What to know
- Canadian advocacy organization Queer Momentum has launched a nationwide Trans Canada Tour, featuring more than 60 events across the country.
- Founders Fae Johnstone and Victoria Bucholtz are hosting town halls, community gatherings and public Q&A sessions aimed at encouraging dialogue about transgender experiences.
- The tour comes as advocates raise concerns about increasing anti-trans rhetoric and policy debates in parts of Canada, including Alberta.
- Organizers say the campaign is focused on reducing stigma, rebuilding community networks and encouraging Canadians to engage through respectful conversation.
As debates over transgender rights become increasingly prominent across North America, two Canadian advocates are taking a different approach to the conversation.
Instead of arguing online, Fae Johnstone and Victoria Bucholtz are travelling from community to community, inviting Canadians to ask questions, share concerns and have face-to-face conversations about gender identity.
Their campaign, the Trans Canada Tour, will bring more than 60 events to cities and towns across the country as part of an effort to reduce stigma, rebuild grassroots organizing and encourage dialogue.
Why Queer Momentum launched the Trans Canada Tour
Queer Momentum is a national advocacy organization founded in 2024 by Fae Johnstone and Victoria Bucholtz to support 2SLGBTQ+ communities through advocacy, education and organizing.
“We have so many incredible activists on the local level, but at this moment we need to come together, because there are conservative politicians and far-right groups that want to divide us and strip our rights away,” Johnstone told Queer & Now. “We need to unite, we need to build our power and bring that power to protect those rights.”
Lovingly called the Ask a Trans Person Anything, or the Trans Canada Tour, QM’s latest campaign sees Johnstone and Bucholtz hit the road to put on more than 60 different events across the country, with the goal of “changing hearts and minds.”
“The first piece is about bringing the community together through drag shows, town halls, just like they did in the 70s and 80s,” Johnstone explained. “We need to get together to plan, to strategize, to think about how we organize to win.”
The second component sees the duo host panel-style events where heterosexual and cisgender people are welcome to pose questions to the Queer Momentum founders.
Aiming to address any confusion for cisgender and heterosexual people, caused by ongoing public debates surrounding Queer rights, Johnstone explained that she hopes open dialogue can help combat this issue.
“For them, it’s often two sides screaming at each other, and we want to turn the temperature down. We want to have some real conversations,” she explained.
“We want to answer some questions. Because we believe in our ideas, [and] we believe that Canadians, if they hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, if they’re in dialogue with us, they’ll agree with us more than they think they will.”
Trans Canada Tour: Combatting dangerous misconceptions
She shared that two of the most common misconceptions she hears about the Trans communities are that they are dangerous, or that they are trying to take away other people’s rights. When in reality, equality is the goal.
“Trans people, just like women, just like racialized communities, just like newcomers, all of us come from legacies of exclusion,” she explained. “What we want people to understand is that Trans folks want what their neighbours want: to be free, to be respected, to be treated with dignity, and able to live lives in peace.”
She says the goal is to help people understand that this isn’t a theoretical debate; this is about human lives and supporting your neighbours.
Words of advice for young Queer people
Johnstone, who has been organizing for the better part of a decade, also shared some words of advice for 2SLGBTQ+ young people who may be scared by the current political climate: We’re going to be OK.
“Our community has overcome so much, and we’re in a period of backlash, but as a 30 year old Trans woman, I can’t imagine what it was like for those who came before me,” she shared. “Those who came of age 20 years ago in a world that was more stigmatizing and ignorant around Trans experiences.”
So while this is difficult, we’ve been here before.
“So this backlash is hard, and it hurts, but I believe in our community, I believe in Canadians too. Canadians are kind and caring people, and we’re going to get through this backlash and build a freer world through our advocacy.”
While Bucholtz was unable to join us for the interview, Johnstone shared her tour partner’s message: The rest of Canada has to get ready.
“So if you’re a Queer or Trans person, if you’re an ally, we do want you to show up at these tour stops, because this is part of how we rebuild the movement.”
Johnstone pointed to Alberta as a warning sign of how quickly hard-won rights can come under threat. In recent years, the province has introduced policies restricting access to gender-affirming care for some transgender youth, limiting participation in school sports, and requiring parental consent for certain name and pronoun changes in schools.
For many advocates, these measures represent a broader trend of growing anti-trans sentiment in North American politics and underscore the urgency of organizing, educating and mobilizing communities before similar policies spread elsewhere in the country.
“We’ve got to lean in, and it’s going to take a village, and if I know anything about community, it’s that when we rally, we have more power than anybody can imagine. So we’re excited to see people, and we need to stop what’s happening in Alberta from spreading anywhere else in this country.”
