Today is International Transgender Day of Visibility, and while it should absolutely be a day to celebrate trans lives, brilliance, and contribution, it should also push us to be honest about the moment we are in.
Too often, in today’s political climate, trans people are pulled into a culture war they did not create. They are used as a political distraction, a scapegoat, and a hot-button issue by people who benefit from keeping public attention on identity instead of the systems failing them.
That matters because visibility is not neutral when the systems around you are still unsafe.
It is also why visibility has to be about more than being seen. It has to be about evidence. When the data needed to understand trans people’s real experiences is missing, flattened under broader umbrellas, or too aggregated to be useful, misinformation travels faster and further than truth. Good data does not replace lived experience, but it does make it harder for systems to dismiss patterns as isolated stories.
That is part of why I was so proud to work on Environics Research’s partnership with Pink Triangle Press to publish the report: 2SLGBTQIA+ Health Disparities in Canada. Together, we produced a report that makes clear how urgently Canada needs more standardized, inclusive, and disaggregated health data on 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.
Because when everything gets collapsed into one umbrella, the people carrying the heaviest burden can disappear inside the category. In designing this study with Pink Triangle Press, we knew we needed to treat communities under the 2SLGBTQIA+ umbrella as distinct, not monolithic. We built the project to surface intragroup differences because we knew that if we wanted to understand where inequities were most severe, and how the system was treating different communities differently, we could not flatten those experiences into one broad label.
So on a day like today, it felt important to highlight a few of the findings that make visible the ways the healthcare system is failing trans people.
Using validated clinical assessment tools, the study found substantially higher depression and anxiety severity among trans respondents:
It also found that:
This report also highlighted important differences within the broader 2SLGBTQIA+ community. As a queer cis man, it reinforced for me that allyship to the trans community means recognizing that the healthcare system is not failing all of us equally. And with that comes a responsibility to use the voice and privilege I have to help bring attention to that reality.
Some of the differences that stood out most to me within the broader 2SLGBTQIA+ community were these:
That is not a small difference in experience. That is a completely different relationship to care, safety, and recognition.
This is why disaggregation matters. Aggregate data can tell us there is a problem. Disaggregated data shows us where the burden is landing, who is being failed most severely, and how the system is producing that harm.
So on a day like today, I keep coming back to this: visibility, on its own, is not enough.
Trans people should not only be visible when they are being debated. They should be visible in how systems are designed, how data is collected, how standards of care are developed, and how decisions around funding and accountability are made.
This report helps show what that action can actually look like: better provider education, more inclusive mental health services, safer healthcare environments, and standardized sex and gender data collection.
Trans Day of Visibility should absolutely be a celebration. It should honour trans brilliance, resilience, leadership, and contribution. But if trans people are visible enough to be politicized, they should be visible enough to be protected.
Because if visibility is not followed by protection, policy, and accountability, it is not solidarity. It is performance.
