Mirha-Soleil Ross
| Mirha-Soleil Ross | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1969 Montreal, QC, Canada |
| Other names | Jeanne B |
| Known for | Transsexual, sex-worker and animal-rights activism, films |
Mirha-Soleil Ross is a transsexual videographer, performance artist, sex worker and activist. Her work since the early 1990s in Montreal and Toronto has focused on transsexual rights, access to resources, advocacy for sex workers and animal rights.
Ross grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Montreal. As a teenager during the 1980s, she became aware of animal abuse. At that time, Ross became a vegetarian and involved with animal rights activism. She said that although people often ask her what it was like to try to pass as a woman, she struggled much more when she was trying to "pass" as a boy and was often attacked for looking too feminine. Ross moved from Montreal to Toronto during the early 1990s, where she was a sex worker and began producing zines and videos.
From 1993 to 1995 Ross and partner Xanthra Phillippa MacKay published gendertrash from hell, a quarterly zine which "[gave] a voice to gender queers, who've been discouraged from speaking out & communicating with each other". They managed the zine's publisher, genderpress, which also distributed other transsexual pamphlets and literature, corresponded with local organizations and sold buttons.
In standard zine format, gendertrash was a combination of art, poetry, resource lists, serialized fiction, calls to action, classified ads, illustrations and collages and movie reviews. By and for transsexual, transgender and transvestite people, it addressed gender experiences at the individual and societal level and prioritized sex workers, low-income queers, trans people of colour and prisoners. Articles frequently addressed the erasure of transsexuals from lesbian, gay, bi and queer communities and the communities' co-opting of trans identities and issues. Five issues of gendertrash were published, and its run ended in 1995.
Ross' videos, primarily short films, centre on gender, sexuality, animal rights and the humour and beauty of the transsexual body. Her videos are distributed by V tape in Toronto.
Ross produced a one-woman show, Yapping Out Loud: Contagious Thoughts from an Unrepentant Whore, based on her sex work and activism, at the 2002 Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts and in 2004 at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. The show intended to educate audiences about issues facing sex workers and refute stereotypes contributing to violence against them.Yapping Out Loud also incorporated Ross' animal-rights activism with images of coyotes and comparisons between oppression faced by sex workers and coyotes, inspired by the American sex-worker organization Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics. In 2001 and 2002 she performed a nine-month Pregnancy Project, appearing in public with a prosthetic belly to have conversations about gender, motherhood and the possibility of womb transplants for transsexuals.
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