't a sliding scale and can actually be combined with other identities. So break it down a little bit more. Sex is biological. It's the physical aspects of your body. Generally, a baby comes out or like that is a boy, or that is a girl, based on physical characteristics, and so that would be the sex assigned at birth. I do want to know that a lot of people will talk about chromosomes or hormones, honestly, unless you go and get a full blown genetic test, you can't be assured as you think you are. So this is just a little basic there. Gender identity is the social constructs. So our idea of what a man is, what a girl is, what a woman is, what a boy is, or other identities within that. I mentioned the fact that I'm trans masculine, but I also identify as a trans man, so I'm a binary identity. So if we were going to do the sliding scale on this far end, but being trans masculinity is a spectrum. You can be non binary and identify as trans masculine or not identify with masculinity or femininity at all.  An easy way to kind of simplify this is genders between the ears, sex between the legs. To add on to this and understanding gender, I want to talk about gender expression. So this is how we act, how we socialize, how we dress, all those things that in our society today are inherently gendered, even when you don't think about it. I want you to invite you to think about the fact that you can be feminine, masculine or androgynous, and that this doesn't mean that your identity is invalidated. So if you identify with a gender that doesn't match the gender expression, that it doesn't invalidate your own identity. So you can be a feminine man regardless if you are trans, which is somebody who has choose to move from an identity that is different than the one that is associated with their sex or otherwise. Understanding gender pronouns. I know that a lot of people get mixed up here, so I'm going to go through quickly and thoroughly. So binary pronouns, again, is the same as binary gender. So we have two terms. Here. We have she, her and he, him. That are the binaries that we're used to. Gender neutral term that a lot of people use as their pronouns is they, them. This has actually been used since the medieval period for singular pronoun. So anybody is saying this is a new term, I would invite you to have them look at a history book, Neo pronouns. There are so many. They are all popping up and there is an individual as a name. Some people don't use pronouns at all and ask that you only use their name. This is another thing where name tags are really helpful. It's why it's important that in our email communications that we're including our pronouns in those so that trans people don't have to out themselves necessarily in order to be used, have the terms they want used utilized. So you can see, I have some examples here for Z them and mixed pronouns. Eddie, would you like to go over mixed pronouns.

Absolutely, so mixed pronouns is how I identify. I use he, they pronouns, which I know can be a little bit confusing for some people, but to be able to describe it, it's I was born a boy, it's the pronouns I use growing up, or he him. But as I got older and started to explore my gender, I realized that necessarily I didn't feel like a boy, didn't really make sense to me. Wasn't something that I necessarily identified with. So learning about what a non binary person was was very eye opening to me, because I could learn that, oh, there's not only two versions of an identity that I can have, there's actually a lot more. So I did switch to they, them, pronouns, and in exploring my gender even more, I still realize that I can still feel confident within that masculine side too. I think there's just a lot of confusion sometimes towards where the line can be drawn between your gender identity and your gender expression, and how we can blur those lines sometimes. So to me, I love mixed pronouns because it feels like a little bit of being political in its own way, and using your visibility to kind of be able to break down harmful understandings towards queerness and that there are only certain versions within these identities that hold truth. So to me, mixed pronouns better represent who I am, how I feel and what makes sense to me in my body and on my insides,

