Velvet is an activist and an early pioneer in getting the BC Medical Services Plan (MSP) to pay for transition (corrective) surgeries. She is a fetish sex worker in Vancouver, and has been an activist for sex workers for years (esp. prior to the investigation of the Picton murders) in BC and across Canada. She was a founder of Westenders Against Violence Everywhere (WEAV) in Vancouver and lobbied extensively to challenge the prostitution laws in Canada.
You can find Velvet online at: velvetsteele.com/
Velvet’s story is one of a series of stories collected at the Moving Trans History Forward Symposium, put on by the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria in March of 2016.The MTHF conference provided onmyplanet.ca with a space to record stories on site during the conferences of 2014, 2016 and 2018.