Leon (She/They)
"Home is wherever water flows..."
Leon Tsai (she/they) is a Taiwanese settler-immigrant and
trans-feminine storyteller (un/re)learning in Tkaronto.
She is a blossoming flower giving birth to herself while seeding, cultivating, and searching for softness...
Leon is here: home wherever the water flows, still breathing for the light beyond and
to the glory of those after her as she invites the world on this journey:
a soul of feelings planning, caring, and preparing for the softest revolution yet.
Leon's Journey/Visions
The Art of A Softer Survival:
Living & Loving through Solidarity
Born and raised in Taiwan and arrived in colonized Turtle Island (Canada, North America) in 2012, Leon is here as a 22 years old settler-immigrant storyteller in Tkaronto (Toronto, Ontario). After first coming out as queer at the age of 12, she then came out as gender-fluid around 14/15 and finally as trans feminine at 16 years old. Through growing, navigating, and un/relearning socio-political truths, Leon began public speaking and organizing first in the fields of feminism, 2SLGBTQ+ and youth empowerment, and now also in spaces centering BIPOC reparations/healing as well as conversations sustaining mental health and mad/disability justice. With the teachings and affirmations through compassionate politics by cultivating empathy for the goals of restorative/transformative justice, Leon is here to serve and contribute to our collective breath, always honoured/humbled to collaborate.
Teachings
Community Consultations/Lectures/Workshops:
Compassionate Conversations in Softness
Leon passionately develops/offers educational, reflective and impactful programmings/presentations while utilizing interdisciplinary mediums as well as ideologies: An exploration between interpersonal storytelling, social-political theories, and poetic/artistic expressions.
Storytelling Samples:
Gender Diversity:
Queer/Trans Education/Expression
The histories of binary colonial constructions to the cis-heteronormative cultrues; the explorations and intersections of Sex, Gender Identities, Sexual/Romantic Attractions, and Gender Expressions at the crossroads of marginalization as well as the burdens of queer and trans liberation...
The conversation can start with learning 2SLGBTQ+ identities/expressions while (re/un)learning and decolonizing our understandings of gender/sexuality.
consent 101:
power & pleasure
Know what is yours and who isn't.
Know what you deserve and when to stop.
Know who you are and
Apologize/Forgive your body...
Understanding, practicing, and cultivating consent culture is re/unlearning our ways of honouring not only others' boundaries, but also our own. Leon speaks from not only a survivor, but as well as one who has worked closely with consent programming, sexual violence prevention and procedural policies, other survivors and activists.
Trans Feminism/
Gender Liberation:
The Future Is Non-Binary
The future is not female;
The future is non-binary: it is queer/trans, it is Black reparations and Indigenous rising, it is equity and justice without bullshit and it is soft, it is fuck the police and it is for the people, it is mad/disability affirming and it is accessible, it is income equality and it is intersectional and non-hierarchal... it is revolutionary.
the art of mediocracy & softness:
surviving/navigating academia
While surviving within capitalistic institutions: an exploration of redefining success and an embodiment against colonial-institutionalization. From navigating academia and trying to stay alive, surviving marginalization/violences on campus and from attempts of perfection to true excellence, Leon shares the stories of dismantling the (North)American dream.
Breathing Softer So We Don't Break:
"you deserve to feel light"
An exploration of mindfulness and healing through transformative justice and compassionate politics as a storyteller searching for softness, as a femme of feelings for healing, and as a mad survivor of psychological/physical/political/mental/generational/spiritual traumas.
blossom:
a flower giving birth to herself
A storytelling of her becoming as she shares her journey self-realization and actualization - the magic and realness of trans-femmehood. She gives birth to herself like an ever softer blossom, and she meditates for our seeds of collective grounding.
Services
- Community Consultations
- Performances of Spoken Word Poetry
- Commissions of Writing/Publishing
- Public Speaking:
Keynote Lectures & Presentations/
Workshop Facilitations/
Panel Discussions
please contact to arrange/organize with
plans of compensation/honorarium
However, Leon believes this work to be accessible to all thus open and looking forward to work with and/or support/uplift
other not-for-profit/equity-focused/humanitarian-driven organizations, yet will seek for compensations strictly from systematic institutions and/or spaces of corporations and
socio-political, economical profit.