Silas 

So one thing I want to highlight is that sexuality is completely separate from gender. How someone acts or expresses themselves does not define who they are, romantically, sexually or platonically. There are different ways to love. Romantic can be separate from sexual. Can be separate from platonic. You may prefer to hang out with girls. You're sexually attracted to men, and romantically you're bisexual. Those are all completely separate from each other. We all have our own spectrums, and we get to kind of get to mix and match. These might all mix to get matched together, but in the end, I want you again when approaching somebody to go enter with curiosity and not make assumptions that just because maybe someone you see as a man approaches you and appears feminine, assume that they are gay or whatever other identity you might. As an example with myself, before I transitioned, I had a lot of people because I was a masculine woman presenting, asking, oh, like, why don't you just identify as a lesbian? Like, obviously, and then as soon as I transitioned, I'm like, well, aren't you just gay because you're a feminine man? Like, I was never going to win the gender game. It was basically what happened. So this is why I would bring this up and mention that these are separate from one another in terms of expression and identity. So we are going to talk a little bit about conflict and queerness. We are here to talk about queer joy. But I want you to know that there is stuff that happens internally and externally, both individually, within our community and outside of it. Internally within the community, we do have some issues in terms of our own group, not wanting to keep everybody together. One thing that I would say is the drop the T movement in queer spaces, opting for the removal of trans people from the 2SLGBTQIA+. The idea is that it should be sexualities only, and gender shouldn't be involved. This, I think again, comes from an internalized place of wanting to seem like the good queer and othering another community. I want to make sure that we're being aware that this may happen, as you might meet other queer people that say harmful things against other identities, and this is a place where you can either stand up for that identity or explore it with them to kind of better understand what's happening there. We grow up in a cis and heterosexual world, so we internalize these ideas that something is wrong with us, and so often that does turn into some form of hate, which can be directed towards another community member or our own selves. Externally, there is a lot of conflict. And again, this is where that hatred or upset comes from. Is the idea that there's something wrong with us. Here are some examples of things currently happening. So JK, Rowling actively campaigning against trans rights groups. She has donated to anti trans groups. She speaks out against trans people. She has mislabeled CIS athletes as trans and ran hate campaigns against them, inherently showing that to her trans is bad. Laws that make same sex marriage illegal in many countries, some at the pain of death, attitudes that queerness is inherently immoral in some way, or the erasure from a queer people from history, which Eddie will touch on later, absolutely

Eddie 

we can, even in this situation, talk about things that are going on in Ontario right now. We have policy memorandum 162, which was put out by our current government here in Ontario, that basically gives parents the right to be able to opt their child out of sexual education, which we all know sexual education is where queer identities are taught. We can have a whole conversation unpacking that in its own sense, as we begin to have conversations between gender and sexuality and the two aren't really the same. So if we're giving young people the opportunities to learn about identity, shouldn't really be brought up in sexual education. But what this curriculum does is it gives the opportunity for kids that need this education to not have it. It's putting parent rights over young people rights, which is maybe not always the best case. And I think it's so important that young people have the opportunity to share how they feel. And this is when we talk about that idea of epistemology, which is letting those kids know that their truth is their truth, and situations like this tell us that absolutely we're wrong and that these identities don't hold truth, which can be so harmful, absolutely,

Silas 

so protective factors, these are skills that queer folks utilize to navigate the world. I'll actually let you do this one, because you actually made this list. Yes,

Eddie 

yes. Protective Factors hold a very big place in my heart in researching a lot about queer youth and queer folk and Silas, I think we talked about this in a conversation, that a lot of the research is towards what's going wrong for us. It's towards how what I mentioned earlier, our increased engagement in sexual behavior, risky behavior, homelessness, mental health challenges, suicidality, it's a lot of people telling us what's going wrong, and it doesn't leave a lot of room to acknowledge what is going well. I like to take the perspective that we have a whole population of people who have been told that their existence is wrong, but yet, somehow, somewhere between childhood to adulthood, something's going right, something's happening that's allowing queer folk to feel strong, to feel powerful, to feel courageous. And why is that not where we're looking? If we're looking for interventions to be able to work with young people, why are we looking at it from a perspective of intervention, while things already going wrong? If that's what we want to call it, or looking at more of the preventative intervention and seeing, how do we expose young people to what's going well earlier? Because we're forcing queer folk to learn these things on their own. What would happen if we expose them earlier? And what I came across in the research was things that we've listed here, like visibility, what we're talking about today, the importance of feeling seen, ideas of code switching, how queer people have found different types of coping skills that allow us to be able to use our gender identity and expression to be able to feel fit in in spaces and feel safe. We can talk about identity and the importance that identity can provide when feeling firm in how your body looks and feels, self reliance and being able to become independent and feel good about yourself despite the world, conversation management was a big one. Sometimes we look at coming out as just a one time experience, but the unfortunate reality is we come out every day, every time we walk into a space and you have pronouns that maybe are a little bit different, or you're you present differently than some people, that's coming out every time you have a conversation. And and it can be tough and can be challenging. And when you're a young person thinking that coming out is gonna be a one time thing and things are gonna get better after that, it's hard to know that it's never actually going to change. It's going to be constant coming out. We can talk about religion and religious trauma and how that impacts queer people. And then, as I mentioned earlier, differences with gender identity and expression, as well as just how to even manage conversations around passing, and whatever that even means, the power that gets associated with people when they're able to present or look what a gender should look like. But I would like to challenge that even further,

