Tag: Trans | CATIE Blog

From safety to belonging: The essential elements of gender-responsive harm reduction

March 2, 2026 • By Phoenix Babiak, Katherine Rudzinski, Lindsay Windhager, Charlotte Smith and Carol Strike

As the toxic drug crisis continues to devastate communities across Canada, available supports are dwindling. In Ontario, many supervised injection services (SIS) have been shuttered by regressive and dangerous government policies. This attack on evidence-based care limits opportunities to expand and diversify harm reduction services, which is especially harmful to women, trans and non-binary people who use drugs (WTNB-PWUD) as their gender-specific needs are already often overlooked in harm reduction services. Only a small number of SIS have provided dedicated spaces for WTNB-PWUD. Looking more closely at the lessons learned from these effective models can help inform where the harm...

Providing STBBI services to trans people: Beyond kindness, what truly matters?

February 18, 2025 • By Asya Gunduz

It is around 11 p.m. and I am getting an urgent call from a friend who is a community member and a refugee trans woman living with HIV. She is telling me that she cannot get the urgent treatment she needs at the hospital and that the front desk misgendered her many times and frowned upon her broken English. Later, I learned that different clinics denied and delayed her HIV and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) meds for different reasons like lack of insurance or language barrier. Another community member who is nonbinary, assigned female at birth, was constantly questioned at...

The critical state of trans health care and the importance of therapeutic alliance

May 28, 2018 • By Florence Ashley

I don’t really like medical spaces. For me, they’re not just spaces that are essential to my health, but also spaces of exclusion and trauma. How often have I heard about people from my communities being refused care? A chronic migraine blamed on hormones. An open wound left unbandaged because they “don’t have the expertise necessary to deal with that kind of people”. And what about inappropriate questions, wrong names on files, or deadnames read out loud in the waiting room, in front of everyone?

Travail du sexe des hommes et des personnes trans : décriminaliser et défaire les préjugés

February 7, 2017 • By Jonathan Bacon

Je me vois souvent contraint de commencer mes billets sur le travail du sexe en parlant du Grand Prix de F1 de Montréal. Chaque année, dans la foulée du Grand Prix – et particulièrement l’année dernière, en juin – les médias se font un plaisir, sinon un devoir, de prendre d’assaut ce qu’ils perçoivent comme une violente augmentation de l’exploitation sexuelle et de la traite des femmes dans le cadre de ces évènements sportifs. Cette médiatisation s’inscrit dans une approche abolitionniste aux effets néfastes, ceux-ci incluant une surveillance accrue, des arrestations plus fréquentes et des risques de déportation plus élevés...

3 things to keep in mind about trans (men’s) inclusion in HIV prevention research

May 19, 2015 • By Ayden Scheim

In response to mounting evidence of the prevention benefits of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) use by HIV-negative gay and bisexual men, a discussion recently emerged on social media about the perceived exclusion of trans men1 who have sex with men from PrEP research studies. In fact, trans men participate in many HIV prevention research studies, whether or not they are identified as trans when results are reported. Some do not identify as trans, but rather as men of trans experience or transitioned men, and are happy to check the “male” box without qualification. Other studies have explicitly included trans men and...