Thunder Bay LGBT community disappointed by trans crosswalk, insists on repairs

The chair of Thunder Pride says he is asking the City of Thunder Bay to order more materials to fixa trans flag crosswalk at Bay and Algomastreets.

Jason Veltri says the crosswalk installed Thursday does not meet the organization's vision.

The city installed two pride-themed crosswalks at the intersection on Thursday, one in rainbow colours and one in the trans colours of pink, blue and white.

But members of the LGBT community panned both crosswalks on social media for showing too much pavement and not enough colour.

The city's director of engineering and operations said the crosswalks did resemble the images of rainbowcrosswalks that had been presented to council and staff, but she acknowledged the resultsdidn't look entirely as advertised.

"There's only six colours of the rainbow," Kayla Dixon said. "The crosswalk is so wide. So if the crosswalk in the picture was a little bit narrower, the colour blocks would have been, you know, closer together, they might have looked larger or more colourful. But as you space them out over a wider crosswalk then it kind of gets lost in all of the asphalt spacing."

Meanwhile other cities, like Whitehorse and Kitchener, have gotten around the spacing issue by paintingthe length of the street instead.

Trans crosswalk needs work

The city added colour to the rainbow crosswalk on Friday using materials that had been ordered for a second rainbow crosswalk slated for May and Donald streets, Dixon said.

That crosswalk was scheduled for installation last Friday, but it's been postponed while the city orders more materials to replace what was used to fill-in the crosswalk at Bay and Algoma, Dixon said.

Critics, meanwhile, say the trans crosswalk still needs work.

"I'm very disappointed with how it turned out. It doesn't look like the original plans at all," said queer/trans community member Joanie West.

LGBT community member Tracy Pollard said while she was ecstatic that the initiative happened,the resultleft her trans and non-binary friends feeling like an afterthought.

"The fact that the issue with the trans side has not been addressed directly, it is just a furthering of the microaggressions that trans and non-binary people experience every day," she said.

Veltri said he too was outraged with the final product.

"We know that the trans community are ... one of the most marginalized communities in our city and across the world," Veltri said.

"The vision for this project was always to be as inclusive as possible by recognizing the rainbow as our sexual identities and the trans crosswalk as our gender identities. And you know, we just have not seen ... the vision come to life that was presented and approved for city council at city council last November."

Coun.Shelby Ch'ng said she has also asked city administration to order more materials to improve the trans crosswalk.

West said they hope something good will come out of the controversy.

"I feel it's already very hard to be visibly trans in Thunder Bay, and I think this kind of made it worse," they said.

"[Young trans people] need to know that it's okay to be seen, and it's okay to be heard too and to not just settle for the bare minimum, which is kind of what, you know, people in marginalized communities are conditioned to do like just be grateful that you have the bare minimum," West said.

"Well I'm sorry. The bare minimum isn't good enough."