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Pascale Diverlus
What's up everybody? My name is Pascale Diverlus. I am a writer, educator, founder of Living Practices Consulting, and one half of your hosting team for Speak, Unspoken.
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Rodney Diverlus
Hello, my name is Rodney Diverlus. I am an artist and a change maker with an interest in the most transformative ideas.
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Pascale Diverlus
You know, our technician, Angelyn, pointed out this intro and I really was ignoring it, but I think it is time to just let it go. Let it go, let it go.
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Rodney Diverlus
Just accept it.
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Pascale Diverlus
Just accept it. It definitely is. It is something.
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Rodney Diverlus
Okay. Everybody puts a thumbs up if you're down for HELLUR, I am sure, I am sure they’re on my side. 2slgbtq+, you know what I do have to say? One of the things that I do love about the gays is that we are absolutely the innovators in the title. It will change, friends.
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Pascale Diverlus
It will change.
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Rodney Diverlus
It will change. So, if you are down, if you're an ally, like you say and you're like, why are they keep changing? It will change. And it really is like the deep empathy and the attempt to recognize that although society will never give us what we want, we can try to give it to each other. And sometimes that means reordering our acronym around.
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Pascale Diverlus
Honestly, I work, you know, I do comms work. And so I worked in jobs. People were like, why? Why are we changing this? Again? We just used this last week.
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Pascale Diverlus
This site says this, this site says this, and I'm like, yeah, when I actually do workshops that are specifically around queer trans, I have to be like, I'm using the word queer and trans, like that's the phrase I'm going to use. That's the one I'm going to use just to not get upset over this.
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Pascale Diverlus
This is what I am choosing to use because, you know, people also are very sensitive about which ones, rightfully so, rightfully so.
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Rodney Diverlus
And I think it's like a community that has to spend a lot of time finding themselves and getting respect for their name and themselves and the pronouns and their identities. And I also think that there's an opposite side, that there are people out there that are trying to push the T out.
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Pascale Diverlus
Yes. For sure, for sure.
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Rodney Diverlus
Gay lesbian supremacists. It's a weird phenomenon, to be honest.
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Pascale Diverlus
For sure. The white gays particularly like you see them on like even like TikTok, on the social media platforms. Like being very protective of the LGB like not that the LGBT.
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Rodney Diverlus
Not even the B, it's really just LG. The LG sometimes like.
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Pascale Diverlus
For sure.
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Rodney Diverlus
They'll say B just to kind of, you know, add in some diversity there and DIY it up.
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Pascale Diverlus
The fact that bisexual is DIY, is wild.
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Rodney Diverlus
1,000%. But, you know, I do think that there's a lot of folks that are doing a lot of work around expanding how we imagine our rights and capacity and what we are owed, and the justice that we as a community are owed. And our next guest is one of those.
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Pascale Diverlus
Absolutely. When I think about who is leading the research and knowledge building specifically around black, queer and trans health, I oftentimes think about this person. I have such a deep respect for her as somebody who has been so active in the community. You see her at both the social and the learning opportunities, both all white. Which is really godly.
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Rodney Diverlus
She does kill the all white. She really does. She's always on point.
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Pascale Diverlus
Listen. She shoots down okay. Blonde locks killing it. Pause. Do you know what line that is? All white when she's feeling godly?
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Rodney Diverlus
No idea. No idea. It literally went over my head. So that was a reference? Okay. Well, okay. For those of y'all listening, I'm sure most of you are with me, and not understanding.
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Pascale Diverlus
Deaf Loaf?
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Rodney Diverlus
Oh, you might as well speak a different language. That's all, that's a deep cut.
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Pascale Diverlus
Okay, but that phrase though was like at the time of Instagram captions, it was one of the ones like in the 2013 to 2014 era.
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Rodney Diverlus
See, I was never.
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Pascale Diverlus
You didn't do captions? You didn’t really?
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Rodney Diverlus
Not really the captions, not really.
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Pascale Diverlus
Are you a caption girly? but like captions from songs.
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Rodney Diverlus
I always liked original captions. I always like to write my own captions. Yeah, I always liked to write my own captions.
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Rodney Diverlus
And because of the quotes, you know, I’m not really a lyrics person. So when I listen to music, I don't often care what the lyrics are.
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Pascale Diverlus
You be mumbling through the lyrics.
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Rodney Diverlus
I think the lyrics are like window dressing. I think music, the composition itself, should give me emotion.
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Pascale Diverlus
The lyrics are pretty important to me.
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Rodney Diverlus
I think they are window dressing, and window dressings are nice. You don't want bare windows, but at the same time, you know, like a good sonic journey will do the job for me. And then the lyrics are just a nice add on.
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Pascale Diverlus
And the lyrics are pretty pivotal, except for what do you have? Like, oh, his fans may come for us like the Drake lyrics where I'm like, you chose this lyric just so it could be Instagram captions.
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Rodney Diverlus
Speaking of Instagram. Well, now that we went on this deep end, let's talk about blood.
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Pascale Diverlus
Let's talk about blood.
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Rodney Diverlus
Let's talk about blood, baby.
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Pascale Diverlus
You really didn't find the...
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Rodney Diverlus
No, I could not find a single song that had blood, that I knew.
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Pascale Diverlus
It'd be like that.
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Rodney Diverlus
It really does.
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Pascale Diverlus
It'd be like that. This episode we have here for you is a very special one. We have a long time pivotal community member, academic, researcher, Dr. OmiSoore Dryden. She is a black, queer, femme and full, okay, full professor at Dalhouse University. She is the James R. Johnson endowed Research Chair in Black Canadian Studies. She took us to school with this episode, okay.
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Pascale Diverlus
She took us to school. She just came out with her book, Got Blood to give anti-Black homophobia and blood donation. It was our opportunity to really think about what health barriers exist for queer and trans people particularly. And she brought it home. She talked specifically about blood donation, how even into the system of blood donation, there is anti-Black homophobia embedded all through and through that system.
