– Audre Lorde

Albert Lalonde, co- spokesperson for the 2019 student movement Pour le Future de Montreal (PLF) since its inception, agreed to speak with me about his experience: “The first call to protest was for February 15th 2019 through an anonymous Instagram story, and suddenly we were 400 kids skipping classes protesting downtown,” he recalls. On September 27 of that year, more than 500,000 people mobilized in the streets of Montreal, demanding climate justice; which at the time, was the biggest climate-related protest in Canada since Earth Day in 2012.

I remember 2019 vividly: I was 15 years old when I first heard Greta Thunberg’s Stockholm speech, famously denouncing global leaders and their lack of action in the face of the climate crisis. I was outraged. This speech marked a shift in much of my generation’s collective consciousness. Adults and leaders of the world were largely not stepping up; radical action had to be taken, and this fight would have to be led by us, the youth. At only 17 years old, Lalonde helped create a movement led by high-school students that disturbed the status quo, bringing the issue of climate change to the forefront. “We were going against all these different levels of authority: our parents, our teachers, principals, the school board, including theMinister of Education.”

Today, however, this sense of responsibility towards future generations seems to have been erased from our collective memory. In October, I posted a questionnaire on Instagram, asking people I know between the ages of 18 and 24 years old to describe how they felt about the current state of the world and the environmental crisis. It quickly became clear that the overwhelming majority felt helpless, describing themselves as anxious, scared, tired, stressed, hopeless, and doomed.

This September, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a report sounding the alarm about the increasingly unavoidable overshoot of the Paris Agreement limit, a legally binding international treaty aiming to hold our global temperatures to 1.5 °C. It urged the need for immediate, drastic mitigation efforts from governments worldwide. In contrast, over the past few years, there has reportedly been a downward trend in engagement for environmental mobilization. Now, according to GlobeScan and BBMG, 42 per cent of youth (between 18 and 24 years old) were disillusioned with individual action in 2024, up by 24 per cent since 2020. The report suggests this decline is due to young people feeling more and more powerless in the face of climate change.

Considering the global socio- political context of the past few years, this is not all that surprising. “In times where there is more urgency, the climate always falls to the wayside,” says Dr. Sejhal Bharghava, a young global health advocate and family doctor based in Ottawa, who agreed to discuss the issue with me after guest lecturing at McGill. Bharghava who is involved in many climate action organizations around the country, does not blame youth for choosing to step back from the overwhelming issue that is the climate crisis: “How much do people expect young people to do? We’re in school, we’re unemployed, we have debt and in our spare time you want us to fix your mess?” It is no longer effective to just tell people about how bad things are; instead, Bharghava strongly believes “we need to present people with a vision of what we can move towards.”

The CEVES — a student-led Quebec sustainable action collective that included organizers from PLF — did have a vision to share. In 2019, students behind this collective including Lalonde were preparing to call for an unlimited strike where they would host workshops on different school campuses and share perspectives on how climate justice could become part of school curriculums. However, these promising plans came to a halt when the global lockdown was called two weeks before they were set to strike. Between 2020 and 2022, core organizers started to experience burnout, making attempts to build on the movement’s momentum difficult.

Lalonde, along with many other young PLF participants, decided to focus his attention on more local issues. “One thing that we saw during the pandemic is that all of these networks didn’t just vanish. They just transferred onto other projects and work that, in many ways, are more rooted.” Indeed, all the young and motivated people who had been engaged in the cause had come too far to do nothing with all the valuable knowledge gained. Many shifted their efforts towards issues such as indigenous sovereignty, migrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and Palestine. In that way, these young PLF organizers have remained active in their fight for justice, and — by extension, environmental justice — at a grassroots level.

At 24 years old, still motivated by the issue of the climate crisis, Lalonde is actively working alongside Our Children’s Trust, a coalition of young plaintiffs (some of which were part of the CEVES) suing the federal government for their lack of commitment toward solving climate change. Though this lawsuit has been ongoing for 7 years, the Federal Court is only now proceeding to a five-week trial that started on October 26 in Vancouver. Despite the disappointing conclusion to the PLF movement’s promising prospects, Albert still affirms that the solution to this deep feeling of doomism among the youth (the belief that catastrophic outcomes of global crises are inevitable) is to get out there and do something.And, fortunately, many young people are.

Sustainable Youth Canada (SYC), a non-profit organization led by youth for youth, organizes climate-related events across the country, hosting workshops in schools and communities, as well as providing policy writing and consultation opportunities. In our email exchanges, Sara Carling and Allie Wang, co- directors of SYC in Montreal (SYC’s oldest and most established Canadian branch) say that people get involved on a volunteer basis as youth-climate activism lacks funding. Though they notice that news related to climate change is rarely positive, Carling and Wang contend that engaging with SYC allows them to “have a different perspective, and see people working alongside each other towards making positive change.”

Bharghava is part of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), an interdisciplinary group uniting health care workers in Canada to connect the dots between the impacts of climate change and human health to governments and the general public. “I think finding community is huge. I know it’s said a lot, but truly, joining CAPE was the best thing I could have ever done for my mental health and my sustainability and resiliency in this movement, because it gets hard,” she admits. People who stay engaged in these important issues continue to be hopeful, even if that sometimes feels radical.

When we turn to the rest of the world for evidence of hope and important activist work, we can find it everywhere. As many of us find ourselves grappling with eco-anxiety or a general sense of doom, let us use these inspiring people and movements as a reminder that we don’t have to deal with these emotions on our own. The healing nature of community cannot be underestimated as an antidote to doomism: “Community isn’t very far and you don’t have to look very hard foritbutyoudohavetomakea bit of an effort to make those connections.” Indeed, to Bharghava, getting involved is all about taking the first step, and that should be the easiest part: “Any sort of advocacy is better than nothing — anything is better than nothing!”

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However, funding only goes so far. “Homelessness becomes a municipal issue when it appears in public spaces, though it starts long before then,” says Mélanie Fournier, a PhD student in psychology at UQAM. There are individual and structural factors at play that can determine housing situations, including: low income or unemployment, rent inflation, immigration complications, social reintegration after incarceration or hospitalization, unstable relationships and domestic violence, addiction, and mental illness.

Investing in warming shelters is not enough, as shelters and homes are not synonymous. This distinction is especially pertinent for “situational” or “hidden homelessness,” where people seek shelter in their vehicles, hotels, and other forms of temporary housing. Nonetheless, some individuals find themselves in the visible category of being unhoused, falling under cyclical or chronic subtypes. These groups may find themselves inhabiting makeshift shelters and abandoned infrastructure, leaving them unhoused for longer. Since having access to temporary housing does not guarantee safety, invisible homelessness can quickly become visible. This also extends to resource access. Despite having access to warming centres and temporary shelters, some, like Jocelyn Motard, prefer makeshift “cabin-like” shelters away from the heart of the city. This allows Motard to avoid precarious social interactions or squabbles with other unhoused individuals. “[These shelters] are the kind of place[s] that you can find a lot of darkness,” he says. While the city of Montreal invests in winter warming centres, access to these shelters is not universal, even with street outreach teams responsible for communicating with and directing unhoused people to them.

Nonetheless, warming centres can be vital to the survival of unhoused peoples amid declining temperatures. Without them, makeshift heat sources in encampments pose fire risks which, if not monitored, can quickly turn life-threatening. This was the case last month at the Notre-Dame encampment, where 180 unhoused people presently reside, when an unhoused woman died following a fire at the Notre-Dame encampment. These improvised heat sources are most often propane-fuelled garbage fires, but solar panels and generators have also been used. As a result, these encampments can become municipal fire hazards, requiring what fire service chief Martin Guilbault calls “case-by-case” reviews. If a makeshift warming centre is found to pose a fire risk, it is supposed to be taken down for “people’s safety.” This approach begs the question of how safety is defined and whose is deemed more important. Devint, a resident of the Notre-Dame encampment, says his biggest safety concern is the encampment being dismantled after last month’s tragedy, which would leave him vulnerable as winter comes. According to CBC, the city of Montreal has cleared out the area multiple times in the past. This makes their promise to withhold from tearing down the encampment in the future seem disingenuous.

The new budget, however, aspires to prevent history from repeating itself by shifting to 24-hour, municipally-regulated shelters at designated locations. Coinciding with Premier Plamondon’s campaign promise, Montreal mayor Soraya Martínez Ferrada announced the opening of “nine warming centres [equipped with beds] across seven boroughs.” This could be significant not only in mitigating the effects of “cold snaps” on the unhoused population, but also in serving as gateways to other social services and aid. Examples of this are the Canadian Red Cross centres in Ville Saint-Laurent and Plateau-Mont-Royal, and the Centre des femmes de convictions de Montréal, which is opening a new warming shelter in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie exclusively for unhoused women.

While the provincial government of Quebec has announced they will provide financial aid for warming centres in Montreal, the opening of these centres is conditional on the recruitment of operating organizations and staff, and on communication with residents around the designated centres. In the meantime, there are several actions Montreal residents can take to support the unhoused population this upcoming winter.

One way to help street outreach teams is to stay informed about local warming centres on the City of Montreal’s website and by calling 311 to “inquire about these centres and report sanitation issues.” Additionally, one can donate clothes and winter gear, either directly to unhoused individuals or through an organization such as Chez Doris, Angels of Mercy, or Mission Old Brewery. Donating non-perishable goods or volunteering at soup kitchens and food banks like Moisson Montreal are other ways to get involved. Closer to campus, students may choose to volunteer on cleanup crews or donate hygiene products at The Open Door Montreal drop-in centre on Parc Avenue. Concerning actionable steps on campus, students can support McGill’s annual fundraising for the Centraide Campaign, an initiative to combat food insecurity and the housing crisis. While donations can be made directly through the Centraide of Greater Montreal website, McGill is hosting fundraising events for the organization. Returning this year is the second annual Pet Photo Contest, with a cash submission fee to participate and/or vote —voting is open from November 15 until December 13.

Ultimately, while increased government funding does not provide a permanent solution to the structural conditions surrounding unhoused individuals, this financial initiative can be strengthened by partnering with local efforts in and around our campus. These government measures complement pre-existing aid organizations and services — keeping people warm this winter is the immediate goal, while combating food insecurity and the housing crisis is the long-term objective.

