Educational Resources

On September 25, 2024, OCASI PSI hosted a webinar with three incredible international student activists in our community who educated us about how student movements have historically played, presently play, and will continue to play pivotal roles in social progress. Watch here!

A resource for queer and trans South Asians, reclaiming histories of acceptance, love, and reverence. The resource is to understand our histories, to understand what our queer and trans ancestors looked like. It aims to affirm queer and trans South Asians and their indigenous histories. It’s to understand that being queer and trans is not a “white person thing”; it is, in fact, something that is indigenous to South Asian communities. The histories and identities discussed in this resource are not exclusionary. This is the first attempt at understanding these histories from afar through some resources available.

Cet article, rédigé par etablissement.org, offre du contexte important pour bien comprendre et utiliser les pronoms non genrés. 

L'infographie « Queer et trans contre le pinkwashing » est une ressource informative créer par Mubaadarat (Montréal) pour résister aux récits de pinkwashing qui utilisent les droits humains LGBTQ+ comme couverture de la violence et de l'occupation coloniale. Cette ressource est également disponible en anglais et en arabe.

A chapter extracted from a book and adopting the style of the manifesto, CJ DeLuzio Chasin examines how the historical establishment of the concept of sexual orientation needs to be undone in order to move toward what the author describes as a truly ace- and aro-friendly society. Of note, such a society is intersectional and abolitionist in its figuration: it must also be anti-ableist, antisanist, anti-racist, and anti-colonialist.

Please Note: This is based on the honor system. Below will be a link with the file. If you are low income QTBIPOC you may download the PDF for free. Everyone else please pay what you can with the sliding scale options! Thanks for you support of GenderFail!

Digital Download can be accessed with the link here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18IUL_K-c9Uv8x3t4oOJUGzVhLefr8wZ0/view?usp=sharing

GenderFail, A Decade of Queer and Trans Liberatory Writings is an anthology publication featuring 20 essays spanning a decade of work by GenderFail Press. These 324 pages encompass the best of our ongoing work. If you are new to GenderFail this is the perfect publication to start to explore our work.

At the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic we released our first GenderFail Reader. This first edition compiled essays from previously published zines and other written essays by Be Oakley and their partner Yvonne LeBien. In the last three years they have published four volumes of their GenderFail Reader series. This book is a capstone of all four volumes, including essays, artworks and ideas that have helped to formulate GenderFail during the last 10 years of the project. These essays speak to the interests, research and passions that drive GenderFail and highlight the powerful agency behind self and small publishing. Their hope is that these essays inspire you to future actions, dreams, hopes and new worlds that center people and communities fighting for a world without colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism and heteronormative oppression.

This flyer offers a summary of a joint OCASI PSI and ACAS (Asian Community AIDS Services) event entitled "What's Goin On in Ontario Schools?". This resource addresses concerns within newcomer communities around 2SLGBTQIA+ policies in schools. The speakers from the virtual event (watch the recording here) were Christine Hsu, Narina Nagra, Alice Te, and gitanjali lena.

As a follow up to our webinar "What's Going On in Ontario Schools", hosted in partnership with ACAS, OCASI PSI welcomed three wonderful speakers on March 21 to continue discussing the impact of recent transphobic legislation in several Canadian provinces, and how to support queer/trans people in our communities in the midst of transphobia and homophobia. Allos Abis, Noon Ghunna, and Beverly Bain offer important insights on sociopolitical dynamics between newcomer communities and the far-right effort to garner support for transphobic and homophobic legislation and policies. They also present perspectives that consider the bigger picture of transphobia and homophobia within and surrounding newcomer communities. 

This joint OCASI-PSI and ACAS (Asian Community AIDS Services) was held on February 1st 2024 and invited four local experts to discuss and address concerns and disinformation among newcomer and diaspora communities around trans and nonbinary curriculum, policy, and practice in Ontario schools. 

The attached recorded includes presentations from three out of four of the event's speakers, responding to questions, such as: 

How has recent legislation in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick around parental consent impacted Ontario?

What are common myths circulating within newcomer communities around LGBTQIA+ content in schools?

How can we support queer/trans youth in schools as parents/community members?

Why are some parents uncomfortable with gender neutral facilities in schools?

Where does fear/ resistance to inclusive school policies come from?

For reasons of necessity, urgency, and sometimes choice, queer Africans cross borders and find their lives unfolding in diasporic spaces. Refugee claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity persecution make up 12% of all refugee cases in Canada, with queer African refugees constituting the largest group within this category. With this in mind, we now have to ask, “what kind of history will be written about the collision between queer Africans dislocated from post-colonial nations and the Canadian settler nation?” In this study, qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted to explore the individual lived experiences of queer African refugees, with a focus on the intricate realignment of sexual orientation, sexual identity, sexual politics, and sexual desire that inevitably emerges through forced migration and the refugee process in Canada. The deep meaning of life experiences is captured in the participants’ own words, providing detailed, in-depth insights into the complexities of their lives, their reflections, and their subsequent responses.

These narratives call attention to the specific features of queer African refugees, who test the limits of the current homonational refugee apparatus. Participants’ experiences of resisting social roles, structures, identities, and expectations that limit queer African refugees and keep them “in their place,” both in their countries of origin and in Canada, are interrogated. The construction of boundaries that decide who belongs and deserves protection within Canada and who does not provides a foundation for engaging in research as a practice of freedom, in order to counter the global narrative of refugee life that excludes queer Africans.

The findings in this research require us to look at practices of exclusion and inclusion in the Canadian refugee system and the tensions that emerge for queer African claimants. In the end, we are left with strategies for how to engage with the politics of knowledge production and advocate for an agenda of social justice and transformation for queer Africans globally.