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Rodney Diverlus
And the words of Dr. Dryden herself, blood remains an active metaphor for shaping our lives.
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Pascale Diverlus
And honestly, the book itself really was so eye opening. You'll hear it in the episode, but we did not realize just how many metaphors are in relation to blood. We think about blood. We talk about blood. It is mentioned in a very active part of our lives. And this episode really, really, really unpacks that even further.
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Pascale Diverlus
This episode of Speak, Unspoken is brought to you by Across Boundaries with support from Ontario Health. We hope you enjoyed this episode.
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Pascale Diverlus
Thank you so much for sharing a voice with us here today, Dr. Dryden.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Thank you so much for inviting me and having me. It's just great to be in conversation with you both.
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Rodney Diverlus
As you know and as you know, Dr. Dryden. We've been fans of your work for over a decade, probably close to 15, 20 years now. And we're very excited to have seen this book. And congratulations on all that has come and is to come from this book. If you have not picked up your copy yet and you're listening to this, what are you waiting for?
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Pascale Diverlus
Do it now.
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Rodney Diverlus
Pick it up. And now from a black owned bookstore. I mean, we want to just dive right into it. For those of us like myself who are not in health care would want you to provide us some context to what is the urgency of understanding the disparities with blood donation? Why should blood and blood liberation, as you call it, be part of kitchen table conversations?
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Rodney Diverlus
Why should we all care?
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
You know, I love that question. Thank you. You know, we all know the blood story. Blood shows itself in our lives in ways that we are aware of and not aware of. And in the book I started, we had a blood story, something like that, and I, I did that because for, you know, 25 years, I was trying to explain the importance of blood donation in our lives as a justice issue, as something that we should be taking to the streets to address.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
But because it's healthcare or science or medicine, I put all of those in quotes. There's a sense that it's off limits, there's a sense that it's not a social issue. It's a definitive issue. Right? Like medicine is definitive, right? We think of math in the same way, right? That one plus one equals two. We think of science as being the thing that tells us the truth about the world.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Earth, bodies, people. And I wanted to identify a way that that's not the case. And I think that through blood stories, if we all understand that, we come into some sense of understanding of our own self through our own blood story. So in the book, I, you know, I talk about you know, an incident in the hospital.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
I talk about my friend, I think in the book I call her Katie. Katie Davey, it's not her name. But when we were eight and how we knew we were more to each other than just friends, we didn't have language for what that was. But we knew that if we performed a ritual of bloodletting and, you know, mixing blood to become blood sisters, that we would then be more than just friends.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Menstruation, you know, was a determining factor in the fact that I am now a woman, which is a horrifying thing to know at 12. And, you know, with all of the work that you all have been doing, we've been doing our Black Lives Matter, we've seen the way that our blood has been spilled in the street and really not thought of as a loss right by decision makers.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
So I did something that could be lost. Right? That did not need to be cared for, protected, things of that nature. So when we understand that, we're like, oh my God, you know, this bullshit, we're not going to let people just take our lives or spill our blood without accountability, without justice, without, you know, some kind of response.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
When we come into a family in a particular way through blood sharing or something else, we understand there are different kinds and forms of kinship relations. I think that way we understand how they're so different and unique amongst all of us. Then we can donate blood. We can take it to health and understand that because of health disparities, because of structural white supremacy and systemic anti-blackness, what is being positioned as truth in science is actually not.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
It's actually a fiction created through structures of white supremacy that often continue to frame us as black people and black, queer and trans people as, as suspicious, as unworthy of, you know, white health care, as, you know, like these, these different kinds of things. And so and this is what I tried to do in the book, but, you know, the more we hear from blood agencies like Canadian Blood Services coming out every February, we need more black donors.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Once they did it in December, we needed more black donors. You know, that should always raise for us why? I know you have black donors. Like what's been going on now you're just like, oh, we need black people. Why? What's happening? Why now all of a sudden? So I do think it's something we should take to the streets.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And, you know, I don't know if we’ll get there. But in the 80s, it was Haitian communities in New York and Montreal. That took to the streets with signs. I don't have those images in the book with signs saying, we don't have bad blood. The FDA needs to change this. We don't have bad blood.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
In response to the early HIV and Aids crisis, and they change protocol, it changes protocols. They're like, okay, we're not going to ban Haitian people in Canada. It was Haitian people, regardless of citizenship. So it also speaks to how we're understood as belonging to the nation. Right? So Haitian people, regardless of citizenship, were barred from donating blood.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
But that's also, I think, a really strong signal that the blood system is as politically motivated as anything else. And we need to wield our political power to actually get better practices and protocols.
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Pascale Diverlus
Absolutely. As you're sitting here talking to the Haitian people in the streets, I'm like, where's my flag? Where can I go and represent it right now? You opened up by answering this question in a really beautiful way of talking about how we all have a blood story. And I was really fascinated by the way that you opened the book with a blood story in which you talk about an experience with blood donation with your mother, in which she asks, is this blood safe?
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Pascale Diverlus
And that was just really interesting to me because many of us probably have very similar experiences and so I'm curious, how did that frame an understanding and a binary thinking of what is safe or unsafe blood? And then how early are we getting an understanding of that binary. So we collectively have these early experiences that frame ideas of safety.
