Lisa Salazar's Posts

Based on a 2014 survey, this essay revisits what trans lives reveal about inner life and spiritual endurance at a time of renewed religious hostility. Image of light streaming in, finally. In the fall of 2014, I set out to ask a deceptively simple question: What does spirituality actually look like in the lives of transgender people? At the time, public conversations about transgender lives were only beginning to edge into mainstream awareness. The language we now use so easily, especially the word  non-binary , had not yet entered common circulation. Most people in my community described themselves as trans men, trans women, gender-queer, or gender-fluid, using the language that was available to them then. If this same survey were conducted today, many of those same participants might well describe themselves differently. The map of language has changed. The terrain of human experience beneath it has not. I was not trying to make a theological argument or defend any religious inst...

On how a quiet truth can unsettle those who haven’t yet faced their own. 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. **** 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.

“No one should lose their child so that someone else can feel more comfortable in their fear.” What might be coming down the tracks as we look toward the dawning of a new day?

Why I No Longer Pray: This reflection isn’t a rejection of awe, gratitude, or the Sacred. It’s an honest exploration of why I’ve stepped away from petitionary prayer and toward reflection, responsibility, and embodied care. I offer it in a spirit of curiosity rather than certainty, and with respect for those whose prayers still sustain them.

  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 ...

  ...And My Life Under Three Flags — My father’s story begins long before mine, obviously, but in many ways, it was already writing the script for who I would become, not just as his child, but as a trans woman who would one day have to find her own voice against the quiet pressures of conformity. His choices, his silences, and his small acts of defiance shaped more than our family’s path across borders; they became part of the map I would one day follow to claim my own existence.

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.

Behind the memes and the politics lies something heartbreakingly simple: a generation of young men who feel like they’ll never have a future.

  This was a Facebook post from August 20, in response to a well-intentioned pastor offering her interpretation on minor inconveniences. It was bullshit with a cherry on top.

  On August 15, 2025, the YouTube channel "Breaking Bread" published a video titled "Female Trump Voters Shocked to Realize They Voted on End Women's Rights." What follows is a tragicomedy that practically writes itself: MAGA women suddenly realizing the men they’ve elevated are openly plotting to strip them of the very rights they take for granted.