In today’s Verbatim, we’ve got a transcript of my interview with Alisa Palmer, director of Cloud 9, currently playing in Toronto at the Panasonic Theatre. Cloud 9 is British playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1979 play that masks a scathing critique of English colonialist notions of sex, gender, and race beneath a fast-talking and often absurd family […] More »

In all the hoopla following the New Orleans Saints’ momentous victory over the Indianapolis Colts in last week’s Super Bowl, an important piece of the biggest day in North American sports seemed to disappear all-too-quickly from the collective consciousness. With the pervasive and nauseating hyperbole around the significance of the Saints’ win in Hurricane Katrina’s […] More »

With Valentine’s Day around the corner and ladies coast to coast anticipating some special show of affection, there are alternative efforts toward female appreciation also being made. The Native Youth Sexual Health Network has just released a collection of writing by Aboriginal men about how they can help put a stop to violence against women […] More »

A few years ago I was assigned a story about circumcision for a national women’s magazine. My research into the topic took me far beyond medical technicalities—circumcision in Canada is a controversial topic, surrounded by heated debate across provinces, religious lines and parental preference. I conducted interviews across the board—from a doctor in Nova Scotia, […] More »

Twenty-years ago, Marc Lépine strolled into the Université de Montréal’s engineering school, L’École Polytechnique, armed with a 223-calibre Sturm-Ruger rifle and murdered fourteen young women. Lépine’s callous rampage was motivated by his hatred for women, whom he held responsible for ruining his life. Opening fire in one classroom, Lépine, only twenty-five at the time, shouted […] More »

If you combine my disability with Queerly Canadian writer Cate Simpson‘s sexual orientation, you may at least approximate the person who should be writing ThisAbility this week. Nevertheless, as a straight male, I’ve still been hearing rumblings of this problem among LGBT friends (and friends of friends) with disabilities for years, even though I don’t […] More »

British Columbia’s adherence to the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has been recently assessed by the West Coast Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) with disturbing results. West Coast LEAF’s first annual Report Card has assigned the B.C. government a grade of “D” when it […] More »

The treatment of Caster Semenya is a disgrace. The 18 year-old South African runner, who is currently the object of “gender verification testing” after winning the world championship 800-meter race in August, has had her most private medical details paraded before the international press in what can only be described as an exceptionally ugly episode […] More »

It’s official, folks: males are the weaker sex. Toronto-based physician Ken Walker—perhaps better known as nationally syndicated medical columnist Dr. Gifford-Jones—points out in a recent article that life’s cards are unfavourably stacked against those with a Y chromosome, and he attributes social conditioning to be a primary culprit. Males live an average of 5.3 years […] More »

You’ve probably noticed by now, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock or just standing endlessly in line to offload your garbage, that Pride is in full swing. I have to admit I find Toronto Pride kind of overwhelming. This is largely because I come from Scotland, where Pride is shared by two cities who […] More »

Girls are expected to behave a certain way. While I’m not exactly sure what that means, I do know that I was once chastised by one of my high school drama teachers for what she diagnosed as “this stupid Goth thing you’re going for”: referring—albeit inaccurately—to my self-styled uniform of inky dyed hair, Salvation Army […] More »