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Pascale Diverlus
There's quotes around that, safe or unsafe blood.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
You know, I came back to that memory when I was first writing the work to my dissertation and other places. And I think I started with my friend Katie Davey, actually, I started with a story from Facebook where somebody wrote, oh, they're asking black people to become stem cell donors.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And I look forward to when I can, you know, as a gay person, when I can finally donate blood. And at the time, I was like, but you're a black gay person, so you still won't be able to donate blood as a black person. And so I was like, let me talk about this because it's a queered or an interesting understanding framing of how one understands their blood.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Right? In this, in this work and so as I was trying to think of other blood stories, when I recalled this experience with my mom where I was, I was actually really quite sick. I have Crohn's disease, and this was early on when I was in Toronto. So I say mid 90s. And so before Canadian bus services started, that was 1998.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And I had to go to my doctor, my allergist at Toronto General, get my blood work back and, I think his resident called him and said that he left the opera or something, and he was like, you need to go to the hospital right now. I'm going to meet you there. I was like, okay, so I guess the hospital and I knew I wasn't well, because I just couldn't walk.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
I was at York University at the time. I couldn't walk across campus. And so I would have to leave a class early, only to end up getting to class late. And I just didn't understand. I know I didn't feel well, but I just didn't understand that I was so sick that I just should take myself like I just didn't understand it.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
I'm just like, oh, I wonder why I'm so... Why I can't get... Maybe I'm out of shape, like these things. So I got in the hospital and they were like how are you? We've been waiting for you. You know, we have room ready for you and he's like you're severely anemic. You can get in a car accident. This is not okay.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
We need to give you blood transfusions. And so I had to call my mom. She was in London, Ontario, and it was probably one of the first times I had to call my mom and be like, I'm in the hospital, right? I'm living alone. I said, “hi mom”, and she's like “what's going on? Is something wrong with you?”.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
What's happening? I said “I'm fine. I'm fine.”
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Pascale Diverlus
00;16;38;16 - 00;17;00;09
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
“I'm in the hospital.” This is calling through the landline, right? We didn’t have cell phones. Calling landlines. She's like, “I'm on my way.” Literally got on the bus from London, which at the time dropped you off. Around the corner from Toronto, west from Toronto General. So you can get off at bay and whatever and then walk to Toronto General.
00;17;00;12 - 00;17;16;27
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And so she was there. And then the next morning when they were doing the rounds. So when he met me in the hospital, he was in his texts from this black tie event. And then the next morning when she showed up, when they gave the documents, I think I was in and out of sleep. So I was only really hearing a part of that conversation.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And then I remember her saying, “Is that safe?” And then they went through all of the rigmarole of, you know, how blood is tested at the time and being safe. So it was later. So that's what I remember of that moment. I don't remember thinking anything more theoretically about it in terms of, oh, safe, sick.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Well, right? It's really these kinds of narrow understandings of those words and what they mean in our lives. You know, to grow into the understanding that there is a spectrum of wellness and a spectrum of illness and a spectrum, right, like that piece. So as I started looking into what were blood protocols, what were they like?
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Well, the first blood donor clinic was in 1940, in Toronto. What was the blood protocol? Although it was the first public blood donor clinic, prior to that, it was private by the Canadian Red Cross Society, which was created by the Canadian military. It wasn't created by Health Canada or whatever health body it was created by the Canadian military for military medical use and practice.
00;18;26;19 - 00;18;29;04
Rodney Diverlus
Only, but not available to pedestrians.
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Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
So when they set up the public so they were able to do the public blood donor clinic because of the brilliant work of Dr. Charles Drew, African-American man who created the technology to collect large quantities of blood and transport them over great distances. This then allowed them to do blood donor clinics in Canada, collect it, store it, and ship it to Europe.
00;18;51;21 - 00;19;24;12
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Right this is World War two 1940s. But then part of the protocol. And you're right, Rodney, you're right only for military use. So if you had somebody in the hospital at that time, you needed to negotiate with the hospital how you were going to get blood for your person. But at this point, only for military use. And part of the protocol was that all of the blood collected had to be cataloged based on the ethno racial identity of the donor, to make sure that white soldiers did not get blood from not white people.
00;19;27;00 - 00;19;48;22
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And that was considered as a blood protocol, and call it that. But that's exactly what it was. They didn't want any kind of cross-contamination. Right. There's other things that can be contaminated, but they didn't want it, which and even though there was no science, right. Charles Drew was like, Dr. Drew, there's no science that supports this kind of race biology.
00;19;48;22 - 00;20;19;15
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
This belief that black people have incompatible blood for white people. Like there was no science for that. They still use that practice. So that social political framing of a blood protocol is important. Right. And then you see that through the Canadian Red Cross Society, through the 80s through the 90s, you see again, the social political piece through 1998 into today, when Canadian blood services came into being.
00;20;19;18 - 00;20;30;21
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And what you see is a highly subjective understanding of how safe and safety are determined and are identified.
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Pascale Diverlus
Yeah. And politics too.
00;20;32;05 - 00;20;32;12
Rodney Diverlus
Yes.
00;20;32;12 - 00;20;35;21
Pascale Diverlus
Like ideas of safe and safety. Are not safe politically.
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Rodney Diverlus
Well. And often those things that are political are subjective.
00;20;38;28 - 00;20;39;16
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Yeah.
00;20;39;18 - 00;21;01;01
Rodney Diverlus
Time dependent I mean that this book really does a really wonderful job of discussing how blood is so pivotal in the many social, cultural and political narratives that we choose. I think a lot of them are taboo when we think about menstruation. And, recently, you know, I'm thinking about Theranos and that controversy with the supposed revolution in blood.
00;21;01;01 - 00;21;23;22
Rodney Diverlus
And I think some of them are also quite common. We use blood literally and metaphorically. Blood sisters that you mentioned earlier before the blood of Jesus is even something that is cultural, that is we still have a sort of affinity to blood types, blood and bones, bleeding love, bleeding heart, bleeding money. We've used both literally and figuratively.
00;21;23;22 - 00;21;43;25
Rodney Diverlus
The concept of bleeding in the concept of blood. And I'm thinking, you know, outside of the gaze of whiteness, what do you think is the role of blood narratives as it specifically relates to black queer and trans communities and sort of like additionally, how do you think they differ from non-black people and non-black queer and trans people?
