Claudette vaughan interviews transsexual sex worker, performance artist and animal rights activist Mirha-Soleil Ross.

QUEER RIGHTS – ANIMAL RIGHTS
Mirha-Soleil Ross does some straight talking with Claudette Vaughan.

CLAUDETTE: For readers who aren’t familiar with your work, please tell us some history about yourself and how you became an AR activist.

MIRHA-SOLEIL: I’m a transsexual videomaker, performer and a long-time prostitute and sex workers’ rights activist. I grew up in a poor neighborhood on the south shore of Montréal (French-Québec) in a francophone and mostly illiterate family. In the mid ’80s, when I was about 16 years old, I watched a TV documentary about fur that included footage of animals caught in snares and leg-hold traps. It changed my life forever. I was so traumatised by what I witnessed that the next day I ran to an anti-fur protest. That’s when I met a whole bunch of animal rights activists. I had lots of questions; they had good answers and by 6pm that same night, I had stopped eating meat, stopped wearing leather, and was eager to learn and do a whole lot more. In terms of animal rights work, some of my main contributions have included hosting for four years a weekly animal rights radio show called Animal Voices on CIUT 89.5 FM (broadcast on the web at www.ciut.fm). In 1997, I also developed the first-ever publicly-funded social services program for low income and street-active transsexual and transgendered people in Toronto. Called MEAL-TRANS, the program included a weekly meal drop-in where we served the best vegan food in town. I coordinated the program from 1997-1999 and then passed the leadership on to another transsexual woman named Christina Strang who ran the project very well until 2002. Unfortunately she then accepted a new job at another agency and the new MEAL-TRANS staff recently started serving flesh. Another action I did was when I got elected Grand Marshal for the annual Toronto Queer Pride Parade in recognition of my work within the trans and sex workers’ communities. I decided to use that opportunity to celebrate my own favourite group of heroes: the Animal Liberation Front. I organized a contingent of activists who carried placards that highlighted ALF actions spanning two decades. So while irritating leftwing radical queer activists kept complaining about how queer pride had become too corporate, too mainstream and too apolitical, we led the parade celebrating an organisation that is identified as a domestic terrorist threat in North America! I was dressed up as The Lady of the Beasts and the 20 activists accompanying me were in army fatigues and wearing coyote masks. All along the route, while up to a million people applauded, the activists lined up in front of every McDonald’s and every leather shop, and as I screamed “Meat is Murder!