Silas 

and just to know for passing this is usually identified with trans folks, but it also can be with other queer identities, where they're passing as the gender they identify with, and other people are seeing them as that gender, so that it's a safety thing. So when I go out, people might not necessarily know immediately that I'm a trans man. I can pass as cisgender, meaning that my sex and my gender identity align in a way that we assume they would. And so the management of making sure that I pass is also a safety mechanism, and it's very context dependent on when I want to come out.

Eddie 

Absolutely and this, to me, summarizes what community is, and so much of this is exactly what Silas just presented as we learn about what queer identities are that fits in with this realm of protective factors in terms of identity. And I think community is where a lot of these protective factors come from. I think queer people have always been solace for each other and provided spaces to understand what it means to live in a body that you're told shouldn't exist. And what these protective factors do is they expose queer youth to the opportunity to feel the impacts of community without necessarily having to be in community.

Silas 

All right. And again, I've been mentioning this throughout. I really want us to remember queer joy. We are talking about some heavy things, some things that are hard to handle, challenges that are facing us. But again, we term you don't like resilient, and we are different. We are connected. It's important to see us individually while recognizing we are part of the greater whole. When we do have issues, they are not always related to us being queer, but they are always colored by it. And now I'm going to pass it off for futurism.

Eddie 

Yes. So the next pillar we'd like to talk about is this idea of futurism. I will start off by acknowledging this theory is a little bit nuanced, and it's kind of pulling from tenants from different theories that we've kind of embedded together. I will say futurism is not something that's really been accepted widely within different fields, and there's to be able to find a definition for this was very difficult. I've kind of had to pull from a bunch of places to put one together, but I'd like to share with you the definition that I created for the purpose of this presentation today. Futurism is about creating utopias, creating spaces where young people can imagine their futures however they best feel fit. It is rooted in gender affirming approaches and is client led. Futurism provides tangible insights towards how the young person views themselves, understands their body, and ultimately, what they would like to see for themselves. As many of us know, I'm sure, in our own practice, the future can be a scary place for a lot of people, and if this is true for people who aren't even queer, the goal of what futurism is is to allow young people to dream big, beautifully and loud, to give permission to someone to bring that what if to reality, to make what felt impossible possible and to make the invisible visible. It's about creating spaces for joy and understanding that two things can be true at once. The world may be telling me that my truth is a lie, that it is dangerous, confusing, messy, and I am too young, far too young, to ever possibly understand what I want or what my body feels like. And while that may be how the outside understands you. You are allowed to feel joy and define your insights. So to be able to talk a little bit about where this come from, where this came from, and I'm not just pulling this out of nowhere, queer futurism has been coined by a theorist named Jose Munoz. They put together a very amazing book, if anybody wants to read it, it's a little bit abstract, so I had to read it like three times to actually understand what they were saying. But I think it really provides a really unique opportunity to not only understand queer identities from a different perspective, but marginalized identities in a whole. Futurism has been wholeheartedly and greatly adapted from principles of Afrofuturism, which people might have heard about a little bit more. But according to Munoz, what futurism is is it's rooted in hope. It challenges the here and now, offering the idea that our current understandings of marginalized identities do not represent truth. So much of how we understand marginalized identities unfortunately comes from those who are actually living outside of those bodies themselves. If we want to take a step back and look at racialized bodies, differently abled bodies, we can understand that, unfortunately, the definitions that have been associated with these have actually come from people that live in the antithesis of it's people who are often white, presenting heterosexual, cisgendered and able bodied. And what this has done is it's created identities that are the antithesis of queerness only exists because there's power within identities that are not queer. And what futurism does is it says, if we're going to create spaces where queer youth are able to start to find healing, we can't operate from the perspectives that we currently have. There's no room for utopias in this space. What it does is it actively disregards and actively fights against ongoing systems of colonialization, and demands that we work towards a utopia where queer people can redefine how we understand ourselves, because our current understandings do not represent truth. And another very amazing theorist that is close to my heart, Wolfgang Vachon, because he's also a child and youth worker, which to me, is magical. Wolfgang kind of takes us a little bit further, and talks about how when we redefine queerness and we take away this perspective that we've been looking at it from, we can actually look at it as something that we can learn from. We can look at it from something that we can take within our own practices. And Vachon talks about this in terms of how we need a resurgence of queer joy for care permeates queerness. And what he's saying is that queerness is more than an identity. It's rather a community or Lifeway full of wisdom, resilience and hope, and it situates queer experiences as something that we can learn from and apply within our practice. And I've put a few examples here of things that Vachon talks about we may look towards the AIDS epidemic and look at how the queer community itself came up to support each other. During this time, we may look at the importance of freedom of expression and what that gives folks to be able to feel free in their identity, and how that is something that we can even apply within folks that aren't queer. Sometimes we get so caught up in what this world has decided for us that sometimes it's hard to feel free from that. We can look at the importance of championing identity, the strengths that come from chosen family and how queer people have always been able to find family, even though sometimes we don't have that within those that we've been born with. We can also look at drag and the power that is associated with living in your truth and sometimes expressing those parts of you that the world tell you are not beautiful. We can look to ballroom culture, and we can also look to protective factors, as we talked about earlier. But when we take a step back and we look at these from a futuristic perspective, this allows us to be able to acknowledge that there's more going on for queer people than sometimes we allow ourselves to see. Another way that I've kind of taken to be able to understand this is through using Sankofa theory. Sankofa is a new word that, well, it's not new. So we're kind of talking about a lot of this stuff, but it's one that's kind of resurfacing in a lot of spaces. And I know it's one that I've seen a lot in literature around child and youth care. But what Sankofa is is it's an African word from the Akan tribe in Ghana. In the literal translation of the word and the symbol is that it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind when you apply this to queer people, what this does is it allows us to talk about and teach traditionally erased queer histories, because bring in the goal is really to bring queer youth back to their roots. Is when you take a futurism perspective to how we understand queerness right now, we can acknowledge that a lot of the time, there is no history that we can lean back to grab from sometimes we feel very isolated within our own experiences and have a hard time seeing that there are people that look, talk and feel like us, and there have been people before us that have felt within those same ways. So what queering Sankofa does is actually give tangible opportunities for people to look back and see that there was a whole community of people before us that just never really had the opportunities to thrive and flourish like we are able to now. Another way to be able to understand this is to look at it from a resurgence of culture erased something I've heard in my practice, working in different settings in this field, is there this idea that there just seems to be more queer people nowadays? I'm sure it's something that you've all heard, or even thought there's nothing wrong with thinking that that's just the resources we've been given to understand such an identity. But what I feel is that when we take this approach, what it's doing is it actually is disregarding the existence of queer people. We've always been here, we will always be here, and unfortunately, we've just not been provided the spaces to be able to understand our bodies and our identities in safe ways. We've never been offered the opportunity to express ourselves in safety and what Jose Munez  talks about is, if you were to ask somebody during the 80s or 90s what a queer future look like, it would have been death. There was no future coming out meant that you were most likely contracting HIV AIDS, and that was a death sentence at that time. What we now know is that things have changed since then. We hope that they continue to change, and through being able to actually acknowledge what's happened in the past, we can move forward and better ways that allow our stories to no longer be erased, for our love to be celebrated and our histories to be cherished.

Silas 

And I just like to add also that even today, that those have had positive impacts, like the Trillium Benefit is a direct was directly given to us because of AIDS advocates wanting to be able to support people with HIV.