00;21;43;27 - 00;21;55;15
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Yeah, that's a great question. I wish I explored more of that in the book specifically, you know, but in that one file I have on my computer that I was like, this is the next thing.
00;21;55;18 - 00;21;58;24
Rodney Diverlus
You know, that's the beautiful thing about knowledge, right?
00;21;58;26 - 00;22;03;15
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
It's not here. You're going to put this somewhere else.
00;22;03;18 - 00;22;04;20
Rodney Diverlus
Period.
00;22;04;22 - 00;22;26;22
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
You know, some of the training I got is being the proper girl, first daughter. Was in especially when menstruation and bladder were the things that I was responsible for where I was responsible for making sure my father never saw. My dad was a nurse. Can we just say, he's a nurse.
00;22;26;26 - 00;22;27;14
Pascale Diverlus
Oh my gosh.
00;22;27;20 - 00;22;44;07
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
But I had to make sure that, you know, there was no blood in the toilet. I didn't leave my tampons , pads like all of those things. Tampons came later. But pads, you know, like, he can deal with a bloody nose, which I got often. He could deal with it too.
00;22;44;07 - 00;22;49;07
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
But the menstruating no, that was no. And part of that was deeply Caribbean, right?
00;22;49;07 - 00;22;49;28
Pascale Diverlus
Yeah. I was going to say.
00;22;49;28 - 00;22;54;04
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
You know, that was like, deeply, deeply Caribbean.
00;22;54;05 - 00;22;55;07
Pascale Diverlus
Yeah.
00;22;55;10 - 00;23;12;15
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
You know, the father of the household, like, all the kind of patriarchal, hetero patriarchal ways that we kind of move. And then, you know, there was also this kind of whispering amongst the women in the family. Oh, she has her period. Oh, Lord, come sit. Because, you know, I could still see it. I couldn't, I am still going to be heard.
00;23;12;18 - 00;23;31;10
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
I can be seen, but couldn’t be heard. But then it just meant that I had more responsibility, like, gendered responsibilities, which I resented the shit out of. Yeah. I was like, why am I in the kitchen? I don't want to cook with you. I don't want to, because I'm cooking. Then you're just shaming me about, no, this is not enjoyable for me.
00;23;31;10 - 00;23;57;00
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
I don't want to do this. You know, where's my brother? The baby and the youngest and the male. Yeah. Right. Just a completely different experience. And so you know some of those stories around the Caribbean-ness of blood I think is really important. Like most of the diasporic pieces.
00;23;57;02 - 00;24;34;01
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And then also I think of, you know, you rule the practices. Ifá practices, where you can use blood sometimes as offering. So there's a whole ritual and protocol if you are killing animals freshly to cook immediately. Right. Like you feed the machete. Right. You feed the instrument that you used to kill them. There's a prayer that is said to recognize the sacrifice you use the blood as an offering for the things around you.
00;24;34;13 - 00;25;07;00
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
So there's that piece around blood that I think is uniquely black and African that we don't necessarily talk about because it's spiritual practices that are considered heathen or devil worship or some kind of thing. So we don't necessarily talk about it. There's more of it, because of TikTok and Instagram and Facebook. There's more of a community, I think, of people having this conversation, but still some of it is very silent depending on how you've been initiated.
00;25;07;03 - 00;25;39;22
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
So those pieces, I think are really unique to queer and trans identities and how we understand queer and trans identity. And I say queer and trans as opposed to gay, and it's sloppy language. There's other languages we could use. But now I stick with queer and trans really to think of our oddness, the fact that we are odd, that we are kind of disjointed from the kind of normative spaces and the power within that.
00;25;39;27 - 00;26;02;20
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Like I think around that. And so that's why I use that language there. But when I was thinking of black, queer and trans people specifically looking through the donor questionnaire, if we were to trust predominantly white gay folks, they'd be like, oh, no, it's just that one question. Your man has had sex with another man even one time since whenever.
00;26;02;25 - 00;26;29;07
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
That is the only question on the donor questionnaire that's homophobic and impacts all gay people. But when you read through it, there's some pretty unique cultural things in the donor questionnaire that get called out as an unsafe practice. I think the purpose of the donor questionnaire is not just a health questionnaire that we're all familiar with.
00;26;29;09 - 00;26;47;29
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
You go to your primary care person. Yeah. This is your family. This is your family. How are you feeling today? And we're just trained to answer those questions. And then they take whatever data from that to determine our level of health or illness. And so this is the same experience of that tool at the donor clinic. You know, there's this and there's that.
00;26;48;01 - 00;27;28;28
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
But when you read through it. You know, some of the older questions were, have you ever had electrolysis or tattoos? And I was like, there are a lot that I learn through trans communities about the ways in which electrolysis and tattooing was a way to further affirm a particular gender identity, gender practice, gender practice. I was like, oh, why are we not thinking of this as trans questions, as questions that I know were for trans people, why are we not thinking about that?
00;27;29;00 - 00;27;55;29
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And then the other question was, you know, have you come into contact with somebody's blood? And I was like, you know, I've given trans guys T-shots, is that what you're asking? Or, you know, I'm an actively practicing lesbian and there's blood. Are we asking that? Are we asking that, like, you don't not have sex just because we have your period, right?
00;27;56;01 - 00;28;14;01
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Or if you're engaging in like anal sex practices, that can be blood, right? So can we think about like, is that what that means? And, you know, have you had sex with somebody whose sexual background you don't know? And I was like, well, how do we not know? Like, how would we know that?
00;28;15;29 - 00;28;17;20
Rodney Diverlus
You know, exactly. And even what's told to us is not.
