Rise Up

How a house party inspired a support network for transgender women

- Deidre Olsen

CANADA’S TRANSGENDER community has made many strides in the past decade: securing rights protections, getting elected to office and seeing themselves represented by central characters on popular shows. But it’s still far from easy to be trans in Canada. According to recent reports, 74 per cent of trans youth say they’ve been verbally harassed; in Ontario, the unemployment rate for trans individuals was nearly three times as high as the national rate; and trans people earn a median income of only $15,000 per year.

In 2015, three trans Montrealers, Estelle Davis, a comedian and writer; Lenore Claire, a stage performer and bartender; and Elle Barbara, a musician and community organizer, decided that it was up to them to create an effective support system for other trans people. Their organization, Taking What We Need, would provide discretionary funding to low-income transfeminine people—money for rent, food, transition-related costs or anything else they need to thrive.