The Trans & Intersex Awareness Seminar is presented to you by the Equity Studies Student Union, in collaboration with the Sexual Diversity Studies Student Union. Hosted by Trans/Intersex/2spirit award-winning playwright and filmmaker Alec Butler, this experience is a do-not-miss! Please note that this is a limited attendance event (the audience will be limited to 25 persons).
Alec Butler is a Canadian playwright and filmmaker. Born Intersex and assigned female at birth, Alec identified as a butch lesbian in his early life, during which time he created some of his more well-known plays, “Black Friday” (which found him nominated for the Governor General’s Award for English drama in 1990) and “Medusa Rising”. Through working on “Medusa Rising”, he met other 2Spirit people and discovered his own background as Metis; a background his family never acknowledged before because of racism during the ‘60s and ‘70s that would have meant social suicide in the small East Coast community they called home.
Alec spent most of the ‘90s uncovering a complicated familial past, his identity rocked even further by the new realization that he was born Intersex. During this time, Alec prioritized his gender issues; he was one of the first to publicly grow a beard, and took the brunt of transphobic attitudes coming from the community. He felt isolated and finding it hard to work and write, he disappeared to grieve his losses of friends who had died during the 1980s AIDS Crisis. In the late ‘90s he re-emerged, encouraged to come out after meeting other Trans people who were coming out as well.
In 1999 he changed his name to Alec and found his voice again. Since then, he has been writing and making short and long films about being Trans/Intersex/2Spirit, most notably “Misadventures of Pussy Boy”, an animated trilogy about growing up gender queer, set in a rural, working class East coast community in the ‘70s. Out of love for Toronto’s vibrant Transgender community he developed and produced “Trans Cabaret”, which began as a theatre piece and is now a video about all things Trans, bringing “Translightenment to the masses” through sketches and behind the scenes, real life experiences of Trans people in the community.
Alec Butler has recently become an author, with the publication of his first book “Rough Paradise”, a novella about growing up Intersex and 2Spirit in a small, East coast community. Last year, his “Pussy Boy” Trilogy also won the Best Short at the International Transgender Film Festival in Amsterdam.
this is a community event | accessible space | lunch will be served | gender-neutral washrooms available | all bodies welcome
** Please contact us with any accessibility concerns and/or dietary restrictions before Monday, November 24. **
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Linked Oppressions was born out of the realization that our individual lives and identities continue to be shaped by the intersectionality of multiple types of discrimination. The ways in which we are racialized and marked by gender, sexuality and dis/ability impact how we occupy certain spaces, negotiate personal relationships and encounter everyday realities. An annual tradition of the Equity Studies Student Union, Linked Oppressions is a month-long event series that examines how various forms of marginalization, (with an emphasis on racism, homophobia and transphobia), are articulated, experienced and resisted. All Linked Oppressions events are free and are running throughout the month of November.