Organizing with Joy: A Conversation with Fae Johnstone of Queer Momentum

From bodily autonomy to building solidarity, Fae Johnstone reflects on the power of conversation, community, and getting offline!

Pride Month may be over, but the work of advancing 2SLGBTQIA+ rights continues year-round.

While in Toronto, for Pride, we sat down with Fae Johnstone, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Queer Momentum, before she headed to Kitchener for the next stop on the organization’s Trans Canada Tour.

Queer Momentum is a national advocacy organization dedicated to advancing the equality, freedom, and rights of 2SLGBTQIA+ people through political organizing and movement-building. Since May, the team has been travelling coast to coast—visiting every province and at least two territories—with more than 65 events planned through September to connect local communities to a broader national movement.

We spoke to Fae about organizing with joy, the connections between trans rights and bodily autonomy, and the importance of getting offline to reconnect with one another.

Here’s our conversation with Fae Johnstone.

Planned Parenthood Toronto: We’ve heard you talk about the importance of getting offline and reconnecting in our communities. Is that a big part of what inspired the Trans Canada Tour? And why did this feel like the right moment to bring people together in person across the country?

Fae Johnstone: That’s exactly it. I think it’s become harder to have real conversations–and hard conversations. Everyone’s broke, everyone’s scared, the world is on fire, and we can choose to either yell at each other about it, or we can try to find common ground. That has really been our hope with the Ask A Trans Person Anything events. And then the other piece is, from a movement strategy perspective, the opposition has done a good job of framing us as if we’re going to yell at them, as if we’re shutting down debate–and this is our rejection of that. It’s our invitation to have the conversation, because we believe our ideas are better than theirs. We stand by our values, we stand by what we believe, and if there is going to be a debate, we actually think we will win it, and that Canadians will back us up. 

PPT: You’ve spent a lot of time talking to people across the country. What’s one thing queer and trans communities are teaching the rest of us about life right now?

FJ: I think we’re starting to teach the world that we need to have fun when we do the work. Like our Politics With a Drag Queen show–it’s political education, but it’s also drag. It’s hot, it’s sexy, it’s sickening, it’s an incredible experience, and I think a lot of progressive organizing has been built on a lot of anger, hurt, and despair about the rollback of our freedom and rights, which is so fair. However, if we don’t organize with joy—if we don’t organize with hope—we will, in fact, lose. And I think queer and trans communities are bearing the brunt. We are one of the chief targets in this era of backlash, and we could choose to just be in that despair, or we can throw a party, bring community together, educate some people, and bring some hope back to the conversation.

PPT: Rhetoric about trans rights is often framed as a conflict between the rights of trans people and the rights of other groups, like parents or cisgender women. What do you make of that framing, and what do you think it gets wrong?

FJ: I think it’s a misrepresentation of how rights work. When we expand human rights protections to include more communities, we build a strong human rights framework for all of us. I also think it’s a disservice to how we experience violence. I think that in this world, trans people, women, newcomers, minority-based communities, you know, we do have a shared experience: a world that wasn’t built for us, a world that speaks over us, that denies us employment and safety. And when we instead nitpick one group’s rights versus another, we’re actually not holding systems and structures accountable for the violence that they enact on whole communities.

PPT: What connections do you see between the fight for trans rights and the broader fight for bodily autonomy?

FJ: It’s no coincidence that they’re starting with trans people and our healthcare access, because when they can rationalize a government putting politicians in your family doctor’s office interfering in the medical decisions and autonomy of young people, of families, and of physicians, it sets a really compelling precedent to do that again. In Alberta, as soon as they introduced anti-trans legislation, there was polling being done by the pro-life ecosystem around age of consent laws for abortion access, and that’s not a coincidence. I’m in this fight to restore rights for my trans community, but at the core of this is the defense of all the progressive world knows and loves and believes it is about bodily autonomy. It’s about universal health care. So there aren’t just connections between these struggles, they are one struggle for a world where politicians aren’t able to tell us how we can live, love, look, or what healthcare we can access.

PPT: In one of your newsletters, you wrote that “bigots rely on fear.” What’s the antidote to fear? How do we build solidarity and momentum in difficult political moments? 

FJ: The antidote to fear is remembering how powerful we are, remembering that the world does agree with us. Most Canadians want freedom, equality, and human rights for themselves and everyone else, too. I think that fear is a strategy of our opposition, and we need to understand it as such and choose hope instead—choose to believe that our movements can and will get through this, and to hope that most people’s minds can be changed. Because of our echo chamber, we imagine that everyone who disagrees with us is a bigot, a fascist, full of hate. Most are just moms who are confused and concerned for their kids or parents or community members, members of […] minority faith communities who haven’t had the conversation with us yet. I think it’s really powerful to remember that we can win just about everybody over. And solidarity is helping connect the dots around a shared struggle, because if this is just about trans people, we will lose. There are not enough of us, and the opposition wants to silo and segment us off, because they hope that you won’t notice, and you won’t care if it’s about people that you don’t understand. But through this agenda they are violating human rights, and that threatens everybody’s collective human rights. We need to make sure that people understand that trans people are a means to an end in this moment, and that the threat is shared, so our solidarity has to be, too.

PPT: Many people want to support trans rights but aren’t always sure what meaningful allyship looks like. What are some practical ways people can show up for trans communities right now?

FJ: I would say, don’t look away from Alberta. Don’t move on from the struggle of trans Albertans. I think we write off our friends in Western Canada and Alberta specifically, and that is a disservice to them, to their struggle, and to the long history of leadership on queer issues that we’ve seen from Albertan communities. My second one would be, stop lecturing and start building relationships. I don’t need allies who go off about preferred pronouns or go on about cis-hetero patriarchy. I need conversation. I need allies who are saying, “Hey, stop being a dick”, or like, “Here is why the policies in Alberta are harmful, because this is the impact they’re having on families and kids.” I need allies who are having the conversation, not looking to one up somebody they perceive as a bigot, because every time we do that, we push bigots further away, and we push people who could be our friends down that same path.

PPT: Is there anything else you’d wish we’d asked, or you’d like to add?

FJ: I’m excited by the tide shift that I am seeing in our movement. That’s what this tour has shown me, that our movement is gearing up to help us build that better world. And no one is going to be able to stop the momentum that we’re building,

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Thank you to Fae Johnstone for taking the time to speak with us.

You can learn more about Queer Momentum and the Trans Canada Tour at queermomentum.ca, or follow @queermomentum on Instagram and @queermomentum.ca on Bluesky.