Eddie 

Thank you for adding that. We can with using this perspective, using Sankofa to look back and the idea that we will never actually be able to understand queer experiences within the approach that we're taking now with the individual, what is happening is when we only allow ourselves to understand gender as binary and concrete experiences. This pretty much says that anything that falls outside of that is false. So when we look back in history, we can look at important figures like Leonardo cap Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, my God, Leonardo da Vinci we can look back at people like Shakespeare, and we can see that if you're using the lens that we've been taught, you're going to automatically understand them as somebody who's straight and cisgender and cisgender. But if we pick a step back and you use a queer historian view, you can see that maybe there was actually some more stuff going on there. Hatshepsut, is a beautiful example of this, Hatshepsut, also known as Her Majesty, the King, is one of the first known queer figures in history. They are incredible. They identified as a king as a lot of people assume that there was no name for a female ruler at the time, so a lot of people associated that Hatshepsut needed to use this identity to feel powerful. But they they continue to play with gender and power. Often time would be seen wearing men's clothing and had a false, golden beard that they would wear. The unfortunate piece is when you look back at stories of Hatshepsut over history, a lot of them have been negative. She's been described as calculating, evil and destructive. When her tomb was found, it had been partially destroyed and completely vandalized. A lot of people associated this to do with that negative view of her being calculating. But what a lot of queer people think is maybe this was another example of a queer experience. It was somebody who was never given the opportunity to actually express themselves in the way that they feel, and Hatshepsut's story can be looked at from the point of view of power. However, we can also look at it from the implications of queer experiences, sharing how the world makes sense to you, and this becoming twisted in something that is not to make sense of, something that does not make sense in a heteronormative world, which is why we've given us ourselves all the permission today to start anew. Because, as we can see from these our current perspective doesn't allow room for queerness. And if we're going to look forward to futurism, how can we make sense of that if we're operating from these places? Another great example of this is we can look at Two Spirit identities and looking at what was lost. As many of us know, prior to colonization, queer experiences held meaning in many indigenous communities. While this was not encompassing across all indigenous experiences across Turtle Island, some indigenous people were able to live their lives as neither men nor women, and even transcended the binary that we talked about today. And in some communities, Two Spirit folks were provided with important roles and were visible within their identities. However, through ongoing systems of settler colonialism, we put a new lens on it, and we're trying to make a sense of identities where we're only given two as an opportunity. So of course, it's not going to make sense, and thus this was erased from history. But in authoring this, I'd like to give us the chance to question if maybe the utopia isn't even what was needed, but rather a more holistic approach to what has been lost. I know we don't have a lot of time, but I also wanted to use futurism to be able to explain a little bit more about how we've traditionally approached queerness within psychology. I think if we as a field want to take a step back and redefine queerness, we really need to understand where we've come from and how we've traditionally interacted with queer people. And something I wanted to situate was the idea that therapy itself has always held more truth than queer identities, and this is because therapy was what was used to be able to treat people like us. We were seen as looking at like something was wrong, we had a mental health concern and we needed treatment. So if we're going to make room for truth within psychology, we need to understand that a lot of our modalities were never created in a space where these identities held truth. It was a therapy that held the truth themselves. To be able to put this into perspective a little bit more, I have some years that I'd like to share with you all queerness, and especially during the time queerness was not as understood as broadly as it. Is now, but more so looking at same sex relationships, wasn't decriminalized in Canada until 1969 and to put this into perspective, CBT, the most common modality that most of us use, was coined in 1960 so CBT was created during a time where sodomy laws were still in existence and queerness was punishable by law. So we can acknowledge that a lot of these modalities we continue to use were never meant for people like us, and we were never included within the definition of what those mean. We can look at the idea that queerness was not removed from the DSM five until 1973 however, it was brought back in 1980 labeled a little bit differently as ego, diastolic homosexuality. This was removed again in 1987 however, I would argue that variants of this diagnosis continue to remain in the most current version of the DSM, and this shows up within gender