❤️ Meet LGBTQ and ALL Benjamin Skinner, a transgender non-binary person and identified as pansexual. Skinner is the first openly transgendered athlete to represent Canada Rugby League. ❤️
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Background
Hi everyone, my name is Benny and my pronouns are they/them and he/him! I’m a transgender non-binary person and I identify as pansexual. I’m a mixed Filipino, Mi’kmaq, and European Canadian, and I live in on the Haldimand Tract in Ontario, Canada. I am extremely proud to be the first openly transgender athlete to represent the Canada Ravens Rugby League program on international soil, and the first openly transgender rugby athlete to score a try for Canada on international soil during the Canada Rugby League Association tour in Serbia (2019).
I am also a proud ambassador of Athlete Ally(@athleteally), ACTIIVST (@actiivst), and now LGBTQandALL. I’m currently studying Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and I have a Peace and Conflict Studies degree from the University of Waterloo. My biggest inspirations for my academic work are my family. My mother is a Filipino woman who immigrated before she met my father, a mixed Mi’kmaq-European Newfoundlander.
I am extremely proud of my cultural heritages and histories, and they have inspired me to become the postcolonial feminist scholar that I am today. I like to combine those cultural and historical inspirations to drive my academia and activism, while I use my own personal experiences to bring BIPOC and queer perspectives to my scholarship. I am also the co-founder of a mental wellness start-up called CommUnity XP, an online platform that is being developed to generate localized mental wellness spaces for university students.
This project was birthed in 2019 to address the specific needs of university students and rose out of my passion for supporting accessible mental wellness spaces. It is also this passion that drives me to support LGBTQandALL so strongly, as having a specific space for groups who have been traditionally neglected in the wellness space is absolutely necessary.
