Everyday Resistance of Gender-Diverse People in Canadian Housing Justice Work

Acts of everyday resistance can be integral for queer and trans communities’ survival in systems that may insidiously, or overtly, contribute to everyday violence against them. Gender-diverse people (including transgender, non-binary and Two-Spirit people) have long had to undertake labour to ensure their own survival and that of their communities, including defining, building, and accessing ‘home’ in a ruthlessly gender-normative system. In the territories known as Canada, gender-diverse people are overrepresented in populations navigating housing precarity and are deeply underserved by shelters and housing services. In part, these institutions persist in maintaining rigid binaric gender divisions. In 2019, Canada’s National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA) propelled interest in investigating housing rights violations, and how the State might facilitate housing for all. In this article, we draw on our collective work together to explore rights-based mechanisms for gender-diverse communities, including the creation of a collaborative zine. We consider two key topics: 1) gender-diverse experiences of housing rights (and rights violations), and intersecting experiences in the welfare, education, healthcare, and criminal legal systems—each positioned to offer ‘help’, but more often being sites of systemic discrimination, exclusion, and harm for gender-diverse people; 2) archiving queer and trans resistance and organising, paying attention to tensions between everyday resistance and collective resistance movements. We explore how some housing rights mechanisms—which we position as an exemplification of ‘benign power’—may more effectively build on strategies led by, and grounded in knowledge from, gender-diverse people. We aim for this article to be actionable for other gender-diverse housing activists to understand what our often invisibilized resistance labour can and has contributed to changing housing systems that are insufficient for assuring the right to a safe, permanent, and adequate place to call home.