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In an essay opposing the Canada-US Free Trade agreement of 1987, writer Margaret Atwood wrote “Canada as a separate but dominant country has done about as well under the US as women, worldwide, have done under men; about the only position they’ve adopted toward us, country to country, has been the missionary position, and we were not on top.” Notably, Atwood expressed similar ideas in her 1972 guide to Canadian literature Survival, in which she posits Canada as a metaphorical rape victim of the United States. Exposed to Atwood’s writings in lecture this past week, I was shocked at their continued applicability. As the trade war between the two nations continues to make headlines, and Trump himself faces new sexual assault allegations, I start to see that Atwood was on to something very real and continuously relevant.

On October 25, at a campaign rally in Port Huron, Michigan, Trump said the trade war would end “soon.” Trade with Canada has been one of the Republicans’ sorest spots in the polls, and an issue that many American voters have at the forefront of their minds as they head into the upcoming midterm elections. A Pew study in July 2026 found that 60 per cent of Americans disapproved of tariff increases, while only 37 per cent approved. At the campaign rally in Michigan, Trump described Canada as “willing to give us anything at this moment.” This past summer Trump also said, “We don’t need anything that Canada has…but they need everything that we have.” The note of sexual dominance in Trump’s language is palpable here.

While Trump’s history of sexual assault remains either a point of indifference or disillusionment for many of his followers, it has never had nearly as large an impact on Trump’s popularity as any economic policy he has implemented. It is public knowledge that 28 women have accused Trump of sexual assault or rape since the 1970s into the 2010s; including his first wife Ivana, who claimed in their 1989 divorce deposition that he had physically and sexually assaulted her, and writer E. Jean Carroll, to whom Trump was found liable for $5 million in sexual abuse and defamation damages in 2023, and another $83.3 million in further defamation charges in 2024. Trump is also accused of significant involvement in Epstein’s child trafficking network, with sources such as CBC reporting that his name is mentioned at least 1,500 times in the initial files, and sources including The New York Times reporting this figure as being closer to 38,000, when the search terms were extended.

Many of us have also seen the abhorrent video from Access Hollywood in 2005 in which Trump says, “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women… I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy.” As uncomfortable as it is to contend with this quote, when read closely, it bears uncanny resemblance to Trump’s ways of speaking about Canada. The American President views both women and Canada as fragile, weak, boundaryless, belonging to him, for his ravaging. Trump has shown us time and time again that he simultaneously views women’s bodies as property for his taking and he views Canada as a geographic version of the same thing: his for the taking, on his terms.

Not only in Trump’s language of abuse, but also in his language of minimization and retaliatory disparagement, can we draw parallels. In December of 2024, as tensions and counter-tariffs rose from Canada (we were, it turned out, not the pushover he had expected), Trump began referring to former PM Justin Trudeau on occasion as “Governor Trudeau.” This demeaning nickname hauntingly mirrors Trump’s behaviour towards the women he wishes to discredit. Historically, the American President has responded to accusations of sexual assault by refuting the alleged-victim’s attractiveness, and thus claiming a lack of interest. When journalist Natasha Stoynoff alleged that Trump had pushed her against a wall and forcibly kissed her in 2005, the President was quoted as saying “[t]ake a look. Look at her. Look at her words. And you tell me what you think. I don’t think so.” When Jessica Leeds claimed that Trump had violently molested her in the first class cabin of a 1970s flight, Trump called this “fiction,” adding that “[b]elieve me, she would not be my first choice. That I can tell you.” Though these acts of minimization may seem to exist in separate spheres, I see Trump’s intentions as one and the same. Any one who publicly challenges his violence and/or his attempts at control is to be met with degradation and humiliation. Trump gets what he wants, or else he pretends it was not worth wanting in the first place. We can also draw parallels between sexual violence and geo-political menace in the narratives which Trump weaves around his victims, wherein he positions himself as the injured party. At this same campaign rally in Port Huron, Trump claimed that for years, Canada had been “ripping” the U.S. “off” via trade. In September, Trump said “[Canadian] leaders have taken advantage of our stupid leadership for many, many years. They felt emboldened….They act like they’re totally innocent. They’re not. They were very bad. But now they’re being taught a little lesson.” In a similar vein, Trump repeatedly describes his female assault victims as attention seekers set on destroying his reputation. Of E. Jean Carroll, Trump said in 2019, “Shame on those who make up false stories of assault to try to get publicity for themselves, or sell a book, or carry out a political agenda.”

As we have seen, there appears to be no video that can resurface, no picture that can be released, no assault Trump can commit on women that can seriously affect him in the polls. It is not a lack of information, but rather a complete and utter lack of integrity on the part of his supporters. There would be no logic in these women trying to destroy Trump with made-up claims – it does not work. They have no motive other than justice. You do not get praise and fame for accusing one of the most powerful men in the world of sexual assault. E. Jean Caroll understands this all too well. In her memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, Caroll wrote, “[w]hy I haven’t I come forward before now?…Receiving death threats, being driven from my home.. .only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten and attack… doesn’t sound like much fun.”

As certain tariffs on paper and machinery products from Canada recently rolled back, and Trump makes promises of the end of the trade war, his fear of losing his grip on his domestic political standing in the midterms is palpable. I only wish Trump’s fear was as palpable in response to a proportionate backlash towards his sexual misconduct — a backlash that never manifested into something strong enough to truly frighten him, reinforcing Trump’s belief that women are his for the taking with limited consequences, if any. Atwood argues that Canadian culture is steeped in its victimhood as a result of America’s economic and cultural domination, which in turn fosters a culture of artistic freedom. What art will future generations be producing, what culture is fostered in America, where women watch their rapist elected into power? Both Canadians and women at large have a history of finding cultural roots in defending one’s self, but we also deserve the liberty to find cultural roots that are not rooted in the violence perpetrated against us. Our lives, our culture, our words deserve to be defined by more than our victimhood.

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On October 23, Beth Lew-Williams, professor of history and director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University, won the 2026 prize for her book John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law. Lew-Williams’ work was chosen from a pool of almost 400 international submissions, making the eight-book shortlist in September before earning top honours. Jonathan Cheng of The Wall Street Journal and Alexander Lee of The University of Warwick were named as the year’s two finalists.

Also on October 23, before the allocation of the awards, all three writers spoke in the Cundill Forum at McGill’s Thomson House, where the Daily was in attendance. Moderated by McGill History and Classical Studies professor Jeremy Tai, the discussion explored the motivating research questions and resulting discoveries key to the three books in competition. The Forum formed part of the October 22-23 Cundill History Prize Festival, which also featured a lecture by previous winner Lyndal Roper for her book Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War, the student-organized Cundill Fringe, and the awards ceremony.

During the forum, Lew-Williams explained that John Doe Chinaman began with questions about everyday life. After researching anti-Chinese violence and immigration restrictions in the 19th century American West, she realized how much was not known about the specifics of Chinese immigrant life in America. Could they enter a barbershop, for example? Where could they sit in a segregated theatre? These were things she did not know. “I wanted to understand the racial norms, the rules of everyday life,” she explained.

This line of questioning led to a shift in research, moving from her previous focus on American border restrictions faced by Chinese immigrants to studying the laws that governed those who successfully became residents. Combining a review of trial transcripts from the 1850s to the 1920s with digital research, she identified more than 5,000 discriminatory laws. Machine learning helped locate potential legislation, but she personally reviewed approximately 9,000 matches to determine their relevance.

Lew-Williams also turned to trial transcripts containing testimony from Chinese immigrants for research. From this angle, she was able to uncover a more personal side of the story. Despite restrictions on Chinese testimony, Lew-Williams found that some immigrants had managed to leave behind anonymity-defying accounts in the historical record. “When you’re given only fragments, you learn to make the best of them,” she said.

As a part of his discussion moderation, Tai asked the finalists to share the story of someone who stood out in their research. For her part, Lew-Williams introduced Ruby Tsang, a Chinese-American woman who filed a lawsuit in 1916 in order to challenge segregation at a theatre in Reno, Nevada. In response, the theatre threatened to lobby for segregation-permitting legislation, and Tsang subsequently withdrew her case. “[T]his is not a story where she triumphs in the end and desegregates all the theatres in Nevada,” Lew-Williams explained, but in her eyes that makes Tsang’s story all the more important. “[W]e get a sense of [the] pushback that those in power, state governments, ha[d] against Chinese communities.”

In the official winner announcement, Emily Greenwood, chair of the jury and a professor of classics at Harvard University, described the book as “a dazzlingly innovative and hard-hitting work.” She highlighted its combination of data analysis and storytelling to recover Chinese voices obscured in legal and bureaucratic records.

Fellow panelist and finalist Alexander Lee described a similar challenge of working with fragments in writing his book The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews. He argued that scholarship often separates Jewish residents’ experiences from the surrounding Christian society, “as if the ghetto’s walls were also built around the archives.”

With his book, Lee examined how the Venice Jewish community’s position was continually negotiated. Alongside persecution, his account considers the relationships and institutions through which residents sustained community. He described studying architecture, commerce, and domestic space to understand experiences that government records alone could not capture.

Jonathan Cheng, the third co-panellist and other Cundhill Prize finalist, was honoured for his work, Korean Messiah: Kim II Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, about the intersections of religious influence and political power through a history of North Korea’s founding Kim family.

This project, Cheng explained, grew from his own curiosity about the Kim family’s Christian background, beginning as a newspaper article but eventually becoming the 768-page book in question. Cheng relied on missionary diaries and correspondence, alongside critically-examined North Korean publications, to investigate connections between Kim Il Sung’s upbringing and the political system that the leader established. “It is about personality cults. It is about the blending of politics and religion,” Cheng said.

When the panel discussion turned to the contemporary significance of these respective histories, Lew-Williams highlighted the continuing influence of nineteenth-century anti-Chinese legal cases on immigrants’ rights. Cheng, for his part, discussed the intertwining of politics and religion across contemporary societies. Lee cautioned that prejudice can persist by changing its form, even as historical circumstances differ.

Lee also emphasized the importance of empathy in historical research. “We seek to put ourselves in their shoes, to see what they saw, to feel what they felt, to know their hopes and fears,” he told the audience. Together, the three books show how recovering personal accounts and stories can deepen our understanding of the laws, communities, and political systems that shape history.

