LISA SALAZAR — BLOG

Photo: The glowing screen of my laptop displaying the Facebook post that inspired this essay. A reminder that existence is not an argument. It is lived. On how a quiet truth can unsettle those who haven’t yet faced their own. The post was about the Williams Institute’s recently updated data showing that approximately 2.8 million Americans identify as transgender. The post was gentle in its simplicity. It did not petition, persuade, or defend. It only acknowledged that trans people are here, and have always been here, woven into the ordinary life of the nation.

  I am generally a calming presence, or so I’m told. I know how to steady a room, how to sit with grief, how to speak softly so others can breathe again. On the surface, I am unshaken. But beneath the surface, the mantle is active, and the lava is hot. Some days, the headlines I read cause tremors in me. The Supreme Court.  The GOP.   The Conservatives in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The endless cycle of “protecting children” that somehow always means coming after people like me. The slogans engineered to ignite panic. The campaigns that treat our existence as if it were a cautionary tale. I see it. I feel it. I hold it. But I do not explode. Not yet. I have lived in Canada since 1973, and I was almost twenty-four. But I was already sixty-three when the DSM was revised in 2013, and being trans was finally removed from the category of mental disorders. Forty years earlier, in 1973, the year I arrived in Canada, Sexual Orientation had been removed. It took four ...

On October 16, 2025, Statistics Canada released a report titled "Socioeconomic outcomes of transgender and non-binary people in Canada." It's the first comprehensive analysis of the socioeconomic outcomes of transgender and non-binary people in Canada, using 2021 Census data. The findings are stark. They reveal not isolated gaps, but a clear pattern of systemic inequity.

Disgust is a deeply human emotion. At its core, it has helped us survive—steering our ancestors away from rotting food, diseased bodies, and potential threats. But as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio program  IDEAS  recently explored, disgust is more than a survival mechanism. It is also a double-edged sword, wielded by cultures, religions, and politics to define morality, enforce social norms, and exclude those deemed “other.” The  IDEAS  episode titled  Disgust: The Good and Evil  shed light on the complexity of disgust and its troubling potential to drive prejudice. Experts discussed how this visceral emotion, while rooted in evolutionary necessity, often misfires, turning instinct into irrationality. As a trans woman, I have experienced firsthand how disgust can be weaponized—how it fuels transphobia and justifies the dehumanization of people like me. This is not just a personal reflection but a societal challenge: to confront the ways...

I took a leap of faith on the third Saturday in July 2008. It was either that or leap to my death. As scared as I was of what lay ahead, it was less frightening than the thought of never having experienced what it felt like to live authentically. I'm happy to still be here, as Lisa. A topic garnering much attention in social sciences is intersectionality, the categorizations of race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group. It is regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. Add to this idea the questions we ask and the answers we get as we explore our world as children and in our youth. What assumptions, expectations, and conclusions do we draw? Do they set us up for success or failure? Same-sex attracted and trans and non-binary persons navigate and view life through a lens that often makes them imagine a future that is frightening. Fear of rejection, ridicule, and abandonmen...

On Tuesday, Sept. 26, a group of about 100 people stood outside the Langley Schools District 35 office in support of the Trustees who had recently approved the SOGI 123 curriculum. (I won’t go into the SOGI specifics, anyone can review it for themselves at www.sogieducation.com .) Photo by Brad Dirks (no relation to Paul Dirks). Among those holding up signs and standing in solidarity with the trustees, were students, family members, friends and allies of LGBTQ students. I wasn’t able to attend, since my current occupation had me stuck in downtown Vancouver. During the two weeks leading up to this peaceful rally, I was in communication with a few individuals who were responding to another group of parents. This first group had voiced strong opposition to SOGI, with a well-organized initiative that included a Facebook page and a website to raise money.  The Langley parents who are afraid of SOGI gathered a few weeks earlier to listen to their organizers, who incl...

