Anold Mulaisho, Dr. Carlo Handy Charles, drag performers Valentina Rosé and Baddie Brooks and Dr. Camisha Sibblis, Director of the Black Scholars Institute, participated in the Black Queer and Trans Migrants and Racism Conference at the University of Windsor’s Black Scholars Institute in March 2026 (DAVE GAUTHIER/University of Windsor)
By Kate Hargreaves
Being legally protected on the basis of gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation is not the same thing as belonging.
That is the message of a new report by UWindsor sociology professor Dr. Carlo Handy Charles examining the experiences of Black queer and trans migrants in Windsor-Essex.
While migrants may flee persecution in their countries of origin, they still face barriers after arriving in Canada related not only to their queer identity but also to race and migration status.
“Belonging to a new country like Canada or a city like Windsor requires concerted efforts to meaningfully include Black queer and trans migrants in existing queer spaces, migrant ethnic communities and broader society,” explains Dr. Charles.
In the report, Charles details how Black queer and trans migrants may struggle to find belonging in largely white queer spaces as well as in ethnocultural communities in which they may be excluded due to their gender or sexuality. At the same time, they face marginalization from the broader community.
For Charles, spaces that offer a sense of belonging are critical.
One such community, and the focus of Charles’s research, is the Queer and Trans Migrant Advocacy Alliance of Windsor-Essex (QTMAAWE), founded in 2024 to provide support, advocacy and community for queer and trans migrants in the region.
“I learned about QTMAAWE’s work after meeting (founder) Anold Mulaisho at the Windsor Pride parade in 2024,” explains Charles.
“We met again during the launch of the Black Scholars Institute at the University of Windsor. We discussed his effort to build a community for Black queer and trans migrants, and the sociologist and researcher in me got activated. I knew at that moment that I wanted to meet other Black queer and trans migrants to research and document their experiences building community and a sense of belonging in Windsor-Essex.”
As part of his research, Charles spoke to 22 members of the QTMAAWE community through focus groups and conducted two in-depth interviews with founder Anold Mulaisho and pastor at the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), Joseph Livingstone.
Central to Charles’s approach was ensuring that he established and maintained a healthy and equitable relationship with the community.
“It is not always easy to conduct research projects with communities that have been marginalized but also exploited by academics for the sake of their individual careers,” Charles says.
With more than a decade of experience working with community organizations in Canada and France, Charles was able to draw on this background in his work with QTMAAWE.
“Dr. Charles brought the scholarly expertise and methodological rigour,” says Samuel Offiaeli, director of projects and strategic partnerships at QTMAAWE. “We brought something equally essential: lived knowledge, community relationships and trust.”
"Universities have tremendous capacity to produce knowledge, while communities carry forms of knowledge that may never appear in institutional datasets,” Offiaeli continues.
“When those forms of knowledge meet with mutual respect, research becomes richer, more grounded and more capable of reflecting how people actually experience the world.”
Offiaeli emphasizes that it was crucial that QTMAAWE members were not just subjects of the research but had meaningful influence on how their experiences were represented and understood.
“There is a profound difference between being studied and being heard,” he says.
“When invisibility has been a strategy for survival, trust cannot simply be treated as a procedural step in research. Trust becomes part of the methodology.”
For Charles’s part, building rapport and trust meant that he was able to develop a deeper understanding of the participants’ experiences. While he was familiar as a sociologist with the realities of racism, xenophobia, homophobia and economic precarity facing Black queer and trans migrants in North America, he says that there were still some surprises.
“I was particularly and pleasantly surprised by the resilience of Black queer and trans migrants in building a community and sense of belonging for themselves in the context of Windsor-Essex where no other organizations catered to their needs,” he says.
Offiaeli echoes this, noting that the report is not only an account of hardship.
“To me, it is equally a record of resilience, resistance, friendship, leadership and collective care,” he says.
Offiaeli explains that participants often describe QTMAAWE as a family and as home, an especially weighty sentiment given how many have lost family, relationships and communities in their migration experiences.
“People who have experienced displacement are not only searching for home,” he says. “They are capable of building it for one another.”
While the organization’s success in establishing this sense of community and belonging is remarkable, Charles emphasizes the need and urgency of funding such organizations.
Offiaeli too notes that responsibility for creating belonging cannot only rest on the newcomer community alone.
“It is a shared responsibility that belongs to universities, governments, service providers, funders, community organizations and all of us who want Windsor-Essex to be a place where people are not merely received but are genuinely able to build a life and call it home,” he says.
The report is available online, and Charles notes that it is written in plain and accessible language for the community, stakeholders, funders and the public, with scholarly articles currently under review for publication.
“The report transforms lived experience into evidence,” says Offiaeli. “Evidence creates the possibility not only of recognition, but of accountability and change.”
Offiaeli hopes Black queer and trans migrants see themselves in the report. He also wants readers to understand that belonging is not a luxury.
“For someone rebuilding a life after persecution or displacement, belonging can be part of the infrastructure that makes rebuilding possible,” he says.
“Belonging can mean entering a room and no longer having to divide yourself into acceptable pieces. It can mean meeting people who understand your experience before you have to explain or defend every part of yourself. It can also mean receiving practical support with employment, settlement, health or the refugee process alongside friendship, dignity and human connection.”
Offiaeli also emphasizes the agency of the people at the heart of the research, not just as passive recipients of support.
“The people whose experiences are represented here are producing knowledge, creating networks of care, supporting one another and actively shaping the community they now call home,” he says.
“Faced with gaps in existing systems, they did not simply wait for an institution to create belonging for them. They began creating it for one another.”
Moving forward with this work, Charles has his sights on documenting the experiences of queer and trans migrants across Canada and internationally, in part through a book project on the transnational relationships among queer Haitian men in eight countries including the United States and Canada. He is also currently the principal investigator on an SSHRC-funded project comparing the experiences of queer and trans newcomers to Windsor and Detroit.
“These projects all aim to illuminate the experiences of queer and trans migrants while contributing to advancing social scientific scholarship on the intersection of migration and inequalities,” Charles says.
In the meantime, Offiaeli says he hopes readers of the report take forward not simply the question of how to welcome newcomers, but what happens after that welcome.
“What does it take for someone to truly belong? Migration can bring someone to safety,” he says. “But belonging begins when they no longer have to survive alone.”
Read the full report, available open access online here.