dysphoria. I know this might sound a little bit out there for people, because sometimes we understand gender dysphoria as something that we treat but what I would suggest is that gender dysphoria as actually looking at individuals as the issue and not looking at the idea that it could be more so from the system themselves. If we were to give young people a blank state to start with, what would that look like? Would gender dysphoria exist? How would it present? Would it be a thing? As RuPaul, my favorite person in this world, always says, we were all born naked, and the rest is drag. We can also bring queer futurism into psychology. So what do we do now? Now, knowing all this stuff, how do we move forward? How do we start anew? How do we do this? I would say that looking at citizenship narrative is a great place to start and consider who are our treatment modalities created for. We can see that many of them were never made for queer people, and they were never in mind when they were developed. What I'm not asking us to do is to adopt and adapt our modalities to meet the needs of what we think queer people will need. This would be operating from the same harmful perspectives that Silas and I have talked about today. What I want you all to consider after leaving today is how you may personally bring visibility to the practice, sorry, to the forefront of your practice. How can you personally decolonize your own understandings of 2SLGBTQIA+  bodies. And how may you learn from our stories, our ways of being, our identities, to be able to ensure that youth can feel seen, heard and given the opportunity to imagine positive futures for themselves, because we cannot shake it up. Sorry, totally started that one, Shake it up, because we can simply not just stir it in. Now you may ask, Well, where do we go from here? Silas and I would argue that we need to continue to make room for visibility and vulnerability. I know my approach to things are a little bit different because I am a child and youth worker, but I will continue to argue that using self as an intervention is so important, especially when we're working with marginalized communities. While I could continue to educate and speak and we can continue to make this a safe space for people to learn queerness, I will continue to argue that the best people to work with queer people are queer people themselves. So I would argue for you all to take away after this today is to question the ways that you can uniquely show up for the youth that you work with in the ways that they need you to I would say futurism provides unique opportunities to work from a client centered approach and establish interventions that are rooted in the young person's understanding of themselves, and aim to promote joy within our identities. And this allows us to question what success looks like. A lot of us operate from a version of success being very colonial, but what happens when we give young people the opportunities to redefine that and develop interventions embodied within it? An example of this would be using this approach as a foundation for interventions, for example, a group program for queer youth that is rooted in a future that allows youth to live authentically, and this could use drag play and gender play as a way to be able to explore. Because sometimes language is not good for queer people to explore our experiences, because language is never made for us, especially when people see they, then pronouns and assume we're talking about a group of people. Sometimes language can be harmful. So to finish us off in a in a good way, I wanted to share an example of queer stories and also share some to ensure that they're not continuing to be erased. To me, drag represents what futurism is. It's a powerful way that we're able to share our stories through art while creating platforms to understand our power. What drag does is it gives opportunity to to find power within the identities that typically we spend a lot of time trying to hide that version of ourself that maybe the world didn't think could fit in. But drag is such a beautiful space for that. So I just wanted to end us off on a place of learning from um, very prominent queer figures, we have Sasha Colby, who is one of the most recent winners from RuPaul drag race. If anybody has watched it, Sasha Colby is incredible, and in her work, she often talks about her experiences unlearning transphobia. Sasha Colby grew up Mormon and grew up in an environment where queness was not celebrated, and through that, she talks a lot about how she had to almost unprogram herself like she had to with a cell phone. If you're looking at getting a new phone, a lot of the time, it already becomes programs with apps, and that's how a lot of queer people understand ourselves. But to be able to find joy, sometimes we need to delete those apps to be able to start new so we can create new understandings of ourselves. Anastarzia Anaquway is actually a local queen. She's from Scarborough, and in her story, she talks about her experiences escaping queer violence and being an asylum seeker here in Canada after leaving a very harmful place where she had actually been shot in her home and did not feel safe where she was living. So she came to Canada to be able to escape that. Traditionally, while these are real stories, these would have been erased and something that we wouldn't have talked about, we wanted to be able to end on a note of sharing more stories, because I think this is where  visibility starts from.