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In 2025, Netflix released psychological crime drama Adolescence, a British TV series that would change the way we think about the manosphere, online incel culture, and its implications on contemporary misogyny. The story, set in South Yorkshire, follows the arrest of a 13-year- old boy on suspicion of murdering his female classmate after she rejected his romantic advances. Each episode is shot in one take, inviting us into the story in its entirety; every moment of silence, every improvised line, every facial expression brings us closer to the feeling that we are there in the room, with those characters — whether we like it or not.

The story of Adolescence did not come from nowhere. Rather, it was a response to the frequent cases of gender-related knife crimes occurring in the United Kingdom. This included the murder of Ava White, a 12-year- old girl in Liverpool who was stabbed by her 14-year-old schoolmate Harry Gilbertson following an argument over a Snapchat video. He was given a minimum sentence of 13 years, while the three other boys involved in the incident were released without charge. Elianne Andam, a fifteen-year- old student from Croydon, London, who aspired to be a human rights lawyer, was stabbed to death by her friend’s seventeen-year-old ex- boyfriend during the couple’s breakup . Noticing these cases, Adolescence screenwriter Stephen Graham wanted to find out what was behind this terrifying “male rage” responsible for the deaths of innocent young girls, remarking “this kind of thing didn’t happen when I was a young lad.”

Surprisingly, the term “incel” (short for “involuntary celibate”) was actually coined by a female university student in Toronto who wanted to create a community for people who had difficulty forming romantic or sexual relationships. Her website, Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project, was founded in 1997 and was open to people of all genders and sexual orientations. As her own dating life improved, she stopped maintaining the website and passed it on to someone else. It was only in the mid-2000s that the “incel” discourse came to be dominated by men. Men who felt resentful about their lack of romantic and sexual experience and who chose to displace the blame onto women. Following the tragic Isla Vista attacks of 2014, in which 22-year-old Elliot Rodger murdered six people in the vicinity of a sorority house to “punish” all women for rejecting him, the creator of the “incel” term expressed regret for the way her project had become tragically misinterpreted. She compared herself to “a scientist who invented something that ended up [becoming] a weapon of war.”

Later in the 2000s, incel communities thrived on online platforms like Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and Gab. They also turned to the dark web for their more insidious communications which included planning and promoting gender-related murders and attacks. Today, popular online figures within the manosphere movement include Andrew Tate, Sneako, Clavicular and Vox Day, as well as anti-feminist women like Hannah Pearl Davis, who claims that divorce should be banned and that men have the “right” to watch porn if they don’t want their marriages to fail. Violence linked to incel culture and the manosphere h a s killed as many as 50 people in the US and Canada, and more in the UK and Germany. In Canada, the first time that a court made a finding of incel-motivated terrorist activity was in 2023, following 17-year-old Oguzhan Sert’s brutal murder of a female receptionist in 2020. He had written a note reading “Long Live The Incel Rebellion” prior to the attack and used abusive language during the murder, calling the woman a “whore” and repeating “die, die, die.”

McGill University students who were interviewed on the topic in my own investigation expressed mixed knowledge about such incidents; 100 per cent of women interviewed were aware of both incel culture and cases of incel-related violence, compared to only 60 per cent of male interviewees. One male student noted the existence of different types of incel figures online, including “looksmaxxers” who encourage young men to undergo unsafe cosmetic procedures or take steroids as a measure to attract women. Most students attributed the rise of these cases to online trends and cultures. However, students also acknowledged that whilst this particular form of misogyny is relatively new, extreme incidences of gender-based violence, femicide and misogynistic ideologies have been around since the beginning of time. A particularly poignant example is the École Polytechnique massacre of 1989, in which fourteen women were shot in a savage anti-feminist attack. Perhaps what is most shocking is the return of such heinous instances during an age of supposed progressivism. When asked if they view these cases as a personal threat to themselves, 100 per cent of female students said yes, while 100 per cent of male students said no. One male student stated “I’ve never read an article in the news and thought, ‘this is a personal threat to me.’”

Recognizing these cases as nothing short of wicked and pernicious acts of violence against young girls and women, and treating them as such in court and beyond, is essential to combatting the normalization of incel culture. Former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer praised the Adolescence series, welcoming Netflix’s initiative to make the drama available for free screening in secondary schools and in parliament. The UK has incorporated potential incel radicalization into its national counter-extremist monitoring program, “Prevent,” but has not yet categorized severe incel attacks as terrorism (the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation concluded that its current legal definition of terrorism is broad enough without needing a new category specifically targeting incel-related attacks.) Meanwhile, Canadian authorities have prosecuted incel-linked attacks, such as the Oguzhan Sert case, under terrorism legislation, and Public Safety Canada announced over $25 million in funding to deal with radicalisation and incel- related violence. The US government recognizes incel extremism as a single-issue motivator to terrorism, but has historically treated cases as hate crimes rather than terrorism. Legally, then, Canada has taken the most steps toward treating incel- motivated violence as the destructive and harmful crime it is.

It is one thing to enforce legal consequences for incel-related violence, and another to prevent it in the first place. In this respect, the UK has taken the most effective measures in implementing anti- radicalization measures into its national curriculum. Schools are mandated to teach students about incel culture, as well as the links between pornography and misogyny and what constitute positive conceptions of both femininity and masculinity. Canada and the US, meanwhile, lack national equivalents, and responses tend to be fragmented across provinces and states. NGO White Ribbon offers free online training for teachers in Canada, but this alone is not sufficient. As one McGill interviewee said in my investigation, sexist and misogynistic tendencies “sadly start young,” making proper education and the prevention of these ideologies in the classroom crucial. Of course, any number of factors can contribute to harmful ideologies, from a particularly influential older brother to a humiliating romantic rejection. But the influence of the environment in which children spend at least six hours a day in must not be understated.

Spreading wider awareness, implementing effective prevention mechanisms, and passing strict legislation and proper online regulation are all steps governments must take to deal with this relatively new phenomena. These girls and women, many of them students, had futures full of possibility. Yet they were made victims of brutal misogynistic murder for the crime of their very existence. They should be remembered and honoured through real efforts at change.

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Content warning: brief mentions of fictional violence

I will preface this article with a disclaimer: I’m not a horror movie fan. I haven’t seen Obsession or The Shining or almost any other horror movie you could name. I don’t usually enjoy them. I do, however, like video games, and all of my self-granted authority to write on the recent Resident Evil movie adaptation — Resident Evil (2026), directed by Zach Cregger — comes from the fact that I have played the games and enjoyed them very much.

Cregger is a rising star in the horror cinema world, with previous hits like Barbarians (2022) and Weapons (2025) arriving to commercial and critical acclaim (from what I understand of the plot, “Resident Evil” would have been a good title for Weapons, but that’s just my opinion). But even with his experience, it was a risk for Cregger to take on adapting the Resident Evil games for the big screen, as no previous Resident Evil film adaptation had ever seen commercial or critical success among the game’s fanbase or wider audience.

The Resident Evil game franchise, developed by the company Capcom in 1996 is a survival-horror game franchise from Japan. It was originally named “Biohazard” in Japanese; that trademark wasn’t available in the US and the English name came from a company-wide naming contest. The classic game series largely follows the stories of various survivors of an out-of-control biological weapon developed by the shadowy Umbrella Corporation. Protagonists fight mutated and virus-infected organisms in post-urban environments ranging from police stations to ruined cities to supposedly abandoned mansions — all with limited resources (most crucially, ammunition). Cregger’s movie sidesteps a lot of the wider game lore and doesn’t follow the storyline of any one game, opting instead to amalgamate elements from different games across the series. The movie focuses on what’s at the very core of the franchise: the gory, science-gone-rogue body horror that defined its essential style and gave rise to the survival horror genre. This has allowed the Resident Evil movie to remain relatively accessible to the wider public while giving a nod to the game’s fanbase — a rarely-achieved balance.

Cregger’s risk has paid off. Resident Evil premiered in Los Angeles on September 15 and was released to the general public on September 18. At the time of writing, it has grossed $216 million globally through the box office alone, with opening weekend pulling in $108 million worldwide against the film’s $75 million production budget. It’s the first Resident Evil movie to cross the $100 million threshold domestically. The film was equally successful among critics and viewers, earning a 96 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the highest rated video-game-turned-movie adaptation ever. It garnered critical praise for the actors’ performances, its faithfulness to in-game elements, and its use of the fear factor.

The film kicks off with an opening shot of the main character from behind, invoking the perspective of a third-person video game. The audience is introduced to Bryan (Austin Abrams), a meek courier who delivers organs to hospitals. Bryan is contracted for double pay to deliver a high-priority package to the isolated Raccoon City, a task he uses to avoid a difficult conversation with his pregnant girlfriend. On his way into the city, however, he is waylaid by aggressive mutated beings… and so the nightmare begins.

Bryan isn’t an actual character in any of the games, but the fact that he is just an ordinary person makes him feel similar to most of the Resident Evil protagonists. Instead of featuring larger-than-life heroic characters, multiple games in the franchise, such as Resident Evil: Biohazard and Resident Evil: Village put the player into the position of regular people thrust into horrific scenarios. One of the major recurring characters across the game series, Leon S. Kennedy, starts out as a police rookie before becoming trained as a skilled federal agent.

The movie itself plays out much like a video game, and players of the franchise will catch several easter eggs. A scene in which Bryan explores rooms in a farmhouse is reminiscent of the Baker property in Resident Evil: Biohazard, and the overall feeling of the exploration mechanics occur in all of the games. His painstaking accumulation of bullets is a task all players are familiar with, and the inclusion of a
room with a typewriter is a nod to one of the old game save mechanisms in the original Resident Evil games. Other details include Bryan’s green courier box (resembling the healing kits in the games) and the voice message he records for his girlfriend (making reference to similar messages players can recover from deceased characters in the game’s environment).

