Beverley Wybrow, receiving the Constance E. Hamilton Award on the status of women, talked of the "ripple effect" of her work with women. "When you help women, they help other women, families and kids. When you change women, you change the world."
Pride Award winners Rupert Raj and Deb Parent were articulate and moving. Raj, a gender specialist, urged a re-education of "doctors and psychiatrists, priests and rabbis that transgender, transvestites and transsexuals are natural and normative on Mother Nature's continuum of gender diversity."
Parent, active in Lesbians Against the Right and in dyke dances and Take Back the Night marches, said she was "lucky to be born queer in Toronto (as opposed to one of the 70 countries where homosexuality is still illegal and the nine where it carries a death penalty.) "Thank you for embracing me as I am, and loving me into myself."