Silas 

Thank you.

Megan W 

Yah, thanks so much you two. That was actually extraordinary.

Silas 

We're also just going to leave this on the screen as we talk. It's questions that leave you thinking, and that way, this can be up as we have any questions.

Megan W 

I already see a couple questions coming in. Marie is wondering. Eddie and Silas, what would you say to clinicians who predominantly use CBT modalities when working with queer kiddos?

Eddie 

Can you feel about that? Yeah, I can. I can answer that question. I think it would. What would be important is the perspective that you're using with it in talking about CBT. I wasn't planning on making people feel like it's an uncomfortable approach to use with queer folk. I think it's just about understanding, traditionally, what it was used for. CBT has been also an approach that has been used as to start with conversion therapy, working with queer people, using CBT as a way to be able to unpack how what was going on in their brain was wrong. So while it can be used if you're coming from it with a positive lens and trying to maybe approach queerness a little bit more broadly. Something that Silas and I have talked about is this idea of broken bone syndrome. Which do you want to explain a little bit? I

Silas 

I do. Okay, so I I've understood it through a trans lens. Is the trans broken bone syndrome, where a trans person goes into a hospital, they have a broken arm. They go to see the doctor, and the first question of the doctor's arm is like, do you think it's broken because you're trans? It's the idea that everything about you, everything that happens to you, has to be related to the thing that is what people see you as. So no, I just have a broken bone. Please. Just put a cast on it. We don't need to talk about my entire trans identity right now.

