2SLGBTQAI+: Streaming Videos & Podcasts

Changing sex. Not simple, not well understood, not consistently regulated, but here to stay and getting complicated. The Fifth Estate follows 17-year-old Adina Scheim from Toronto, who is becoming a boy named Ayden. Ayden is willing to go to great lengths to alter her female body to correspond with her male self-image. And Ayden is not alone. One Canadian clinic is carrying out 250 sex reassignments per year. Women and men of all ages believe that identity is not as simple as what kind of body parts they happen to be born with. In order to find their true identity, they’re prepared to undergo major surgery, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars and is most often irreversible. Ayden’s parents and friends, health and gender experts, and several individuals who chose sex re-assignment offer insight into a charged and complex issue. [From Website]

Through its streaming video collections, the library provides access to thousands of videos online. This guide offers instructions on how to provide access to these collections for teaching purposes.

They called it "Gay Day." 100 protesters gathered in Ottawa in August 1971 for the first large-scale public protest for gay rights in Canada. Speakers addressed the fact that amendments to the criminal code in 1969 legalized their sexual relations but did little to alleviate the oppression of the gay community in everyday life.

I Am Skylar is the emotionally compelling story of an articulate 14-year-old girl who is thoughtfully defining her future and the woman she is to become. Surrounded by a family and a community who show her unconditional love as she follows her personal path, Skylar faces the complexities of being a transgender girl on the cusp of puberty with refreshing honesty and unshakeable dignity.

Positive Women meets three people who have contracted the virus. But they are neither gay, nor intravenous drug users. All three have been devastated by a disease now affecting more heterosexuals than gay men. Sarah only discovered she was HIV positive in a routine hospital check during her pregnancy. Emma fell in love with a middle-class older man she met - only finding out she was HIV positive after the condom split. And when Nikki, already diagnosed as positive, fell pregnant, she had her baby - only to lose her to Aids, aged two.

Stonewall Uprising explores the dramatic events that launched a worldwide civil rights movement. When police raided a Mafia-run gay bar in Greenwich Village, the Stonewall Inn, on June 28, 1969, gay men and women did something they had not done before-they fought back. As the streets of New York erupted into violent protests and street demonstrations, the collective anger announced that the gay rights movement had arrived.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has issued a historic apology to members of the LGBT community. It's for actions the Canadian government took against them, simply because they were gay.

CBC British Columbia host Wil Fundal explores gender and more in They & Us: a six-part podcast series about people who have had to go beyond the binary – the "he" and "she" – to figure out who they truly are.