Trans+ Visibility in an Age of Erasure and Misinformation
Date: Thursday, October 9, 2025
Time: 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm
Location: Zoom webinar
Hosted by ULethbridge’s Office of Accessibility, Belonging, and Inclusion, this panel will provide a courageous space to discuss the current state of visibility and discourse around transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer (trans+) bodies, identities, and lived realities, both globally and in Canada. Join ULethbridge and MRU scholars as they unravel how we came to be at this place in trans+ history, what contributed to the rampant disinformation about trans+ bodies and realities, and where we must go to ensure the future is inclusive. Learn from scholars and experts about the various ways events in the United States continue to contribute to the ongoing confusion and misinformation about trans+ folks in Canada, and how we can prevent further marginalization of 2SLGBTQ+ communities.
Panelists
Dr. A.J. Lowik (they/them)
Dr. A.J. Lowik is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Lethbridge. Their qualitative, mixed-methods and arts-based research focuses on the reproductive lives and health of trans people, including menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, nursing and menopause. They also work to ensure that health research is meaningfully inclusive of intersex, trans and Two-Spirit people, and that it mobilizes sex and gender concepts with accuracy and precision.
Brent Saccucci (all pronouns)
Brent Saccucci has worked as a K-12 teacher and equity consultant in schools and universities across Canada for over a decade. He is now a faculty member in the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge, where he teaches courses in the social, cultural, and political contexts of education as well as critical media literacy. Before ULethbridge, Brent taught social justice and literacy education at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta. Brent is a Senior Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Far-Right Studies and serves as Faculty Advisor of the inaugural Leading Social Change in Schools Cohort for over 60 teachers looking to make change in Southern Alberta schools and communities. He is also a doctoral student at Western University in social justice education, where he studies theocratic government’s curriculum censorship of queer and trans voices. Brent is also writing an open-access, multimodal textbook with queer and trans students as a way to combat misinformation on ‘gender ideology’ in education; and he co-created a new cross-faculty course on “Misinformation” with six other faculty on the UofL campus to help equip undergraduate students with the tools needed for an increasingly polarized information world. Most recently, Brent was awarded the 2025 Alberta Human Rights Champion by the John Humphrey Centre for Peace & Human Rights.
Corinne Mason (they/them)
Corinne L. Mason is a Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Mount Royal University (MRU). Their research program is inspired by two central curiosities: 1) reproductive justice and queer kinship, including kinship navigation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the centrality of homo and transphobia in discourses on birth rates, and queer parenting in the time of “parental rights," and 2) the institutionalization of feminist and queer logics in higher education, including critical studies of EDI and sexualized violence responses. Mason is the co-founder and co-director of QriTical: queer + trans research hub at MRU and the co-Chair of the Women's, Gender and Social Justice Association (WGSJ) Association.
Facilitator
Katie DeLucia (she/her)
Katie is a Consultant in the Office of Accessibility, Belonging, and Community, as well as serving as a Projects Consultant in the Office of Human Resources at the University of Lethbridge. A queer, trans-woman with over a decade of lived experience and academic and advocacy work around gendered realities and possibilities, Katie is a Registered Social Worker, holding a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Calgary. Her work centers around transformative systemic change, applications of trans-feminist theory and research, and developing resources and policies to support marginalized communities.