Cinematographically, the film is also shot to mimic the feeling of playing the video games. The camera is often angled towards what Bryan is looking at through over-the-shoulder third-person shots, or creating tension through first-person perspectives (a fair amount of Resident Evil gamers play in VR; a friend of mine who tried it said he couldn’t bring himself to open the doors in the game). The soundtrack features ominous pulsing tones that reflect the unsettling scenes and environments, suggesting stress to the audience and intensifying the atmosphere of danger. The jumpscares, ever present in any horror media, are effective and well- executed. The movie is also unapologetic in its depiction of survival. Bryan is forced to make harrowing choices in his quest to deliver the package, including blowing the head off of a mutated child to defend his own life. As the movie goes on, Bryan faces progressively stronger and more dangerous enemies, and at one point exclaims, “I only use guns in video games… it’s confusing in real life!”

Abrams is phenomenal in his role. He embodies an appropriate level of sheer terror at his situation, mixed with disgust, disbelief, and an occasional comedic relief that brings much needed levity to the film. His facial expressions are particularly relatable and funny, especially when he displays shock at having done something ludicrous or encountering a new monster. The real stars of the movie, in a way, are the monsters: morbidly obese sewer dwellers, acid spewers, and otherwise mutated creatures. Some of the monsters are recognizable from the Resident Evil game titles, but most are new creations by creature-design legend Shane Mahan and his company Legacy Effects. Inspired by past game installments, they’re skilfully designed to inspire terror through their behaviour, movements, and most critically appearances, amping up the core body-horror element of Resident Evil to the maximum.

Thematically, the film’s main message is about how delaying change will only worsen the bill when it comes time to pay. But I didn’t go to a Resident Evil movie for its moral messaging, and I doubt anyone else did either. The movie isn’t meant as an analysis of community like Weapons is — here, narrative depth isn’t the point. Instead, the blend of action and progression with game-reminiscent cinematography produces a devoted love letter to one of the greatest game franchises of all time. In my opinion, the strongest meaning lies in the film’s title. What makes Resident Evil truly terrifying is that the title implies that what you’re dealing with isn’t some far-off threat, or abstract eldritch horror or magic. Titles like The Last of Us are bleak, while The Walking Dead gets straight to the point but sounds kind of funny, and It is ominous. The name makes it known that the threat is inside your house, so to speak, and emerging from the mundane, which raises the scare factor exponentially.

While avoiding spoilers, the conclusion of the movie — although paced alarmingly quickly to the point of feeling rushed — I found to be appropriate considering Bryan’s character and the elements of the games that Cregger chose to focus on. Of course, you’ll have to go and watch it yourself to form your own opinion on it. It also leaves the door open for a sequel, though no statements on that have been made. I personally think that ending the series with this most recent movie wouldn’t be a bad decision, but if other directors choose to follow in Cregger’s footsteps, some good could definitely come of it. The only way to find out is to keep playing.

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For McGill students, the solution to these qualms comes in the form of a website, with shrouded origins and a dead-simple user experience, called Seat Alert.

Seat Alert, for the shrinking minority that has never heard of it, is a service that notifies students when free spaces open in full courses or their waitlists. Using Seat Alert is a straightforward process that involves paying two dollars to receive text updates as spots open in a class you’re interested in. Because of the demand for certain classes at McGill, that notice is crucial. If at the start of the year you hear a text chime at the library followed by rabid typing, that person probably just got a Seat Alert.

Despite its growing presence on campus, the history of the website remains obscure; some peers I spoke to even thought it was an official McGill website. The interface, anachronistically simple at a time when anyone can build a glitzy website in one or two AI prompts, stands out. The website gives one nod to its origin at its very bottom: the name Ethan McAuliffe, in small print.

To learn more about the story of Seat Alert, and why it looks so unique on the internet today, I decided to give him a call. As it turns out, the complete lack of ads, branding, or any commercial zeal isn’t an accident. Ethan has it exactly as he wants it.

Ethan is from Toronto, and began as a student at McMaster in 2018, where he completed a joint degree in engineering and business. In 2021, as COVID-19 put school online, Ethan opted instead to do a co-op, one of many during his degree. During this time, he found himself driving his sister and her friends to their university of choice — McGill — for the start of term. On the road, the topic of course selection and how difficult it was to get the schedule you wanted came up. A friend in the car then mentioned a service called Get A Seat, where McGill students could pay to be notified when space in a class opened up. This type of service was new to Ethan as nothing like it was offered at McMaster; but was one that he knew would be appreciated, especially given the lack of waitlists at his school. Ethan, armed with the necessary technical abilities, decided to build a similar website for McMaster.

The service was a quick hit, spread only by word of mouth. In time, while McMaster remained the most active hub, Ethan expanded the service to Laurier and other schools, though Seat Alert is now no longer offered at them. Despite having connections at McGill, there was no need for his service here; it remained Get A Seat’s territory, and Ethan didn’t strike me as the Machiavellian type. During this time, Ethan reached out to the creator of the service looking for advice on how to grow his own, but never got a response.

It remained this way until 2023, when Ethan received an email from a student at McGill inquiring about whether he had any plans to spread Seat Alert to Montreal. Get A Seat had shut down, he was told, supposedly because of a routing issue. Ethan figured out how to fix the error and launched his service at McGill that same year. At the start, it was free for McGill students as Ethan expected more errors to come and didn’t feel that charging people during that time was good practice. He also knew that a free service would spread quickly — and it did just that. He attributed this to a market in need, and Seat Alert showing up as the first result when anyone searched for the now-defunct Get A Seat. To get the word out further, Ethan also posted on the McGill subreddit and got his sister to spread the word to friends. He didn’t pay for any marketing, and instead focused on making something that worked reliably.

As his service expanded, so too did the security procedures enacted by many of the schools where Seat Alert was used. Many of them started to require a secure login to be able to access the class information. This is why Seat Alert is no longer available outside of McMaster and McGill, where secure logins aren’t required. With AI posing new risks to institutions’ cybersecurity, this could soon change.

I asked Ethan about the possibility of hiring students with secure logins at these defunct schools to gather the necessary information. Ethan had thought about it, but an experience he’d had in the early days of Seat Alert, where he was called into McMaster’s IT department and questioned about what he was doing, deterred him from putting other students at risk of disciplinary action in this way. Looking at past student-focused startups, his worries aren’t unfounded. OneClass was a startup founded by students at the University of Toronto in 2010, that allowed students to share course notes and lecture materials online. It grew quickly and raised venture capital, but at the expense of its own reputation and certain copyright laws. In 2016, it was issued a cease-and-desist by the University of Waterloo and in 2020 it was fined $100,000 by the Canadian government. The startup has since ceased operations.

Ethan has now graduated from McMaster, and has been working on other projects since then, with Seat Alert covering costs in the background. When I asked if Seat Alert could ever be his full-time job, Ethan laughed and responded that the revenue was far lower than I must think.

I followed up by asking him why he wouldn’t increase the price by even a dollar — a 50 per cent increase in revenue that I didn’t think would deter many students from using the service. He responded that with rising costs related to running the automated texts that are core to the service, he may soon be forced to. Barring this, he didn’t think it would be fair to raise prices arbitrarily in order to make a greater profit. This is what interested me most about Ethan: his idealism and complete lack of self-interest in the face of a culture that values prestige and profit above all else.

Undeterred, I asked him about bundling, which would let users buy alerts for multiple classes at once. This would lower the cut of revenue that Stripe (the online payment platform he uses) takes from each order. He agreed with the principle of this idea, but felt that it might ruin the simplicity that makes the site so user-friendly. Bundling would mean introducing accounts, which require emails and passwords, and storage, which is expensive. I also asked him about waitlist intelligence, an additional service that could tell people how quickly spots typically opened up in a class. He hadn’t thought about it, but was interested in it.

As a big fan of David Fincher’s The Social Network, I found myself during parts of our conversation comparing Ethan to Mark Zuckerberg, who, in his pre-Facebook life, had made a website that showed the courses a user’s friends were taking. Their motivations both centred around making tools they themselves wanted, and both prioritized speed and simplicity for the user. However, this is where the similarities ended. Ethan appears to lack the greed and unsettling guile that has made Zuckerberg a persona non grata the world over. More importantly, Ethan sounds cool. He’s easy-going and doesn’t take himself very seriously, even when being asked about a business he created. At this point in our call — with me pressing him to raise prices on a service for students in need — I was in fact the Zuckerberg, which wasn’t a great feeling. Ethan, as aware of this as I, laughed and said that if he implemented a price hike, he’d be putting me down as the person who had recommended it.

Despite his idealism, or perhaps because of it, Seat Alert has been growing at a pace of about 5 per cent per term for the past two years, according to Ethan. Even so, Ethan has doubts as to whether he’ll pursue it much longer, given other projects on his horizon and his distaste for web development. He clarified that this would just mean taking a further step back from it, and not shutting it down completely unless he is forced to.

I’m confident that Seat Alert will remain reliable, regardless of how deep Ethan’s involvement remains. The website’s continued success is a good reminder to all of us that not everything in life or in business must be made with growth and profit margins in mind. In the end, simplicity and honesty prevail in making the world, course selection included, better. If I’m wrong, or if Ethan cedes control to me, be ready: price hikes incoming.

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From the dark of the stage, theatre artist esi callender speaks: “Slave Play is a comedy of sorts. It should be playedas such. I’m not sure where the music is coming from, but it’s there. You should not work to make the audience comfortable with what they are witnessing at all.” And so began Black Theatre Workshop’s (BTW) Montreal reading of Jeremy O’Harris‘ highly controversial Slave Play.

In its original 2019 run on Broadway, Slave Play riled audiences and critics. In one talkback with the director, for example, an audience member rose from the crowd and shouted to air her grievances about the piece. The play, she claimed, was just “a whole bunch of stuff about how white people don’t get how racist they are.” Not all agreed with this perspective, however. Despite Slave Play’s ability to provoke, or perhaps because of it, many critics celebrated the work for its bold approach in confronting the historical legacies of slavery that persist within interracial relationships.

The title Slave Play is a double entendre; representing both the play’s discussion of slavery and its use of play in the bedroom to explore those legacies. Act I sees three couples roleplaying as an enslaved woman and her overseer, a white mistress and a mixed-race man, and an enslaved man and an indentured servant, respectively. Featuring brown-skinned dildos, slur-filled dirty talk, and incendiary slave-master power play, the first act thrusts (pun intended)uncomfortable stereotypes about Black people onto the audience, to show that they subtly persist within everyday life.

