How this New Brunswicker is helping trans youth after growing up struggling to belong

Growing up in Saint-Quentin, a small village in northwestern New Brunswick, Pascale Joëlle always felt different.

Even though they had their solid groups of friends, they never felt like they truly belonged.

"It was always like, 'okay, yes, I am friends with those people' … but inside there was still that missing piece," Joëlle said.

"Without seeing myself reflected in anything, it was hard for me to really grasp and be like, 'okay, yeah, I belong.'"

Now 30 years old, Joëlle is a married business owner living in Moncton who identifies as a trans-masculine non-binary person. 

Transgender refers to someone whose gender identity differs from what they were assigned at birth. It's an umbrella term that encompasses identities like non-binary, which refers to people who fall outside the male-female gender binary.

Each year in mid-November, Transgender Awareness Week is held. That's followed by Transgender Remembrance Day on Nov. 20, which is dedicated to commemorating those who have died due to transphobic acts and drawing attention to the violence directed toward transgender people.

While the day was first observed in 1999 to memorialize Massachusetts transgender women Rita Hester and Chenelle Pickett, who were murdered, Joëlle said it continues to hold significance for many trans people since "we are still under attack."

"We all hear of those horrendous stories where they commit suicide, they are attacked, they get killed," said Joëlle. 

"Families lost people. They lost loved ones because of the hatred, because of not seeing yourself past a certain age."

According to the Trans Murder Monitoring Report, 350 trans and gender-diverse people were reported murdered worldwide between Oct. 1, 2023 and Sept. 30, 2024 — one of the highest death tolls since its start in 2008.

For Joëlle, they are working to increase education around 2SLGBTQ+ topics because they know what it's like to grow up without any representation in their community.

In school, Joëlle said they were taught what a boy's body looks like and what a girl's body looks like and how those two genders should act. But when puberty hit, Joëlle couldn't understand why they didn't check either of those boxes.

"As a teen, that's the one thing you want to do, is fit in, and I just didn't have that."