00;28;17;22 - 00;28;58;13
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Exactly how would we know if there's something unknown like these are the people who are like your job is to write the question. When I was thinking through the donor questionnaire, I was trying to really look at some of those questions like, how does this impact us? So if you're at a university campus, which is where they were holding a majority of their donor clinics because we wanted to get people young to last over a period, a lifetime, I'm hoping, you know, ethically and consensually that you're having a lot of sex with people whose backgrounds you don't know. Like its university.
00;28;58;15 - 00;29;12;08
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
I'm hoping that's part of the experience that you're having. And we were also in the clubs like we were at the pub just like a black night. We were on the clock.
00;29;12;09 - 00;29;18;29
Rodney Diverlus
Everyone's one degree of separation. I mean, ultimately, when it comes down to it, it really is one 1 to 2 degrees of separation.
00;29;19;04 - 00;29;51;22
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
It's 2025 and I'm still getting information like they are not dating. What? Again, what? So I was really trying to come at it with how queer are we? How resistant are we to respectability politics? Because we're already odd, right? As black queer people were already not like the stranger in the space.
00;29;51;24 - 00;30;18;04
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
So if that's the case and we and I'm actively working on making sure there's zero shame, then what is the totality of the questions that we can ask? And I think for me, because when I first moved to Toronto, I found myself in a community of folks, at Sisters Cafe, and a bunch of places. And they had this, this kind of questioning of me as a way to be like, who are you?
00;30;18;04 - 00;30;34;10
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
But they were very deliberate and direct questions. And I've never had that experience as a deliberate indirectness. And it forced me to be kind of like, well, who am I? Let's know who I am, but they're asking me questions they've never considered, and they're asking it in a way that's not like, do you belong and not belong?
00;30;34;10 - 00;30;48;22
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
It's just like, well, you're here and we're going to do community together and we're going to be at the club together. And so we just want to make sure we get a sense of who you are. And that is the land. And that was all black, queer and trans people from the Caribbean, from Africa, but right from the US across Canada.
00;30;48;24 - 00;31;10;18
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And so that was the lens, the black queer and trans analytic that I was bringing to the donor questionnaire to be like, well, who are we in our totality, moving away from the homo patriarchy of we're just going to look at this tiny question of the white gay, because we're not like those people.
00;31;10;19 - 00;31;18;15
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
We know the sexual history of our single lover we've been married to and I was like no.
00;31;18;15 - 00;31;20;18
Pascale Diverlus
Let's be real.
00;31;20;20 - 00;31;24;20
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Like, why are we not out here saying no we're whores.
00;31;24;20 - 00;31;54;20
Rodney Diverlus
Yeah, exactly. You know even when you're on this theme of like the expanded questions, I'm curious if currently there's still also the questions around, your relationship to the continent of Africa, because when I remember, that was one of the considerations as well. And I know we always talk about the formal bans on gay and bisexual men, as we've talked about, but the regionality and the sort of stigma that's attached to where different people are from, I mean, I still think 2025, a lot has changed.
00;31;54;20 - 00;32;12;08
Rodney Diverlus
But I think if you walk in, talk to the most random people down the street, there's still this sort of like I would still assume that there's still this perception that certain places of the world are these places that are riddled with untreated HIV and Aids. They don't have Prep, they don't have these things. They are just.
00;32;12;10 - 00;32;21;18
Rodney Diverlus
And so like I'm curious if that's still a consideration from, from your perspective of the donor questionnaire as well. And if those, those considerations are still carrying a stigma.
00;32;21;20 - 00;32;44;21
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Yeah I know apparently Africa doesn't have condoms. Yeah. So like we don't have those things. We're too busy having sex in trees that we're not, you know, and living in close proximity to elephants and everything else. So they don't ask those questions directly. Because they're like, if we ask questions directly around Africa, we'll be called racist. So we’re not going to ask those questions anymore.
00;32;44;27 - 00;32;51;02
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And I was like, okay, you are racist. Those questions are absolutely based on racism.
00;32;51;02 - 00;32;53;00
Pascale Diverlus
First of all.
00;32;53;00 - 00;33;17;05
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Period. Full stop. But that doesn't mean that you can't ask questions in a particular way. So in the book, when those questions were there and I say if this really was around HIV-O, directly after the tainted blood crisis, then why weren't you asking about all of the countries that had that strain of HIV, which include Belgium, Spain, France, the United States?
00;33;17;05 - 00;33;41;27
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Why weren’t you saying? Are you from Chad? Belgium? So why weren't you including all of the countries? You didn't do that. You only included these eight African countries. And then to simplify the question, you just said Africa. No, no. And for the same reason, therefore saying that all 54 countries in Africa have HIV-O. And you can't do anything about it.
00;33;42;00 - 00;33;47;19
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Bullshit. But they ask the question differently now, have you ever had malaria?
00;33;47;22 - 00;33;49;16
Rodney Diverlus
Oh my goodness.
00;33;49;18 - 00;34;00;19
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Or this question is still on there. The last time I checked, which is this November, have you ever come into contact with the bodily fluids of a green monkey?
00;34;00;21 - 00;34;01;11
Rodney Diverlus
Wow.
00;34;01;14 - 00;34;02;04
Pascale Diverlus
Wow.
00;34;02;08 - 00;34;38;05
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Yeah. So that question's been on for forever. Now it doesn't say, are you a technician? Do you work in, a sanctuary? It doesn't say that. Just says, you know I've been in Barbados. I see monkeys climbing in the, you know, taking all the mangoes, not allowing them to ripen. But I have not read anything where somebody has just tripped across the bodily fluids of a monkey, you know, like, what do you mean?
00;34;38;08 - 00;35;05;07
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And the question about malaria? For how long? Must've you had malaria. When did you get malaria? Or have you ever been on medication for malaria. Those kinds of questions are appropriate health questions that are not asked on the donor questionnaire. It is, have you had malaria yes or no? The answer is yes. You can't donate blood. Have you come into contact with the bodily fluids of a green monkey?
