Aaron Devor (he/him)

Aaron Devor came out the first time in 1966, when queer was a slur and gay bars were hidden behind unmarked doors where you needed to know someone and a password to get in.

Living as a lesbian and still jailbait, he was caught in a raid at a NY bar the summer of Stonewall.

Moving to Toronto soon after, he became involved with the earliest lesbian, gay, and feminist organizing there in the early 1970s, including the first meetings of The Body Politic.

In the 1980s, he started studying gender diverse people like himself.

In 1989, he became a prof at the University of Victoria and published the first book, Gender Blending, about people who we might now call nonbinary. His second book, FTM (1997) became a classic about trans men.

When he came out as trans in 2002, he was Dean of Graduate Studies at UVic and it made national news. Since then, he has gone on to found the world’s largest Transgender Archives (2011), the Moving Trans History Forward conferences (2014), and the world’s only Chair in Transgender Studies (2016). He is the author of many publications about Trans+ people and has been recognized with numerous awards.