Research can preserve what power tries to erase

Academic research can feel distant from daily life. For marginalized communities, however, research can become a form of protection.

It can prove that an experience dismissed as personal is actually systemic. It can preserve histories that governments would rather forget. It can turn whispered stories into evidence that institutions can no longer plausibly deny.

And when queer and trans people are frequently asked to prove realities we already live, this kind of work is extremely important.

We are asked to prove that discrimination exists. That poverty exists. That harassment exists. That barriers to employment, housing, health care and political participation are real.

The evidence is not ambiguous.

Statistics Canada’s first detailed census-based analysis of transgender and non-binary economic outcomes found higher poverty rates and persistent earnings gaps. Even among full-time, full-year workers, those gaps remained after accounting for factors such as education, occupation, region and disability. Transgender women experienced an adjusted earnings gap of 19.1 per cent compared with cisgender men. The gap was 12.4 per cent for non-binary workers and 6.9 per cent for transgender men.

Another Statistics Canada report found that one in five LGBTQ2+ workers had experienced workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

These are not signs that queer and trans people lack ambition, ability or work ethic.

They are signs that Canada continues to waste talent.

Research does not give our lives legitimacy. Our lives are already legitimate. What research can do is deny institutions the comfort of pretending they do not know what is happening.

Nicole’s work goes one step further. Instead of asking only how political systems affect transgender people, she asks what transgender people do inside political systems.

Why do trans people run for office? What paths bring them there? How do voters respond? What choices must candidates make about disclosure, safety, identity and campaign strategy? How does their presence affect public opinion and public policy?

Those questions move trans people from the margins of political research to the centre of political agency.

We are no longer merely the people policy happens to.

We are the people writing it.

Running while transgender

I know what it means to enter political life while openly transgender.

When I ran for school trustee, I was not asking voters to elect a symbol. I was asking them to trust me with the governance of a public education system.

I wanted to talk about student safety, accessibility, mental health, budgets, public accountability and the future of education. But being visibly trans meant that some people treated my existence as the central political issue before I had said a word about policy.

That is one of the contradictions Nicole and I explored.

You can be a political leader and still be treated as a political controversy.

You can win an election and still be asked to justify whether someone like you should be allowed to participate in public life.

You can possess the same legal authority as every other elected official in the room while knowing that some people see your identity, not your decisions, your record or your ability, as the thing requiring scrutiny.

Visibility can open doors for the people who come after us. It can also carry a personal cost.

Nicole’s research examines the sacrifices trans candidates make, the harassment they encounter and the strategies they use to earn trust in communities that may have little direct knowledge of trans lives. Her “Gender Identity on the Ballot” project also studies how trans candidacies affect both public opinion and policy.

What stood out to me is that trans candidates are not usually entering politics because they want every conversation to revolve around being trans.

They run because they care about their communities.

They care about schools, housing, public health, transportation, climate policy, affordability, human rights and good government. They bring political instincts, professional skills and a sense of responsibility developed through surviving systems that were rarely built with them in mind.

That lived experience does not make a person automatically correct. Identity is not a substitute for evidence, judgment or accountability.

But lived experience is knowledge.

Nicole describes this as a kind of embodied credibility: the authority that comes from understanding a system not only through reports and theories, but through what that system has done to your body, your family, your livelihood and your sense of safety.

A person who has fought to access health care understands how administrative barriers operate.

A person who has been shut out of employment understands how discrimination hides behind supposedly neutral practices.

A person who has had to calculate the safety of every room understands institutional culture in a way no workplace checklist can fully capture.

That is not a weakness to overcome before entering leadership.

It is expertise that leadership has been missing.

Queer economic power is real, even when institutions refuse to value it

The political debate around LGBTQ+ inclusion is often framed as though queer and trans people are a small special-interest group seeking accommodations from everyone else.

That framing is dishonest.

We are workers, employers, customers, taxpayers, creators, investors and business owners. The Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce says more than 100,000 businesses across Canada are 2SLGBTQI+-owned and operated. It estimates that one in every 40 Canadian businesses is LGBTQ-owned.

Queer economic power does not begin and end with consumer spending during Pride Month.

It exists in the companies we build, the people we employ, the taxes we pay, the art and technology we create, and the local economies we sustain.

Yet too many corporations still treat LGBTQ+ inclusion as a branding exercise rather than an economic and ethical responsibility.

They put rainbows on their social media accounts when support is profitable. They sponsor a parade when the photographs look good in an annual report. Then, when political pressure rises, some quietly retreat.

Vancouver Pride reported a nearly 50 per cent drop in corporate sponsorship in 2025. Pride Toronto also lost major corporate sponsors amid a broader retreat from diversity and inclusion commitments.

That retreat tells us something important.

A corporation’s values are not revealed when supporting a community is easy. They are revealed when that support carries a cost.

Pride sponsorship alone does not make a corporation inclusive. A company can fund a parade while underpaying queer workers, excluding trans people from leadership, tolerating harassment or denying LGBTQ-owned businesses access to its supply chain.

Real inclusion lives in procurement, hiring, benefits, promotions, workplace safety and executive decision-making.

It means buying from queer-owned businesses. It means protecting workers who come out. It means removing barriers that keep transgender employees trapped in lower-paying positions. It means treating LGBTQ+ people as future executives, board members and founders and not simply as a market segment.

The economic argument for inclusion is clear. The OECD warns that excluding and undervaluing LGBTIQ+ talent damages economic growth.

But there is also something unsettling about having to prove our humanity through profitability.