00;35;05;07 - 00;35;37;17
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
The answer is yes. You can't. Any blood. And then the other question, have you had an HIV/Aids test? We know there's no such thing as an Aids test. Again, they're saying this is based on science, but you're not asking questions based on science. And your job, the Canadian blood service’s job. When they were instituted by Health Canada and the federal government was to educate the Canadian population on why the donor questionnaire is the way it was.
00;35;37;18 - 00;35;48;14
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
I argue they abdicated that responsibility by conflating these questions and allowing for harmful stereotypes to be perpetuated.
00;35;48;14 - 00;35;49;17
Pascale Diverlus
Absolutely.
00;35;49;19 - 00;35;51;08
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And they need to be held accountable for that. That’s bullshit.
00;35;52;05 - 00;36;26;09
Pascale Diverlus
100%. And if you're going to add even like further context to this, to, you know, in the beginning and how you talked about this and thinking about the totality of these questions, you know, to the average person or to somebody who may not, you know, be informed about these conversations, could be confused as to why would that question be targeted, or why would you know a particular community feel impacted, but they signal many different signals that kind of like combined together to provide a sense of belonging or, un-belonging to a particular communities.
00;36;26;11 - 00;36;50;24
Pascale Diverlus
I want to read this quote because I actually think this was one of the quotes that had me like, jaw dropped reading the book. And I think it's a really important one. And it says “while many are familiar with the formal ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men, few are familiar with the questions concerning Africa and blackness in brackets on the donor questionnaire that served to ban blood donations from people of African descent from 1998 to 2018.”
00;36;50;27 - 00;37;10;17
Pascale Diverlus
And I think that's really interesting because, you know, I grew up in the student movement, and so there were many different campaigns against blood bans. This is a conversation that was happening quite frequently in our circles. And yet somehow this very crucial piece of information slipped through the cracks of our advocacy. It was a gap that we did not know.
00;37;10;17 - 00;37;26;14
Pascale Diverlus
I did not know until reading your book and so how is it even in our advocacy, even if we are in, queer and trans circles or advocacy or groups, these very crucial ways that black communities are targeted are still able to be omitted from these conversations.
00;37;26;17 - 00;38;10;21
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Yeah, 100%. You know, when I first started doing this work at York, it was with students who were like, they're banning gay blood. And in reading the donor questionnaire. So after, you know, a year and a half of working with student groups on creating more intersectional, student activities, and for them to then come and be like, this is just about gay blood was a shock to me because we just spent all that time talking about the intersecting things that happen in queer people's lives and black people's lives, but then they just came with, there's just this question on gay blood.
00;38;10;23 - 00;38;35;07
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And I was like, that's not that. There's more to this. And I remember going to, early communion bus service meeting in 2000. I think Allan Rock was the Minister of Health at the time, when I asked him about this question of HIV and Aids or, sorry, HIV-O, and let him know that this stream was also happening in other countries.
00;38;35;09 - 00;39;11;20
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
His response was, well, we see it in Belgium and France and Spain and the United States. It's because people from Africa brought it there, right? Because no HIV can start in North America, right? It can only ever start in Africa. And that is still such a believed reality, of course I heard, I witnessed white gay people and I think Kyle Freeman also argued some of this was, you know, we are victims from Aids that started in Africa.
00;39;11;20 - 00;39;41;00
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
We too, as white gays are victims like you are from the tainted blood crisis. Like you are who unknowingly got HIV. We too are victims because it started over there and it was brought here. Yeah. And so working in the faculty of medicine and doing more work around health disparities and medical practices and protocols, the thing that is most difficult for people to understand is when they're like, why does this happen?
00;39;41;00 - 00;40;00;13
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
How does this happen? Not necessarily the question you're asking, but what I hear and they want to be like, it's because of these three things. But the answer to that question is structural white supremacy and systemic anti-blackness. So that's the answer to the question. And so when I say it's because of structural white supremacy and systemic anti-blackness, they're just like, we just need an answer.
00;40;00;13 - 00;40;15;05
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
What I was like, that's why it happened. The afterlife of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade that is why it happened, right? When I was early doing this work, I had white gays say to me, why do you keep bringing black stuff in? Canadian Blood Services said that to me.
00;40;15;05 - 00;40;39;12
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Why do you keep raising this shit about blackness? We give you these fundings to deal with gays and well, how are you dealing with blackness? And we would be in Pride Toronto meetings at any of these meetings where we were like, are you honestly trying this late, late 90s, early 2000s are you are honestly trying to tell us that racism isn't a queer issue and people would stand up and be like, it's not.
00;40;39;15 - 00;40;53;22
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
It's not a queer issue. Are white queers that are like white gays? They'd be like, I don't benefit from white privilege because I am gay. I was like, shut up. I will fight you today.
00;40;53;24 - 00;41;17;12
Rodney Diverlus
Oh my gosh. And it's also recent. I mean, when you speak it, I just think about 2016, being on air, live on air with Rosemary Barton, who is a beacon in journalism, and me at 24 years old, having to explain to one of the most prolific and awarded journalists in this country why black issues and queer issues are the same as a black and queer person.
00;41;17;12 - 00;41;18;21
Pascale Diverlus
You’re like I'm black and queer.
00;41;18;23 - 00;41;39;05
Rodney Diverlus
Like, you know, and it's interesting that you mention this. And when you bring it up, it makes you think about the sign of phobia as well. That came up during, Covid. And we went through another pandemic, you know, about 30 years later and there still is in North America. We just want it. It has to be somebody else.
00;41;39;05 - 00;42;02;11
Rodney Diverlus
It's always someone else's fault. And this just happened to us always. And that thought is in many ways why, you know, the infection was allowed to be in North America for months without us knowing. Like it wasn't just March 1st. This was sitting there for a while. But we're constantly baffled at how interconnected we are.
