Category Archives: Queer Issues
seasons of gender: reflections on trans day of remembrance
gender can be a daunting topic – daunting for trans and cis people alike. for the latter, discussing gender can seem difficult. anxiety-provoking. tentative to engage, cis people often avoid asking about pronouns, avoid trying with pronouns, avoid learning about gender altogether. all this employed in the spirit of fragility: as if it is better […]
Unapologetic
Pictured is Maneo Mohale wearing her identity to the March Against Racism in March 2015.
Maneo has written about this t-shirt in an article published in HOLAAfrica.
white feminist 404
can trauma be owned can it be speculated on / paid for in plastic rainbows & rubber kisses? you, white feminist, are a bracelet locking me within these washed, haunted halls (so clean): the clock, this wristband, these lunch trays – they tell me to give one story here the exact four lines you’ve been […]
Pièce de Résistance – Art as Revolution
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings At an open mic evening called Spoken Works III: Centring Black Voices, some of those stories were released. Held on March 4th at Heartwood Community Café, non-black organizer Jane Shi explained that the […]
Meet the Editors: K.
My name is Kay, and my politics are about amplifying voices in the margins, honouring our complexities, and dismantling the colonial capitalist white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy with transformative love, warm toques, rage, consent, and poetry on Friday nights… come join me.
Meet the Editors: Sarah K.
I centre my newness to ‘anti-o’ work in this introduction because the critical work done in academic spaces can often be or seem daunting or inaccessible. It doesn’t have to be, and I hope The Talon can be – among other things – an entry point to critical perspectives on a multitude of subjects for you, as it is has been and continues to be for me.
10 Shitty Things about Vancouver Nightlife: A QWOC* Perspective
TW: this article contains mentions of rape, harassment and sexual assault. As a queer, black woman, moving through a straight, white world can be challenging. From everyday micro-aggressions to huge systemic structures of discrimination, our society privileges those who are very much not me. This is evident when I’m picked out in class to give […]
Social Justice Synonyms #17: “Dyke” and “Fag”
The words “fag” and “dyke” are both words that carry a history of violence – emotional, verbal, and physical – against folks perceived as QUILTBAG. They’re words that have been, and continue to be used to remind people when they are enacting gender or sexuality in ways seen as ‘deviant’ according to social norms, which […]
Navigating Beyond the Gender Binary
When I was a young child, I thought my parents wanted me to be a girl so badly that they secretly surgically altered my body so I’d be a girl (i.e. have a vulva). I never brought it up with my parents, I just frustratingly accepted it. I was taught gender and sex were synonymous, […]
Reconciling Whom I Love with Where I Love
This piece originally appeared in the recent (and first ever) “Sowing Seeds and Setting Roots: An Outweek 2015 Zine.” Outweek is a series of events hosted annually by the Pride Collective at UBC. For “Sowing Seeds and Setting Roots,” they encouraged submissions that took intersectional approaches to queer identity. We encourage you to check out the zine […]