Queer people deserve equality even when inclusion does not increase a company’s quarterly earnings.

The business case can persuade institutions to act. It must never become the reason our rights exist.

Pride must decide who it belongs to

The withdrawal of corporate sponsors has forced Pride organizations to confront a difficult question: what is Pride when the money disappears?

Pride has always carried a tension between protest and celebration.

Celebration always has an important place. Queer people deserve public joy. We deserve music, dancing, family, colour, flirtation and the freedom to occupy public space without apology.

But Pride was never created simply to make queer identity more marketable.

It grew from resistance.

As Pride organizations became larger, many entered partnerships with corporations and governments. Those relationships brought resources, legitimacy and the ability to host major public events. They also created dependence.

Nicole’s research on local politics and Pride asks how advocacy organizations navigate relationships with corporate sponsors and municipal governments.

That question has become urgent.

When a multinational corporation withdraws because supporting LGBTQ+ people has become politically inconvenient, a local Pride organization can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars almost overnight.

But something else can happen too.

Local businesses step forward. Labour unions contribute. Community members donate. Volunteers rebuild events at a more human scale. Pride is reminded that it did not begin in a corporate boardroom.

This does not mean corporate or government funding is inherently wrong. Public institutions should support events that contribute to community belonging, tourism, culture and human rights. Corporations that profit from queer workers and customers should invest in the communities that helped create their success.

The question is whether those partnerships strengthen community power or replace it.

Pride must be more than a party corporations rent for a month.

It must remain accountable to the people who need it when the cameras leave.

Changing public institutions from within

Our conversation also moved beyond elections and Pride festivals to the quieter work of institutional change.

Nicole studies how sexual orientation and gender identity (often shortened internationally to SOGI) become integrated into large organizations.

This process is sometimes called mainstreaming. It means LGBTQ+ inclusion is no longer confined to one ceremonial statement, one department or one annual awareness day. It becomes part of how an institution collects data, assesses programs, trains staff, distributes money and measures success.

At the World Bank, for example, SOGI inclusion work has included country profiles, consultation guidance, staff training and research into the social and economic costs of exclusion.

Canada’s federal government has also supported the Public Service Pride Network and employee-led initiatives intended to improve inclusion across the public service.

These programs are critical for employee retention and success, but policies like these do not implement themselves.

Institutions change because people inside them keep asking uncomfortable questions.

Who was missing from this consultation?

Whose data was never collected?

Who will be harmed by this policy?

What assumptions were treated as neutral?

What happens to a transgender person when this rule is applied at the service counter, in a hospital, at a border or inside a school?

Often, progress can be traced to a small number of people who refused to let an institution remain comfortable with its blind spots.

They may be queer or trans. They may be allies. They may be public servants, researchers, elected officials, union members or policy staff.

Their work is rarely glamorous. It happens in draft documents, committee meetings, budget requests, amendments, training sessions and conversations that never become public.

But this is how institutional change becomes durable.

In 2017, Bill C-16 added gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act and expanded related Criminal Code protections.

That legal change mattered enormously. It did not appear from nowhere. It followed years of advocacy, scholarship, testimony, political work and personal risk.

And even after a law changes, the deeper work continues.

As we learned from T’s story, a right written on paper is not the same as a right that can be exercised safely.

Representation changes what institutions are capable of seeing

Representation is often discussed as a matter of symbolism.

A trans person wins an election. A queer person joins a corporate board. A Pride flag appears outside a government building.

Symbols have a role to play in communicating safety, especially to young people searching for proof that a future is possible. But representation is most powerful when it changes decisions.

A queer elected official may notice how a policy affects chosen families.

A transgender public servant may recognize that a form, database or identification requirement will create barriers.

A Two-Spirit leader may challenge an institution to confront the colonial assumptions embedded in its understanding of gender.

A lesbian executive may understand why benefits, parental leave or workplace culture exclude families that do not fit an old model.

None of this means one queer person can represent an entire community. There is no single LGBTQ+ experience. Race, disability, poverty, geography, religion, immigration status and Indigeneity shape our lives in radically different ways.

It means that institutions make better decisions when the people inside them carry a wider range of knowledge.

The goal is not to place one queer person in a powerful position and declare the work complete.

The goal is to redistribute authority so that no institution can treat straightness or cisgender identity as the unspoken qualification for leadership.

We are not asking to be rescued

The most important lesson from my conversation with Nicole is that queer and trans people are not passive recipients of progress.

We are not waiting for corporations to discover courage.

We are not waiting for governments to decide that our freedom polls well.

We are not waiting for academics to explain us to the world.

We are producing knowledge. Running businesses. Organizing communities. Writing laws. Serving the public. Winning elections. Changing institutions.

Sometimes we do it loudly, through protest and public confrontation.

Sometimes we do it quietly, by changing one policy, one budget, one workplace or one person’s understanding of what leadership looks like.

The backlash against queer and trans people is real. It is organized, well-funded and increasingly willing to use our lives as fuel for political ambition.

But backlash is not proof that we are losing.

Often, backlash is what happens when people who were comfortable holding power realize that power is moving.

Queer and trans people are no longer asking only to be visible.

We are demanding the authority to shape the places where we live.

We are not simply appearing in institutions that were built without us.

We are changing what those institutions are for.

For generations, other people wrote policies about our lives and called it expertise.

Now, we are the researchers.

We are the candidates.

We are the business owners, organizers, public servants and elected leaders.

We were never just the controversy.

We are part of the country’s political, social and economic power, and Canada cannot afford to keep pretending otherwise.