00;42;02;14 - 00;42;04;01
Rodney Diverlus
So white supremacist.
00;42;04;03 - 00;42;26;02
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And we see that. Right? Like people who are houseless, who want to access a shelter. They can still be drinking, right? We see this thing. It's like, are you the perfect innocent person that we can just do these things in? And this is the part around respectability politics that will kill us every single day.
00;42;26;13 - 00;42;49;20
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
It's a thing that will leech from our very marrow because we are so committed to being seen as respectable. We're making ourselves sick and literally taking life units out of our lives. Right? We're speeding our death and so when I'm like, we're whores, we get to be whores because we need to really disengage from whatever shame we think should be around that.
00;42;49;20 - 00;43;06;06
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Yes, we have sex. Yes, we have anal sex. Yes, we've had sex with many people at the same time. Yes, we can all be bitches and have sex with many people at the same time. Like we can be doing these things. These things are okay. And I still have the right to get care and have the right to healthy food.
00;43;06;08 - 00;43;27;01
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And I still have the right for love and care and like, I still have that right. So we still have the right to think about blood donation and understand that there will always be some kind of reaction to donated blood. Someone will always have some kind of reaction. It is. It is not an easy medication to take.
00;43;27;04 - 00;44;01;20
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
There will always be some kind of reaction. And if we thought of more intersectionality in a diverse way, in a more intersecting, interlocking way, then we would be having blood products from a vast diversity of people and which would actually respond to the lack of blood products that it's currently in the system. But you need someone who can be like, hold on, we're doing this wrong.
00;44;01;23 - 00;44;34;01
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Let's think about this differently. Let's go back to the screening. If we need the screening, let's go back to that because we're thinking about this in an inappropriate way. And we need to think about it without being sex phobic, without being racist. CBS like people in Canadian Blood Services, they would literally clutched their pearls at the thought of, well, how do I ask this 72 year old grandmother if she's had anal intercourse?
00;44;34;01 - 00;44;38;11
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
I was like, you are. You're telling us a lot about the kind of sex you’re having, don't need to but you are.
00;44;38;11 - 00;44;41;14
Rodney Diverlus
That part, that part, nobody asked you..
00;44;41;14 - 00;44;44;04
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Why aren’t you asking granny about it?
00;44;44;07 - 00;44;45;28
Pascale Diverlus
Especially granny,. to be honest.
00;44;46;00 - 00;44;47;03
Rodney Diverlus
Granny retired.
00;44;47;03 - 00;44;48;10
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
She’s lived the life.
00;44;48;12 - 00;44;50;18
Rodney Diverlus
Granny retired with an edible. Like that's it.
00;44;50;21 - 00;44;57;09
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
That's a full life. Granny doesn’t have time for you. Granny's going out, but it's saying, like, two things and things. I'm traveling, baby.
00;44;57;09 - 00;45;02;28
Rodney Diverlus
She’s getting her groove back and she's on her third husband like Granny's chillin.
00;45;03;00 - 00;45;26;08
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Right? But because I think that that's where one of the things that we have always done when we study liberationist movements is that we have done things that have not been done before. That's the thing that has stunned people. How did you shut down the Gardener?
00;45;26;08 - 00;45;28;18
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
You're not allowed to shut down the Gardener. We shut down the Gardener.
00;45;28;18 - 00;45;29;16
Pascale Diverlus
And what.
00;45;29;18 - 00;45;31;05
Rodney Diverlus
Period.
00;45;31;07 - 00;45;55;03
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
We started literally talking about defunding and forced police departments to talk about defunding, like we did these things that you said were just ridiculous that we couldn't do. That is the same thing that has always happened in science. Yeah. What's happened to white Supremacy frame? Oh, let's do surgeries on black women and not give them any anesthesia and then say, let's call it gynecology, right?
00;45;55;03 - 00;46;18;02
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Like those things. But black people, queer and trans people have done some wonderful science, predominantly because we're black and black queer trans people. And that is the same energy that needs to come to a healthy, robust donor system. And that's not there.
00;46;18;05 - 00;46;47;19
Rodney Diverlus
And you know what? Bless you, really. I mean, I think in this context that we find ourselves in this year of our Lord, 2025, in which one has to, I cannot believe we reached such an anti-science place, even though it feels like it follows a cycle and where scientists have to, defend their right to science and which truth becomes evermore relative, evermore questioning, evermore ephemeral.
00;46;47;21 - 00;47;08;22
Rodney Diverlus
I think the work that you're doing and bringing about the nuance and the complications and the fact that these are not easy answers, but we need to listen to community to find them out, and that there needs to be additional work by these systems to continue to not only make sure the science is sound, but that care is done, that both of those two things can be done together.
00;47;08;24 - 00;47;30;06
Rodney Diverlus
I think it is needed more than ever. It's needed more than ever. And really your book coming out is perfect timing. It's perfect timing for this world. For anybody listening here, please pick up your copy. If you have not picked up your copy you do need to pick it up. It is “Got Blood to Give: Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation”.
00;47;30;08 - 00;47;58;14
Rodney Diverlus
And I feel like you've really done such an interesting conversation to help us reopen all the things. And the last thing I think I'll leave for passing to you, Pascal, is that I really am fascinated by, you brought it up earlier, and I think that for those who are reading the book, read the books to think about this concept of innocence and health and who gets to be protected, who gets to be held in many different worlds and different possibilities?
00;47;58;16 - 00;47;59;23
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Yeah.
00;47;59;26 - 00;48;14;18
Pascale Diverlus
I do, you know what? Right before we close out, I am just curious if you want to say any last or last words about. I want to talk a little bit about the Black Health Education Collaborative. Just let us know a little bit about the work you folks are doing. I know you're working with folks from across the country, across North America.