Act II arrives with a twist. Titled “Process,” this portion of the performance is interrupted by two therapists, who emerge from the crowd. These therapists reveal to the audience that, all along, the couples have been participants in a group therapy project known as “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy: A RADICAL therapy designed to help Black partners reengage intimately with white partners from whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure.”

The conversations that follow are both hilarious, and deeply psychoanalytical. Characters fight, cry, and plead with one another as they explore their desires in their relationships, as well as their desires in relation to their identities. At the Montreal reading of Slave Play on October 24, audience members were laughing, clapping and even interjecting. I heard one person yell “Oh shit” from the crowd.

Beneath the comedy, of course, the weight of the subjectmatter endures. Being Black in the United States, where the historical and continued oppression of Black people pervades daily life, is not so easy, especially when non-Black loved ones cannot understand this experience.

As complicated and painful the themes are in Slave Play, writer O’Harris also weaves in a sublime wit. His stage directions are poetic. Music is ubiquitous. Love is the premise. None of the characters would be in therapy if it weren’t for the care they had for their partner. What the play argues, then, is that care and romantic love in the United States is inextricable from its history of slavery.

Slave Play is a part of BTW’s series of readings titled tête-à-tête, which invite viewers to engage in conversation with theatre. Rather than put on a main stage show, BTW produces three readings of plays which might otherwise not be shown due to cast size or controversy. Alongside these readings, BTW also hosts pre-show conversations, in collaboration with Concordia University’s Black Community Engagement Office and University of the Streets Cafe. The goal is to bring private tensions into public discourse and ask new questions.

In an interview with the Daily, artistic Director Dian Marie Bridges explains that in running Slave Play, she wanted to “really question why do we do theater? Why are these plays important? What gives people an incentive to come to theatre? What is the role of art in the Black community? …That comes down to community. That comes down to conversation.”

O’Harris is equally interested in these questions. In his documentary about the making of the play, Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play, he states that Pornhub created a map of the most popular porn per state, where “ebony and lesbian porn were the top porn in New York.” O’Harris continues: “[I]f all you people are going home and watching this in your secret little rooms and then also like, you know, voting for Obama but like saying the N-word when you hear a Kendrick Lamar song [when] you’re all alone…I want to play with all of those aspects in this room because like, I know you can handle it because you do at home…so let’s see you handle it here.”

This is the sentiment of tête-à-tête. Bridges tells the Daily that part of the reason why she programmed Slave Play was because she “wanted to see if we were ready for it [Slave Play], if we could have a conversation about it.” So what kind of conversations emerge from Slave Play? What does it mean to show Slave Play in Montreal?

For Bridges, “Slave Play as therapy really speaks to the psychological impact of slavery on [America]…It’s a different relationship [in Montreal].”

At the talkback following the show this weekend, audience members were curious about actors’ relationship to their characters. They asked questions such as, “Did you take your role seriously?” and “Was it difficult to play a character with trauma that might parallel your own?”

Perhaps these questions demonstrate that despite not being in the United States, we all have something to take away from the intrinsic complexities of race and traumatic history within our identities and how they affect our relationships. Or that as the stage directions declare, “Everything in life is a performance.”

Whether ugly, beautiful, explicit, poetic, or painful, language is the power that shapes us all. It can poke at us, hang over us, or give us a voice. Slave Play plays with all of these factors, highlighting how conversation is where we can make sense of it all.

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There is something particularly disturbing in hearing someone admit to celebrating acts of violence. Even more unsettling: learning that this same violence was treated as a routine aspect of military life. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, NAZA (2026) examines Israel’s genocide in Gaza through the testimonies of its very perpetrators. The particular success of the documentary, then, lies not only in what it reveals, but also in the shocking reality of who reveals it.

NAZA features interviews with 24 ex-Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel, who confess their military experiences and explain the systems behind attacks on Gaza. While the interviewees remain anonymous — their faces are hidden in shadow and their voices have been altered to protect their identities — the accounts of violence which they share are painfully detailed. That the filmmakers allow the subjects to speak for themselves is also effective; their testimony tells a story more unsettling than any other narration could likely achieve.Then there ist he staging of the interviews themselves. Abraham chose to conduct his interviews on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, filming the shadowy participants against the backdrop of the illuminated city. The darkness of their admissions is thus foregrounded and unsettlingly contrasted by the bright, ordinary urban life which spreads out behind them. Perhaps the most horrifying moments come when former soldiers describe how little remorse they felt for their actions. Some recall celebrating attacks alongside their comrades. One interviewee remembers that “it was fun” and compares the experience to playing a video game. This comparison becomes even more disturbing when the film explains the meaning behind its title.

‘Naza’ is an Israeli military term referring to expected civilian casualties. As one former soldier explains, “You would not say ‘15 people have been killed,’ and certainly not ‘15 women and children have been killed.’ You say ‘15 Naza.’ Instead of acknowledging the deaths of civilians, the military terminology reduces them into an abstract quantity. This language turns the violent eradication ofentire families and communities intoroutine military procedure. The people being killed becomenumbers, obscuring the human consequences of military actions, even to those leading these attacks.

In a particularly poignant moment, one former soldier asks,“I still see theNazis as evil. But what does that mean I am?” His words reveal adisturbing contradiction between the condemnation of Nazi atrocities and the violence carried out against Palestinians. The Nazis are remembered for their cruel persecution, dehumanization, and the systematic murder of millions of people. Yet the soldier’s question forces him to confront the violence he took part in against another group of people. He questions the difference between the atrocities he condemns and his own actions. Another soldier is more blunt, and his confession is all the more horrifying. “Gaza is full of bodies,” he says “It’s not a grave, it’s a pit.”

Beyond the testimonies, one of NAZA’s most compelling features is its portrayal of Tel Aviv. Throughout the film, signs of Israeli propaganda appear in public spaces while people continue their daily lives. Businesses remain open, streets are busy, and ordinary routines continue, all the while the rooftop confessions speak of unthinkable violence. This creates an unsettling, almost uncanny feeling for the viewer; Palestinian suffering — less than a hundred kilometers away —is pushed aside in the public consciousness, but its ugly truth lurks in the shadows nonetheless. This contrast raises questions about collective responsibility, indifference, and the normalization of violence. While the interviews reveal military desensitization to violence, the footage of Tel Aviv asks viewers to consider the spread of these attitudes into the general populace.

NAZA also raises questions regarding testimony and credibility. Palestinian journalists have spent years documenting the destruction of Gaza, often while experiencing the very violence on which they are reporting. Many have been killed while doing their work. Yet their accounts have repeatedly been dismissed by Israeli officials. This is the most uncomfortable aspect of the documentary’s approach to portraying the violence in Gaza through the testimonies of Israeli soldiers; it is precisely through giving perpetrators of genocide a voice thatNAZA offers a perspective that isundeniably revealing. Unfortunately, it would seem that the words of those responsible for violence carry more weight than the words of those experiencing it.

Ultimately, NAZA invites a reflection in its viewers that extends far beyond the film’s final scenes. Through its unsettling personal approach, the work forces audiences to contend with questions of guilt, indoctrination, and perspective, as well as exposing horrifying truths of this continued genocide. The resulting film makes for an unsettling watch, but then again, if this were easy, such a work would not be needed in the first place.

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As Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Curry embodied a flamboyant, gender nonconforming character who defied conventional ideas of sexuality, masculinity, and self- respect. The film’s enduring cult following and its famous participatory midnight screenings have transformed it into more than a purely cinematic phenomenon: it has become a space where audiences continue to experiment with identity, celebrate their differences, and find community.

Parton’s influence, meanwhile, demonstrates how a mainstream icon can foster acceptance for the socially outcast through a different kind of cultural power. Rooted in country music and Southern traditions, she has time and time again chosen to use her wide-reaching appeal and gift for storytelling to bring LGBTQ+ experiences into the broader public consciousness. From writing and recording the original song “Travelin’ Thru” for Transamerica, a film centred around the exploration of transgender identity, to her unwavering public support for LGBTQ+ rights, Parton showed repeatedly throughout her career that compassion need not be constrained by such arbitrary divisions as who one is capable to love.

These two public personalities reveal how utilizing their massive cultural influence with deliberation can create transformational possibilities for people who rarely got to see themselves reflected with dignity in mainstream culture. Curry’s theatrical defiance makes space for experimentation, transformation, and the joy of refusing conventional labels; while Parton’s warmth, humour, and generosity demonstrate the power of extending that space through empathy and public advocacy. Neither legacy can be reduced to a single character, song, or statement — instead their significance lies in the ways their work continues to give audiences permission to envision lives and realities beyond any external expectation.

Tim Curry: The Power of Being Unapologetic

Few performances have become as inseparable from queer cultural history as Tim Curry’s in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. With glittering eyeshadow, towering platform heels, fishnet stockings, and an unapologetic appetite for pleasure, Curry transformed an unconventional sci-fi musical into a celebration of sexual liberation. Decades later, audiences still gather in theatres worldwide to recreate its scenes and sing along to its musical numbers. For LGBTQ+ audiences, Frank-N-Furter represented something rarely afforded to queer characters in mainstream entertainment: the leisure of extravagance. Curry’s legacy extends beyond a memorable performance — through Frank-N-Furter, he helped bring alternative expressions of gender and sexuality into the spotlight which challenged social norms. Adapted from Richard O’Brien’s 1973 stage musical, The Rocky Horror Picture Show follows wholesome American sweethearts Brad and Janet, whose encounter with the inhabitants of a mysterious mansion upends their conventional understanding of sexuality and desire.

At the centre of their surreal experience is Frank-N-Furter, a flamboyant scientist from the planet Transsexual whose androgynous appearance and uninhibited behaviour disrupt the couple’s carefully ordered world. The risk of taking on such a role was considerable. Frank-N-Furter required a bold performance, that of someone utterly unaffected by society’s traditional expectations of masculinity. Curry, however, was drawn to the challenge. Reflecting on the role, he explained being attracted to risk: “I would choose risky over anything. That’s the best way to be.” Although Brad and Janet technically occupy the roles of the protagonists, Frank-N-Furter commands the screen from the moment he first appears. His entrance and the ensuing performance of “Sweet Transvestite” establish a character who refuses to be diminished by convention. Curry plays him with a magnetic combination of theatricality, sensuality, humour, and a sense of danger making Frank-N-Furter simultaneously seductive and menacing. He does not merely challenge the rules — he makes breaking them look irresistible.