Eddie 

Yeah, yeah. So if we're looking at it with CBT, it would be making sure that what we're unpacking would be helpful for the young people, and that we're not approaching it from, well, let's just see what's going on from your queerness, but let's see how we can support you in general, as a whole, as a person beyond so, yeah, I wouldn't want to warn people about using it. It would just be as you're using it, acknowledge where it came from,

Megan W 

Right. And the Yeah, I see what you're saying. I think, I mean, everybody here in the chat is saying that they have loved this presentation, and it's been very eye opening, just so much, I don't know if you can see the chat, but so much love and positive feedback coming your way, both of you. I love these questions that you have here. One, I wonder if it might be helpful to even, like talk about some of these together. Do you do? Yeah? Sorry, go ahead.

Eddie 

Yeah. We, we put them here as a way for people just to kind of leave thinking. So the ones that we put here were, What does it mean to feel secure in your body? How much of your own future was inspired by people in the media that look like you? What would it mean to not see this? Did the norms that you were expected to follow feel right for you, did it feel like the path you wanted to follow? Was imagining your future life with a partner difficult? Could you allow yourself to imagine what felt right, what could be? Question for the practitioners would be, do you think that our field does enough to ensure queer folk feel visible within our practice? And the last question being, how much of our work with young people is shaped by colonial understandings of success, rather than how young people themselves define it? And what does this mean within the scope of this presentation? These are very broad questions, but we wanted people to be able to leave thinking, how do we move forward from here? And just

Silas 

To give you an idea of, like, queer experiences of this and Eddie, if you want to field any of these questions too feel right, feel free to but like, how does it mean to feel secure in your body as a trans person? That's a lot of work.  That meant medical intervention for me, and how much my future is inspired by people in the media that looked like you? I didn't know that trans men was an option until I was out of high school. I remember there was somebody who was trans, masked, I think, on Degrassi but their storyline was not handled well. They weren't what I envisioned of myself. I couldn't actually put that together, so I didn't even allow myself to consider my own trans identity until I was able to transition when I was 24.

Eddie 

Yeah, and I can, oh, sorry, go ahead. Megan, No, you go ahead. Gonna say for me, answering one of the questions, did the norms that you were expected to follow feel right for you? That was so not true. I remember growing up picturing in my mind that I was only allowed to be with a woman. That's the option I was going to have. I knew that that wasn't how I felt, but it felt like that was the only future that was for me, and hearing all these norms, like, boys don't cry. My goodness, I cry constantly. I still do. So what happens when people aren't given that opportunity to express what feels right. A lot of that is so internalized, and my goodness is Silas talks about what it feels to what it is to feel secure in your body. There's also so much work that has to go within just feeling okay, within our own identities, in itself. I talked about, and I've said this to so many people, that for me to be able to feel like I can speak in front of folk, I had to unpack so much baggage that was on top of this little boy who was so scared to just be feminine, and it took so long to be able to be able to feel proud of that side of me. I now have a drag name for it. It's Betty Jane Butler, Lady Betty if you're nasty, but the whole idea is being able to find joy within those spaces. And in putting this here, we just want to be able to show that it's not as easy as it looks for some people. Yeah, sometimes there's a lot that has to go behind those scenes to be able to get to these places. And if we can make youth feel visible earlier, maybe these questions wouldn't have so much meaning. Yeah, and

Megan W 

that kind of, that's a that kind of brings me to the next question that we have here is, what because Eddie you spoke about like growing up in a family that really did support you, what message do you think you would give to parents of young children?