A personal Meaning for the word transgender Published by ConversationsThatMatter.tv and VancouverSun.com  Saturday, July 21, 2017 (CLICK IMAGE TO WATCH INTERVIEW) “This week’s Conversation That Matters features Lisa Salazar, who helps us to understand the transgender spectrum. “What does it mean to be transgender? “The term is relatively new. It is also widely misunderstood. Many people believe trans or transgender is about sexual orientation rather than gender identity. “After decades of fighting the voices in her head, Lisa took on the long and challenging transition from her life as a man to the one she knew was her true self. “Lisa takes us on her journey and at the same time provides insight into the lives of transgender people. “Her life story and the recent enactment of Bill C-16, which ensures that transgender people are guaranteed the same human rights as those who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, lead to this week’s conversation. “Co...

A friend,  Matthias Roberts,  recently invited me to write some thoughts on belonging. He said this: "Specifically, if you could share a story on a time where you felt that you truly belonged — even if it was just for a moment." He published my response today (May 17, 2014), so I'm sharing it here too. This is the link to his blog,  Not Boring Yet :  http://notboringyet.com/saturday-stories/belonging-saturday-stories/   I invite you to visit his blog and read some of the other stories from other contributors. I felt like I did not know how to pray for nearly two decades. Oh, I prayed, but my sense was that my prayers were ineffective—like lead balloons—my prayers didn’t even reach the ceiling, let alone G_d, or so I thought. The very public process of transitioning seemed so drastic and unfair. After all, the struggle with my gender identity was a very private matter. Why was the solution—if, in fact, to tra...

As featured in Medium.com Ever wonder what it might be like to change into a different person? I’ve lived in Vancouver for the last forty years of my life; that’s about two-thirds of the total trips I’ve taken around the sun. I’ve met hundreds of people during those years, if not thousands. Some were my business clients; a couple were my bosses; dozens were my employees; about three hundred were my students at Capilano College; a crazy number were customers I had the pleasure of serving at my family’s restaurant in Kitsilano, Las Margaritas; another five hundred or so were fellow worshippers in the seven different churches we attended as a family; and several dozen were neighbors, the parents of our children’s friends, and the many other people I knew only by first name—the grocery store clerks, pharmacists, postal delivery persons, etc. I haven’t added all these people up, and I don’t know how my list compares to yours—is it larger, smaller, or average in size? I have no way of...

Long before I could admit I was transgender, I spent twenty-one weeks trying to apply the teachings of Exodus to myself. In 1991 I became aware of a ministry at my brother’s church that was trying to help gays and lesbians change their sexual orientation. The program’s director was Marjorie Hopper, a very masculine-looking woman with a harrowing, complicated, and difficult story. For years she lived as a man and worked as a custodian until she was outed at work, and her world came crumbling down. She had a religious experience and became a zealous anti-gay advocate and eventually the director of the Living Waters program at Burnaby Christian Fellowship (BCF). Living Waters was one of the many ministries associated with Exodus International. In those days, as I struggled with my gender identity, I desperately hoped God would heal me and remove all my feelings of inadequacy as a man. The word transgender entered our vocabulary, and there were new ways of thinking that, honestly, scared ...

Who Made Me Gender-Role Police? The story is titled “About a Boy: Transgender surgery at age sixteen” by Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker Magazine (March 18, 2013). It talks about how many more females are coming out as transgender now than in the past. But as I reflected on the amazing progress trans people have made in recent years, it made me aware of my own subtle bias about gender-role conformity. Indeed, my doctors tell me that compared to twenty years ago, when it seemed that twice as many males transitioned to females than females to males, today there is equilibrium in the numbers, with as many females as males identifying as transgender. Margaret Talbot says this: In the past, females who wished to live as males rarely sought surgery, partly because they could “pass” easily enough in public; today, there is a desire for more thorough transformations. The subject of her story is a young transman named Skylar who underwent top surgery at sixteen, a much younger age than wou...