At the time of the film’s release, and for a few of the decades that followed, LGBTQ+ people were frequently relegated to limited or stereotypical portrayals in mainstream entertainment. The 1970s saw queer characters that would more often than not serve to provide comic relief, tragic storylines, or cautionary tales. Frank-N-Furter offered a striking alternative: a character whose gender expression and sexuality were central to the story, rather than details to be concealed. Through its camp aesthetics and exaggerated performances, Rocky Horror’s gleeful parody of existing sci-fi and horror conventions challenged audiences to reconsider the boundaries between masculinity and femininity; normalcy and deviance. Its irreverence managed to make challenging the tropes of the genre entertaining without stripping them of meaning.

Yet Frank-N-Furter is no straightforward hero. His story does not culminate in a celebration of any moral virtue, nor does his gender expression map neatly onto any single established LGBTQ+ identity. But that complexity is part of what makes Curry’s performance so compelling. Queer characters need not to be flawless in order to deserve representation. Allowing gender nonconforming characters to be morally ambiguous — even outright villainous — challenges the expectation that marginalized people must demonstrate some sort of exceptional goodness to justify their place on the silver screen. Frank-N-Furter’s outsize, monstrous exuberance can be read as a reflection of the historical association between queerness and deviance, but it can also be understood as a source of power. Rather than seeking acceptance by becoming “respectable,” Frank only ever takes pleasure in his
own excesses. His character invites audiences to consider whether being an outsider might be something more than a cause for shame. The film’s mantra, “Don’t dream it, be it,” distills that philosophy into a simple invitation: stop treating self- expression as an impossible fantasy…and begin embracing the person you want to become.

One of the most remarkable aspects of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, however, is the unique showgoing tradition that has developed around it. Screenings of Rocky Horror are rarely passive experiences: spectators often arrive in corsets, feather boas, leather jackets, formal gowns, and whatever else allows them to participate in the spectacle. They shout familiar lines, dance along, and watch live performers reenact the same scenes before the big screen. These gatherings have transformed a cult film into a living theatrical experience. For LGBTQ+ viewers, they can offer an opportunity to experiment with appearance and identity in an environment where unconventional self-expression is part of the celebration. O’Brien, the creator of Rocky Horror, has acknowledged the production’s impact on conversations about gender and sexuality. In an interview with The Guardian, he reflected on how the work had helped people feel less isolated, expressing gratitude for its wider social impact. More than five decades after its stage debut, Rocky Horror continues to demonstrate how a performance can challenge the most stringent of cultural expectations.

To reduce Curry’s career to a single role, however, would be to overlook the extraordinary range of his work. His performances demonstrate a particular gift for combining theatrical extravagance with mischievous humour. In Clue (1985), he cultivated an impeccable sense of comedic timing to the absurd and intrigue-driven murder mystery. As Pennywise in the 1990 television adaptation of Stephen King’s It, he brought to life a deeply unsettling villain whose lurking menace became unforgettable. He has also appeared as the Lord of Darkness in Legend, Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, and the concierge in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Across these performances, Curry added a fantastical feeling of glee to characters who disrupt ordinary life, always making room for the strange, the excessive, and the unexpected. That same sensibility is what connects his broader career to the spirit of Rocky Horror: a willingness to find delight in what convention tells us to reject.

The world has changed considerably since The Rocky Horror Picture Show first reached audiences: LGBTQ+ representation in film has expanded, and conversations about gender identity and sexuality have become considerably more visible. Yet acceptance remains uneven across social and cultural fields, and the freedom for people to express themselves freely cannot be taken for granted. The film remains meaningful because it celebrates the refusal to be confined by expectations: Frank-N-Furter is excessive, and impossible to contain. He does not ask permission to occupy space — he simply arrives and commands all attention. Curry was the one who brought the character to life, with a performance that was as mischievous as it was subversive. His portrayal helped turn what could’ve been a merely provocative stage creation into an enduring cultural icon, inspiring generations to question the boundaries around gender, sexuality, and self-expression. Yet what makes Curry’s performance so enduring is not simply that it challenged conventional ideas of gender and sexuality, but that it made defying those expectations look liberating. To me, that is part of what makes his legacy so meaningful to queer audiences.

Dolly Parton: A Voice for Belonging

Dolly Parton occupies an unusual place in North American pop culture. A country music superstar known for her rhinestone-studded outfits, towering blonde wigs, and unmistakable voice, she has long appealed to audiences even far outside her genre. Among her most devoted fans are disproportionately many LGBTQ+ people, for whom the meaning of her work extends beyond her music. Parton’s appeal to queer audiences begins with her public persona: her exaggerated femininity and ‘camp’ have made her a favourite among drag performers, who frequently recreate her signature looks. Parton has largely embraced these impersonations — in her appearance on the cover of Out magazine in 1997, she acknowledged her established place in the queer culture.

However, the connection goes deeper than rhinestones and wigs. Parton has spoken about being judged for her appearance and background, experiences that according to her have informed her empathy for groups who are treated as outsiders. Her 1971 song, “Coat of Many Colors,” recounts how children mocked her for wearing a coat sewn by her mother from scraps of fabric. Rather than presenting the coat as a source of shame, Parton celebrated the love behind it. For LGBTQ+ listeners, the song’s emotional logic can resonate with the experiences of bullying and rejection all too common in their childhoods. Parton has connected her appeal to queer audiences with her own experiences of feeling different, allowing listeners to find personal meaning in a story that was not explicitly written about queer identity. Others of her songs have acquired similar significance through reinterpretation — “Jolene,” with its intense focus on another woman’s beauty, has inspired numerous queer readings into its lyrics. Meanwhile her 1991 song “Family” more directly acknowledges differences that can occur among one’s relatives, including sexual orientation, while affirming that familial belonging should not be contingent on any sort of conformity on the part of the individual.

When Parton made her transition from country music into film and television, it only expanded her cultural reach into the queer community. Her move to Los Angeles brought her into partnership with Sandy Gallin, an influential talent manager who was openly gay. Their professional relationship helped expand her career into mainstream entertainment, including major film roles. Her 1980 debut role in
9 to 5, in which she stars alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, follows three women confronting workplace sexism and an exploitative boss, contributing to her appeal among audiences — often queer ones — drawn to narratives of resistance. In 2005, she wrote and performed “Travelin’ Thru” for Transamerica, a film about a transgender woman travelling across the United States. The song received an Academy Award nomination, and Parton performed it at the 2006 Oscars, bringing a story centred on the transgender experience to one of the entertainment industry’s most visible stages. She also explored queer family relationships in her 2019 Netflix anthology series, Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings. One episode follows a gay couple navigating family secrets and rejection around a New Year’s Eve wedding. Its recognition from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) highlighted the value of incorporating LGBTQ+ relationships into mainstream storytelling. Above all, these projects demonstrate how Parton translated her cultural influence into opportunities to underline queer narratives, placing stories that might otherwise have remained at the margins before much wider audiences.

Her support for the queer community became particularly evident during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when gay men were faced with widespread stigma, discrimination, and public rejection. Her production company, Sandollar Productions, co-produced Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, the landmark 1989 documentary about the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Her book editor, Elissa Altman, has also revealed that Parton privately covered the medical costs of a staff member’s gender transition in the 1990s. Her advocacy continued for decades: she spoke up in support of same-sex marriage in 2009 and voiced support for transgender people amid Tennessee’s passing of Bill 1, which banned gender-affirming medical care for minors as of July 1, 2023. Across the decades, her support for the LGBTQ+ community took on many different forms from public awareness campaigns to personal assistance. Her activism takes place within a broader philanthropic mission: in 1995, Parton established the Imagination Library, which distributes free books to young children in honour of her father who never learned to read. Following the devastating wildfires in Tennessee in 2016, she provided financial assistance to families who had lost their homes, as well as later contributing to COVID-19 vaccine research. It is clear that, for this star, compassion extended beyond words and into meaningful projects that directly affected people’s lives.

Parton’s relationship with LGBTQ+ audiences is particularly significant in the American South. For some, she represents a connection to the music, humour, and cultural traditions of home without requiring them to accept the prejudice that can accompany those traditions. Her influence has surfaced in legal debates over queer expression: in a ruling striking down a Texas law restricting drag performances, federal judge David Hittner cited Parton as an example of a mainstream entertainer whose flamboyant clothing and suggestive performances could potentially be restricted under an overly broad interpretation of the law. His reference illustrated the difficulty of regulating drag without also raising questions about artistic expression in mainstream entertainment. This example is particularly fitting for an artist whose public image has long played with the boundaries of femininity and theatrical exaggeration. Parton’s appearance is not merely decorative; it has become part of a cultural language that drag performers can reinterpret and that queer audiences can claim for themselves.

Parton’s significance lies in her ability to challenge prejudice without distancing herself from the culture that made her famous. Her career demonstrates that advocating for LGBTQ+ acceptance does not have to mean abandoning one’s roots. Through songs that invite reinterpretation, films that foreground LGBTQ+ experiences, and advocacy spanning the HIV/AIDS epidemic to contemporary debates over transgender rights, Parton has made queer acceptance part of a broader cultural conversation. The rhinestones and wigs may make Parton instantly recognizable, but her enduring influence comes from what she has accomplished with her visibility for those who lack a voice. For LGBTQ+ audiences in particular, her legacy continues to represent the possibility of making compassion a principle that transcends differences in identity, background, or belief. Though the impact of both Curry and Parton’s lives and careers will eventually belong to history, their art continues to invite new generations to dream boldly, express themselves with freedom, and build communities where difference is celebrated. Between Tim Curry’s theatrical defiance and Dolly Parton’s enduring compassion, these two cultural icons have helped generations of LGBTQ+ people embrace their identities, find community, and live unapologetically.

The post The Freedom to Be: The Enduring Legacies of Tim Curry and Dolly Parton Within the Queer Community appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Inspired by his friend Peter Knegt of QCC Toronto, founder Jeremie Romain has been running QCC Montreal since May 2024. The club first screened at the one-room Cinema Moderne in the Mile End before moving to the bigger Cinema du Parc as of November 2025. “I wanted to start something especially for queer cinema,” he explains in an interview with the Daily.