Eddie 

Yes, well, that's such a beautiful question. I would I would say a lot of it would have to do with safety, something that I see come up for a lot of queer folk and a lot of families is this idea of, how much do we protect this young person, and what do we allow them to present? How do we allow them present? Because I don't want them to be harmed. I don't want them to be in danger. If they're themselves, the world's out to get them. What I would say instead is that, unfortunately, we cannot change how the world understands queer people, but what we can do is create spaces where young people feel brave to talk about what it means to live within these experiences. It's about making sure that the environment is safe, that they feel seen, that they feel like they can be vulnerable with you and know that while the world may be a hard place, when I get home, my parent is somebody I can lean on. My guardian is someone I can lean on. So I would just say, agency, give them the space to be visible, and then give them the space to cry on your shoulder when they get home.

Silas 

And physically that shows support, like it shows that though you have better outcomes.

Megan W 

And I like to use the word brave, because I know sometimes like we, like to say creating a safe space. But the reality is, a lot of the time those safe spaces don't really exist. So I like that you use the word brave there, because I feel like that really sort of articulates that very, very clearly as well. There's like, an element of bravery, you know, to go into these spaces a lot of the time,

Eddie 

absolutely.

Megan W 

And I think one thing that you're having me reflect on Silas from what you were just talking about, too, was just like the sheer power there is in representation, also in the media, but also in the community and the interactions that you have every day, and for especially, you know, working with young people, I think that's something that's so important.

Silas 

No, I completely agree. And like making sure that there are accurate reflections of them, and not we kind of talked about like, the best person for a queer person is generally another queer person, similar with representation, is not having people that aren't part of those identities, representing those identities like we often see in media, yes,

Megan W 

and I think I can speak on behalf of everybody and saying, like, yes. Thank you for this incredible presentation and for sharing your wisdom, but also thank you for sharing your personal stories as well, because that's yeah, obviously it really a lot of us know and love you both so much as well. So it's just very eye opening to hear your personal stories and that you are in a place where you're comfortable sharing that with us too. I think we're all very, very grateful. So thank you.

Eddie 

Thank you for Marie for creating a workplace where we're able to share these kind of stories. So much of this field doesn't often leave room for this and room for us to talk unapologetically openly about queer experiences. So it is so amazing to be in a place like flourish, where these things are celebrated, they're encouraged, and we're given the platform to speak. So I think it also goes back to the whole team.

Silas 

It's literally in my bio.

Megan W 

Yes, huge shout out to Marie, like these clinical rounds, and obviously I know you're so, yeah, such an advocate for all the clients that you serve and the communities that you serve. So just, there's so much love to go around here.

Marie 

We're, I know it's, it's one o'clock. I just wanted to say, thank you so much, you guys, this was unbelievable. I don't know, with the team, I've been crying this whole presentation. It just makes me so happy to see it come together. You both are incredible speakers. And you know, if we, if the kids that we work with, see any of this representation as part of, like, our future and kind of you know, we, we, we are so happy to have you both. And again, like Megan said, Thank you for being so honest and open and answering all my questions that I'm embarrassed to ask, but I want to ask because I want to get it right. It's just so important.

Eddie 

Thank you for saying that that, to me, is where the magic is at. I think so it's so difficult sometimes to be able to enter these places, because we don't want to offend, we don't want to upset, but we need to ask the questions. We need to feel embarrassed, we need to feel vulnerable, because that's where we can actually share the learning. So that, like warms my heart. They even say that, because I find that that's where the magic happens.

Silas 

Yeah. And also, they even expand on that, if you're coming in with goodwill and honestly wanting to learn, most people are going to be very happy to tell you, so don't be scared in that sense. The only time that I've ever been like upset with the question when it was clearly coming from a place of hate.

Eddie 

Yeah, we also were never given the platforms to learn these things. It's as we talked about, queer experiences have been erased. So I want everybody be able to feel the permission to give yourself a little bit of grace in the lack of knowledge that we have, because it's not you, it's not anything, it's just the system and how we talk about queer people. So it's, I think it's so important to give ourselves the grace and move forward with curiosity and moving forward with spaces of just allowing people to be brave and vulnerable.

Marie 

Thank you so much everyone. Thank you Eddie and and Silas. We have to go because we're having a Taylor Swift party here in about five minutes. So we all have somewhere to be. And thank you so much for joining us on your lunch hour. Our present or presenter for next week, we'll be sending out the bio. We're just so happy with the outcomes of these clinical exchanges. So we're so happy to send out the bio later, I think tomorrow, probably, and we will see you all next week. Have a great day.