Trans PULSE: Wrapping Up

You may have noticed some changes to our website recently. After years of collective work to document the experiences of trans communities in Ontario, we are wrapping up our work on Trans PULSE. It’s been amazing to see all the changes in policy, practice, and community advocacy since we began our work. Our very first seed grant to build the team came in 2005, and we held our community soundings the summer of 2006. We collected our survey data in 2009 and 2010, and we’ve worked since then to get a wide range of results out in formats people can use. So many of you in the community contributed your experiences to this data set, and your efforts to making this happen. So many of you are taking our results and using them in your professional work and advocacy. When we started this project, there were so few data on trans health and trans lives. So much has changed since 2005, with the relisting of transition-related surgeries under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, changes to human rights policies, changes to sex work laws, trainings of medical and social service professionals on trans-competent and trans-friendly care, and increased media attention to trans issues. We are pleased to have played a part in some of that personally, and through having provided information to support the work of others. We have watched as parts of our survey were replicated in the UK and Ireland; as our “erasure” paper has been used in teaching medical, nursing and health sciences students; as trans community members, community agencies, healthcare centres, and policy makers have used our results to support their work; and as parents of trans youth drew support from our report on the impact of parental support. It’s been amazing.

While this long-term project is wrapping up, all of us on the Trans PULSE team continue to work (separately and together) on a range of projects related to trans health and trans community. We are committed to maintaining this web site to make it easier for you to locate our work from Trans PULSE, and you can continue using “Data in Action” to tell us what you’re doing with our work. What we won’t be able to do going forward is to have someone check this site’s e-mail regularly, and we will likely not have the capacity to take on extra work to assist on other people’s projects. We’re using our time and energy to make sure the remaining high-priority items get out to you.

So what comes next? While our funding, and the bulk of our work, have wrapped up, you will still see new Trans PULSE results posted here for at least another year or two. In addition to the nine academic papers, six reports and eight e-bulletins currently released, we have three academic papers that will be out shortly, another under review, three manuscripts nearly ready to be submitted for review, and a book chapter on the way. There may be a few more at later dates as well. We still have major work coming out on Aboriginal gender-diverse people, access to family medicine, racism and transphobia, sex and gender diversity within trans communities, and suicide prevention, among other topics. So stay tuned. This will be a long, slow, farewell!