While programming has in the past included more contemporary titles, such as Mysterious Skin (2004) and 120 BPM (2017), Romain’s main focus for QCC is the history of queerness on screen. “It’s kind of a queer history course, if you will,” he says, “it’s about showing the firsts. [For example,] the first time a character was a known lesbian in a movie, and [was labelled as such].” Although, not everything is about overt queerness as history has not always welcomed an openly queer character on screen, of course. Romain is therefore equally interested in screening films with what he calls queer “sensibilities.” “When you look into it, and you read about the history of the people making movies, you can find out who was queer… and how [that] impacted their work.”

Equally, Romain admits that some representation has not aged well. “In a lot of stuff from the eighties and nineties, the representation is kind of problematic… but it was the first [of its kind] and it was groundbreaking at that time.” It is still “very important,” Romain thus believes, in showing “the history throughout the decades, [and] how stuff changed.”

Genre and tone must also be considered. “I like dramas and intense stuff,” he says, but admits that he’s consciously trying to strike a balance for QCC’s 2027 programming. He has more comedies planned for the upcoming year, for example. “I think the community, at least in Montreal, responds more to [comedies], and it’s just more fun for people… but I still think we need some of the dark [stuff] once in a while, to show the history.” Romain seems to have a quota of sorts to keep his selections varied. “I love to program at least one documentary, at least one film in black and white…not, obviously, all American movies,” he explains. “But there’s only twelve months in the year. I can’t hit everything, but I try to diversify [as much as] I can.”

Next month’s screening of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) is both a nod to this comedy-loving audience Romain speaks of, and a choice of personal significance. “[Pee Wee Herman] is kind of the person who raised me,” he shares. “I watched those movies over and over again.” The film, he explains further, is an example of these aforementioned “sensibilities” which queer artists lend to their work. “The character [of Pee Wee Herman] isn’t queer,” explains Romain, “but the actor is… [and he has] a humour and a way of moving that I resonated with as a kid.”

It goes without saying that art and representation go, and have always gone, hand in hand, but Romain sees cinema as particularly well-suited to queer visibility and storytelling. “In terms of art and culture, I think cinema is kinda the thing where you can see yourself represented. For me, when I was growing up, [film] was my portal to culture. I’m from a really small town and that’s how… I saw that other types of people were out there.”

On the whole, Romain says that the reception to QCC has been positive. “When I started the club, I got so many messages, and everyone would [tell] me at the events, ‘Thank you so much for starting this, this was missing in Montreal.’” While the typical showing is a relatively low-key affair, QCC screenings have in the past featured live performances and Q&A sessions with the local queer community. A screening of Paris Is Burning (1990), for instance, included conversation with members of the Montreal ballroom scene. Romain also speaks highly of the audiences, who, apparently, sometimes hold discussions amongst themselves afterwards. “I always ask [if anyone] has seen this movie before, and it’s always fun when basically no one has seen it. That means they’re gonna be excited to talk about it after.”

Romain is also keen to highlight the posters present at all QCC screening, which are exclusively artist- commissioned and custom-made. “I try to pick artists [where] I see something [in their art] that could resonate with the movie I’m trying to book, and it always surprises me how well they turn out.” The posters are then sold at the screenings as a souvenir. “I like that there’s little pieces of this club that…live on elsewhere”.

This month, QCC is celebrating Halloween with a screening of the black-and-white horror cult classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962). At the time of writing, 41 of 133 seats remain available. For now, Romain seems proud of the club, but is open to future growth. “I do still feel, even almost three years in, that there are a lot of people who don’t know about the Queer Cinema Club that would probably enjoy it. We’re not as known as we could be, slash should be.”

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane plays Thursday, October 29, 9pm at Cinema du Parc. You can find all of the upcoming QCC programming on their Instagram, @qccmtl.

The post “This Was Missing In Montreal” appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The Daily spoke with Kimberly Wong, current director general of SILK, and Gregg Blachford, former president of Gay Line (1993-1996) and director of McGill’s Career and Placement Service (CaPS), about CAEO Québec and the SILK program. We discussed queer education and services for English-speaking schools, volunteering and outreach, allyship, and counteracting shame with queer joy.

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Justin Friedberg and Mara Gibea for The McGill Daily (MD): What facilitated the expansion of Gay Line to CAEO Québec and SILK? How did the shifting media landscape’s impacts on the dissemination of information from the ’90s to the 2000s affect Gay Line’s mandate?

Kimberly Wong (KW): Gay Line served an important role from the ’70s to the 2000s; however, there are plenty of resources on the internet now and not many people who love to talk on the phone anymore.

Gregg Blachford (GB): There weren’t many comparable organizations that existed at the time. The original goal of what they were doing, giving information to a lot of people, has changed. Over the decades, many organizations have sprung up to deal with the police, health, and AIDS. The phone line in Montreal was no longer unique […] eventually phones stopped ringing.

KW: The organization transitioned to new opportunities: […] workshops to talk about queerness and sexuality, [and] collaborating with Queer McGill to get volunteers.

MD: The theme of CAEO Quebec’s 50th anniversary celebration is titled “Queer Joy.” What does queer joy mean to you?

GB: Queer joy is about pride, excitement, and fun. It’s about lifting the shame and engaging more with the joy of being gay.

MD: How did shame manifest socially and politically in Montreal’s queer community during Gay Line’s operation?

GB: Near the beginning of Gay Line, in the ’90s, Montreal’s queer life was full of difficult conditions: unsolved murders which the police weren’t taking seriously, raids on saunas and bars, and an AIDs crisis hanging over people’s heads.

MD: In 1993 you, Gregg, delivered a testimony to the Quebec Human Rights Commission on the inquiry into “Violence and Discrimination against Gays and Lesbians in Quebec.” Have any of the issues in your testimony been addressed? What has remained consistent or shifted in terms of the needs of queer communities in Montreal?

GB: Quebec, to its credit, gave the opportunity for the queer community to talk about what was happening and what they think should be happening [with the referendum regarding police violence against queer peoples and spaces]. What’s it like today? On one level, it’s much better: laws have changed, and there are no more police raids — they’ve apologized for the raids in the 70s/80s. What is consistent is the shame that hangs over people’s heads, despite the turn towards positivity in the queer community. Still, the expectation of having to come out and have some reconciliation with your mind is still there.

MD: How has the CAEO Québec facilitated this reconciliation?

KW: Reconciliation is about facilitating that education — making people more comfortable and making spaces to work towards educating different kinds of populations and adapting to the changes they need on the front lines.

MD: One way that CAEO Québec is creating these spaces is through the SILK program, of which you, Kimberly, are a director. Could you tell us a bit about that?

KW: The SILK program provides workshops that are testimonial-based. Queer volunteers go into schools and share about themselves. One of the main ways to connect to students is through storytelling: everyone loves stories, whether you’re young or old.

The program is about getting students to think about other perspectives that they haven’t thought about before. People may not realize their values have come from parents or religion, and some haven’t been exposed to the queer community. As a result, we strive for a safe learning environment where people can ask their questions, even if they’re uncomfortable or antagonizing. It’s a cool way to be able to enact social change through education and young people: if we can plant these seeds at a young age, they can carry that forward for the rest of their lives.

MD: Considering the organization is a non-profit, how vital is volunteering?

KW: CAEO Québec and the SILK program are all volunteer-run, which is very rare. Because we don’t have a specific funding body, there are positives and negatives. We don’t receive money (i.e. grants), but we’re also not beholden to a governing body’s priorities.

GB: The program is inter-generational too! We recently had a party at my house with past volunteers. Volunteering meant so much to them: it teaches active listening, which they’ve used in other areas of their life, making change. “New gay” volunteers get something out of it too… it’s a two-way street. Often students come who are exploring their own gender, sexuality, and identity.

KW: Something nice about the program is that the CAEO Québec takes time to train people and make them more comfortable. It can be a one-time thing, low stakes. Many volunteers feel a lot of satisfaction after speaking to students. We poll anonymous feedback about the workshop, and 95 per cent of it is positive. It is so rewarding to see that, as the workshops are something we would’ve wanted when we were in high school. They can be life- saving in some contexts. The whole thing feels very special, making space for volunteers, community — magic comes from it.

MD: That’s how both of you met working for Gay Line. Would you say these relationships foster lifelong contacts?

KW: Many people become long-time friends. You have Gregg, who volunteered from 1984 to 2007 — truly intergenerational. The program includes very passionate people who want to provide community support, using the privilege they have in their lives. It’s free; it’s volunteering.

MD: Considering Gay Line’s historic ties to McGill, how can students and allies get involved?

GB: The dances run by Gay McGill in the SSMU building were not just for McGill students, but for the whole community. People talked about how vibrant it was and how it made them feel. I was involved with admin to move the university towards better relationships with queer community, including starting the annual return of the Rainbow Reception.

KW: For volunteering, something notable about our organization is that we accept allies in our volunteer pool.

GB: Allies were important then, and allies are important now too.

KW: For SILK in particular, allies can demonstrate why community [exposure is important for] students who may not be able to relate to having close ties to the community.

MD: Would you like to share any parting wisdom after 50 years?

GB: The reason it’s lasted 50 years is because of Kimberly. She held it together when it could’ve fallen apart, which shows how individuals can keep things going. Being so upbeat, positive, and cheerful really helps.

KW: We don’t expect people to come in with perfect skills. Because we work with a marginalized group of people, there has to be more understanding and flexibility. The organization is as strong as the volunteers that make it up. We want the space to be an encouraging sandbox for people to learn, grow, and gain new skills.

CAEO Québec is currently hiring volunteers and SILK workshop facilitators. The next training will take place on November 7, 8, and 14 from 10:00 AM to 6:30 PM in downtown Montreal. Students can follow @caeo.quebec on Instagram for more information.

The post Celebrating CAEO Québec’s 50th Anniversary appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Good People is a bi-weekly article series highlighting McGill students doing community-oriented work on and around campus. Because it’ s important to celebrate good people doing good things.

Finn Jacobsen was in his first year of law school in the fall of 2025 when he and his colleagues formed a community of transgender students at McGill’s Faculty of Law.

