Jake Pyne

Jake Pyne has spent the past thirteen years as an advocate and a community-based researcher in Toronto's transgender community. Alongside a host of committed colleagues, Jake has worked on initiatives to improve transgender people's access to emergency services, health care, and family law equality, and more recently, to support gender-independent children and transgender youth.

As an advocate, Jake led a team of trainers and policy consultants from 2001--2008 at The 519 Church Street Community Centre in Toronto to improve transgender access to homeless shelters. In 2004, this team received a provincial award for outstanding work on behalf of homeless people, and in 2008, the City of Toronto granted it a Public Service Award of Excellence. In 2012, Jake co-organized the first National Workshop on Gender Creative Kids at Concordia University and helped to establish the national website, GenderCreativeKids.ca. At Rainbow Health Ontario, Jake worked with a committee of provincial stakeholders to develop resources for the families and service providers of gender-independent children, and in 2013, he co-led a national research meeting to identify barriers to these children's wellbeing.

As a community-based researcher, Jake is a co-Investigator on a number of studies, including Trans PULSE, which the Institute for Gender and Health named in 2010 one of the nation's top ten success stories in sex, gender, and health research. With the Centre for the Study of Gender, Social Inequities and Mental Health, and the LGBTQ Parenting Network at the Sherbourne Health Centre, Jake launched a study about transgender parents that resulted in a provincial initiative to address family law bias and informed a documentary by filmmaker Rémy Huberdeau that aired on CBC in 2014.

As a scholar, Jake's work explores what various knowledge systems and social and institutional practices foreclose and make possible for gender non-conforming people. His work has been published in academic journals, edited collections, and online forums, and he has presented to audiences at provincial, national, and international conferences. Jake is the recipient of twenty academic and community-based awards. He holds both bachelor's and master's degrees in social work from Ryerson University, and is currently studying Social Work and Gender Studies at McMaster University.