Growing into Resilience: Sexual and Gender Minority Youth in Canada

Preface: Remembering the Vriend Decision

Part I: Steeling Life in the Face of Adversity

InterText I – Mara: Learning to Own Gay

InterText II – Vincent: I’m Passing

1. Making It Better NOW for Sexual and Gender Minority Youth

InterText III – Sean: I’m a Man, Yes I Am

2. Gender Beautiful: Living in the Fullness of One’s Affirmed Gender Identity and True Gender Self

InterText IV – Larissa: My Heritage is a Big Thing

3. Camp fYrefly: fostering, Youth, resilience, energy, fun, leadership, yeah!

InterText V – Mark: Being the Boy I Am

InterText VI – Paul: Bringing People Out of Silence

4. Making and Implementing Policies to Protect Sexual and Gender Minority Youth in Schooling and Healthcare

Part II: From At Risk to At Promise

(Chapters with Kristopher Wells)

InterText VII – John: Learning to Own Gay

5. The Marc Hall Prom Predicament: Queer Individual Rights v. Institutional Church Rights in Canadian Public Education

InterText VIII – Sam: It’s Like Piranhas, Man

6. Gay and Bisexual Male Youth as Educator Activists and Cultural Workers: The Queer Critical Praxis of Three Canadian High-School Students

InterText IX – Jon: Born to Be, Deserving to be Happy in My Own Skin

7. The Mental and Sexual Health Nexus in the Comprehensive Health of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth

InterText X – David: Stealth, But Living Trans Fulltime

8. Gay-Straight Alliances and the Quest for Recognition and Accommodation of Sexual and Gender Minority Students in Canadian Schools

Appendix: Growing into Resilience: An Emergent Research Typology of a Dynamic Process from the 1980s into the Present Moment