The Trans Law Collective — a volunteer-run organization that provides free legal information, education, and advocacy support for trans, non-binary, Two- Spirit peoples, and individuals questioning the gender binary in Quebec — was born out of this group of peers. The Trans Law Collective offers monthly legal clinics, free of charge, on McGill’s downtown campus to help students and Montreal residents navigate the legal process for changing their legal name and sex designation. Beyond clinics, the collective also hosts social events, a pre-law mentorship program, and conducts legal research with an eye towards using the law as a tool of liberation.

The Daily spoke with Finn Jacobsen, second-year law student and the Trans Law Collective’s Vice President of Communications, about the organization. We talked about making legal information accessible, building community, and their organization’s vision for growth and continuity.

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Enid Kohler for The McGill Daily (MD): To get started, I want to learn more about you. How did you get involved in this organization? What drew you to it?

Finn Jacobsen (FJ): I’m a second year law student, and this club started up last year, when I was a freshman. A bunch of my first year colleagues and I reached out to the trans community in our first year law class. We were really lucky to have a ton of trans people in our 200 person class. We ended up with twelve people in first year and we made this club. We’re building it from the ground up.

MD: How would you pitch the Trans Law Collective to a student who has never heard about it before in 30 seconds?

FJ: We have three main arms. We do legal research, social events — connecting the trans community and students at McGill — and then we provide services as well. The main service we do is legal clinics, like for name and gender marker changes. But in general, we’re just trying to support any initiatives that involve the intersection of the trans community and the law.

MD: From your perspective, why is the Trans Law Collective important? Why is there a need for these kinds of services for the trans community in Montreal?

FJ: When it comes to legal transition issues, I find the process in Quebec is actually really great. It’s pretty open, but it’s so hard to understand, especially if you don’t have a legal background. It can just stump people when it really doesn’t need to; it can be really confusing. Our clinics get people to feel confident to make the changes that they really need. It’s nice to talk to someone who has done it all before and who can just get you sorted and connected.

Generally, trans people are facing a lot of struggles right now. There’s a lot of laws trying to be put into place that make it harder to be trans. So it’s important that we keep on top of that, stay aware, and take control of the rights that we do have as trans people and as people generally.

MD: Since you launched last year, what has the response been like, particularly to your legal clinics?

FJ: Weve had some pretty great moments. It’s been really cool. We worked with one person who was nonbinary and who didn’t always feel seen in their gender. And then they got to submit all these things [paperwork] to get an X marker on all their IDs and to have their chosen name reflected on all their legal documents. At the end of their time at the clinic, they were super emotional and just really excited to have this done. When you see stuff like that, it’s really moving.

MD: What do you have planned for this school year? What’s in the works for your team.

FJ: We’re having a clinic right now, actually. I just left it to come here. For this year, we’re running bi-weekly clinics off campus in Verdun, at the Centre des Femmes. And then we do monthly clinics on campus to try and be as accessible as possible to McGill students. We’re doing social events too. Trans Tuesdays will be starting up soon, just fun social events for people to hang out.

MD: Imagine a student sees a post for Trans Tuesday but feels nervous about attending the event alone. What would you say to them?

FJ: I’d say it’s probably a lot less intimidating than you think. Everyone in the club is really nice. And everyone who’s ever been to these events is always friendly and happy to chat.

Feel free to bring anyone, like a friend if that will make you feel more comfortable. We just want to give people an opportunity to meet other trans people, queer people, or supportive allies on campus.

MD: What is your vision for the future of the Trans Law Collective?

FJ: We’re just focused on continuity right now. We want to make sure the service stays available, especially on campus. Hopefully, the further we go, we can get more funding, provide more support, and do more legal research, too. The sky’s the limit.

MD: The tagline for this column is “good people doing good things.” In the context of your work with the Trans Law Collective, what does being a “good person” mean to you?

FJ: I think for a lot of trans people, it’s just nice to be able to be seen and supported. I feel like the trans community often doesn’t ask for much, it’s just, “let people be who they are and then see them for who they are.”I think that’s what we’re trying to do. Let’s make sure people get access to that.

Learn more about the Trans Law Collective’s services, social events, and opportunities to get involved through their Instagram account, @translawcollective or via their website, translaw.info.

The post Trans Law Collective Dismantles Legal Barriers for Montreal’s Queer Community appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Specific language has always allowed queer communities to avoid hostile attention and identify themselves to one another — in Montreal during the 1980s, for example, a group of lesbian women would picnic in the Plateau under a banner labelled the “spinsters’ circle” (cercle des vieilles filles) in order to escape unwanted scrutiny. The language used by queer people, often marked by double entendres and subtle subversions, came to develop a tenacious ability to subvert harmful intentions. Even the term ‘queer’ itself, originally a derogatory label meaning ‘strange’ was eventually reclaimed and absorbed into the community’s lexicon.

Today, the topic of queer language (such as gender-neutral pronouns) sparks endless debate and culture-war skirmishes; however, what these ideological frays obscure is the significance of accurate representation to individual identity. Pronouns in particular have inherent personal meaning: they are increasingly being used to indicate not only how someone views themselves but also how they wish to be perceived by others. The growing importance of pronouns in describing queer identities makes Quebec’s exclusion of gender-inclusive language in government communications all the
more distressing.

The use of ‘queer’ as an activist term began in the 1990s. Tyler D. Harvey, a PhD student at the Yale School of Public Health, calls the label a “political identity rooted in demands for equality and liberation for [the] community.” To be openly queer is to resist a system that suppresses your identity. The free expression of this identity, therefore, is itself an act of radical defiance. For many Gen-Z members of the LGBTQ+ community, queer appellatives are “not just a matter of communication […] but also educate and influences society as a whole, despite pushback from those in power,” writes English undergraduate student Kayci Resende-Abbott of Suffolk University.

Supposedly justified under the banner of ‘protecting the French language,’ Quebec’s ban of inclusive language in French government communications ultimately denies the identity of gender nonconforming members of Quebec’s queer community. According to Victoria Legault, the executive director of Aide aux Trans du Québec, this restriction excludes those who use the pronoun iel from participation in public life.

Even Jean-François Roberge — the former language minister responsible for this policy — accepts that “[p]eople are gender-fluid. They are who they are, they are who they want to be.” However, by instating this legislation, he has established a precedent of harming and invalidating the very community which he allegedly supports. Although Roberge claims that “we want people to be happy,” his actions tell a different story. In the realm of healthcare, for example, the lack of gender inclusive ianguage has been suggested to deter members of the LGBTQ+ community from seeking care when needed.

This Queer History Month, The McGill Daily’s editorial board reaffirms our commitment to using language that respects the identities of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities. Queer individuals deserve to be faithfully recognized and represented by the new PQ government. The following sources and organizations provide useful information on respectful terms and language:

University of Michigan Spectrum Center
McGill’s guide to gender-inclusive language
Glossary of Queer terms
Queer Speak en Français
LGBTIQA+ Multilingual Terminology
Aide aux Trans du Québec

The post Queer Language is Queer Resistance appeared first on The McGill Daily.

There are, of course, little differences between students who live in residence first year compared to those who don’t. Most residences offered by McGill are a five to 15- minute walk from campus. This means that the average student in residence can afford to wake up about an hour or two before their lecture begins. In contrast, a person living off campus with the same morning class would probably have to wake up much earlier to accommodate a longer commute. Moreover, the time it takes to get to class increases exponentially the more they rely on public transportation. For example, a student living in Brossard must take the bus, then the REM, and then walk ten minutes before entering campus, meaning they have to wake up almost an hour earlier than a residence student. This factor also applies when returning home. Many extracurricular clubs and social activities don’t start until after 6 PM, and can drag on until as late as 9 PM. For students belonging to these clubs who don’t live downtown, they have to repeat their morning commute reversed and arrive home as late as 10 PM. To make matters worse, certain forms of transport, like the metro and certain bus routes may feel less safe during later hours, especially for women traveling alone. These factors make it much less convenient for offcampus students to get involved in student life.

Nevertheless, the hours students wake up at and the hours they get home constitute only minor differences between residence and non-residence life. After all, some students may be morning people, for whom waking up early is not a challenge, regardless of how close they live to campus. One could additionally argue that students offcampus make up for the time they lose on public transportation by not having to do the same volume of chores such as cooking dinner or doing laundry, as they may still live with their parents. There is, however, an important distinction between the students living on and off of campus, the most important of which is the volume of social interaction one gets from living in a residence.

Indeed, dorm-life is filled with social interaction. Whether that be a positive factor or not often comes down to the sociability of individual students, but being in proximity to so many people of the same age definitely comes into play in how easy it is to make friends. After all, students living on campus have a wider range of social events they can attend, whether they are organized by the residence or independently by students. This greatly increases students’ chance of developing a sense of community, which may not always be the case for students who still live at home.

Most importantly, more social interaction means more chances to network. It may appear overly cynical to analyze social interaction solely based on its transactional value, but there are simply too many examples of successful business ventures, partnerships, and creative projects that have emerged as the result of a dorm friendship. Websites like Facebook and Napster were created to facilitate socializing and sharing music between students living on campus. Bands like MGMT and The Pixies were formed as a result of dorm-friendships. For students living in residence, this form of networking happens much more naturally, through communal living. This does not mean that students living off campus cannot network, but they may find themselves as easily immersed into McGill’s community in order to develop useful connections.

Furthermore, while McGill’s Quebec-residency tuition brings more class diversity to campus due to its low cost, in comparison to the international tuition, this class diversity becomes virtually obsolete when considering the demographics of residences, which mostly includes out-of-province and international students. While McGill as an institution may be open to class diversity, the university’s residence system still possesses the same flaws as other, less inclusive spaces. Networking, one of the most essential parts of the McGill experience, is ultimately facilitated for wealthier students who can afford to live in residences. While lower-class students may attend the same classes and go to the same events, they simply cannot compete, on a social level, with students who can afford to live on campus. The difference in experience between a student living at home and a student living in residence is therefore not simply a matter of how much time one can sleep and how close one is to campus; it is a socio-economic issue.

Living on campus indirectly advantages out-of-province and international students. Their increased ability to network and their constant social interaction in the residence community, allows for greater career and social opportunities. While this phenomenon is less prominent than in the United States where tuition costs even more, McGill’s student life is unfortunately not free of its own elitist bubbles.

The post The Price of Staying Home appeared first on The McGill Daily.