00;48;14;18 - 00;48;18;04
Pascale Diverlus
From what I see, you give us the last couple of words about that.
00;48;18;22 - 00;48;41;15
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
I love the Black Health Education Collaborative. I've been very, very blessed to work with some fantastic folks across the country. Some bad ass women across the country, African Nova Scotian folks. Like it's just been really great. So we've been really working in the system of medicine and medical protocols and medical practice in education. That is not easy. It's not for the faint of heart.
00;48;41;15 - 00;49;02;12
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
That's why I'm glad I'm on sabbatical. I've been doing a lot of sleeping, a lot of resting, a lot of chilling out. But we've made some significant interventions in, for example, the Canadian Medical Association Journal the same day, who, until we started working with them, had not published from a black researcher in over 100 years of its existence.
00;49;02;14 - 00;49;27;03
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
That wasn't easy or fun working with them. And they write about it as well. And we have. But it brought some change to that, which is great. We created black health examination objectives with the Medical Council of Canada, and that means anybody who graduates from medical school in Canada needs to know something about black health for them to write their exams and then be licensed to practice.
00;49;27;03 - 00;49;29;12
Pascale Diverlus
Life saving, life saving work.
00;49;29;14 - 00;49;53;17
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Right? Like there's no other body in North America or the UK that has black health examination objectives. So we're thrilled that that happened. And it would take a lot for them to take it out, knock on wood, to remove it. And then we created the black health primer with eight modules for med students and students and public health on black health.
00;49;53;19 - 00;50;23;04
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And it has different learning pathways. If you are a white person, indigenous person, racialized person, or black person, and so you can go through in your pathway to learn about structural white supremacy and systemic anti-Blackness. And I say those two words because they're actually key objectives in the Medical Council Canada's black health examination objectives, like actually having to understand structural white supremacy, you know, systemic anti-Black racism.
00;50;23;04 - 00;50;44;06
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And that's also in the primer. And we're expanding the primer. We're going to look at primary care. I had an experience at the dentist the other day. So I think we'll be moving into dentistry. The dentist was just like, you know, you're a colored person, with a denser bone. And so we need... I was like, no.
00;50;44;08 - 00;50;50;21
Pascale Diverlus
So it's every type of health care. You're going to be tapping it too. Great, great. Thank you very much. Very necessary.
00;50;50;24 - 00;51;08;17
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
We're going to do that. Onye Nnorom, Dr. Onye Nnorom who is a public health and primary care physician. We met in April before I left to come to Halifax. We met at my going away party, and she's like, you're the Johnson Chair in Black Studies in the Faculty of Medicine. We need to do things. People are dying.
00;51;08;17 - 00;51;14;21
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And I was like I’m in, call me. And that July, we started doing work towards this. And so.
00;51;14;28 - 00;51;16;16
Pascale Diverlus
So amazing, so amazing.
00;51;16;16 - 00;51;21;16
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
There's so many people, like there's just so many people.
00;51;21;17 - 00;51;42;16
Pascale Diverlus
Such amazing work Dr. OmiSoore, like life saving, affirming work that is going to change, like our interactions in health care today and generations to come. Again, thank you so much for sharing space with us. If you have not grabbed it, make sure you grab your copy of “Got Blood to Give: Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation”. Let me tell you it is a read.
00;51;42;16 - 00;51;48;24
Pascale Diverlus
Okay, it is a read. Thank you so much for being with us, Dr. OmiSoore Dryden. Thank you.
00;51;48;26 - 00;51;55;12
Rodney Diverlus
So much. Thank you so much. Love you. Thank you. Love learning from you. And keep up. Keep the good fight alive.
00;51;55;14 - 00;51;57;09
Pascale Diverlus
Period.
00;51;57;12 - 00;52;05;08
Rodney Diverlus
Keep repping for us and all the spaces you know, making space for all of us. Causing mayhem, causing a storm, causing pain.
00;52;05;10 - 00;52;07;11
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
And the cutest of shoes.
00;52;07;13 - 00;52;07;28
Rodney Diverlus
And the cutest of shoes.
00;52;08;02 - 00;52;09;14
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
You see my nails?
00;52;09;16 - 00;52;10;10
Rodney Diverlus
I see your nails. Boo!
00;52;11;19 - 00;52;16;23
Rodney Diverlus
For those of you hearing, we have Dr. Dryden in an all white, all white frame.
00;52;16;23 - 00;52;17;21
Pascale Diverlus
Blonde hair.
00;52;19;04 - 00;52;26;26
Rodney Diverlus
Like sun kissed blonde hair, and the nails are laid with a nice massive floral ring. Style on point always.
00;52;26;27 - 00;52;33;23
Pascale Diverlus
All white too, don’t forget it. We remember to wear our brightly, close-to-white [colours] for you.
00;52;33;25 - 00;52;42;06
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
I just love being in conversation with you. I like being in spaces with you, thank you for asking me and I look forward to when we can, like, get on bed in the streets, period.
00;52;42;07 - 00;52;49;25
Rodney Diverlus
I can't wait for IRL. May it be warm. And may it be a nice drink and a nice patio. Yes, I'm manifesting that for us.
00;52;49;28 - 00;52;52;14
Dr. OmiSoore Dryden
Yes, yes, I accept those blessings.
00;52;52;14 - 00;52;57;02
Pascale Diverlus
You absolutely have a beautiful rest of your night and we shall talk soon.
00;52;57;26 - 00;53;01;06
Rodney Diverlus
So much love to you. So much love. Enjoy the rest of the tour.
00;53;01;08 - 00;53;28;14
Pascale Diverlus
Thank you so much for listening. Speak, Unspoken is brought to you by Across Boundaries with support from Ontario Health, produced by Living Practices Consulting, hosted by Pascale Diverlus and Rodney Diverlus, edited and mixed by Angelyn Francis. We out.