Community hub
Recent from talks
Contribute something to knowledge base
Content stats: 0 posts, 0 articles, 0 media, 0 notes
Members stats: 0 subscribers, 0 contributors, 0 moderators, 0 supporters
Subscribers
Supporters
Contributors
Moderators
Hub AI
Mirha-Soleil Ross AI simulator
(@Mirha-Soleil Ross_simulator)
Hub AI
Mirha-Soleil Ross AI simulator
(@Mirha-Soleil Ross_simulator)
Mirha-Soleil Ross
Mirha-Soleil Ross is a transsexual videographer, performance artist, sex worker and activist. Her work since the early 1990s in Montreal and Toronto has focused on transsexual rights, access to resources, advocacy for sex workers and animal rights. She is also known for art produced under the pseudonym Jeanne B.
Her notable works include gendertrash from hell, the Counting Past 2 festival, her show Yapping Out Loud, and the film Mateřština.
Ross grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Montreal, Quebec. Her family was francophone, worked in construction, and was mostly illiterate. She is Métis. As a teenager during the 1980s, Ross became aware of animal abuse, becoming a vegetarian and getting involved with animal rights activism. She credited this with increasing her awareness of the needs of other marginalized groups, like queer people and sex workers. She struggled to "pass" as a boy and was often attacked for looking too feminine. Ross moved from Montreal to Toronto during the early 1990s, where she did sex work and began producing zines and videos.
From 1993 to 1995, Ross and her partner Xanthra Phillippa MacKay published gendertrash from hell, a zine which "[gave] a voice to gender queers, who've been discouraged from speaking out & communicating with each other." They published the zine via genderpress, a company they began in Toronto. Gendertrash was distributed via queer and feminist bookstores, then shared widely among trans people and the queer underground scene, helping form a collective trans culture. In 2025, Ross and Cat Fitzpatrick compiled gendertrash issues and archival materials into a 2025 book, Gendertrash From Hell, published by LittlePuss Press. It has a foreword by Trish Salah and afterword by Leah Tigers.
The original zine included art, poetry, resource lists, serialized fiction, calls to action, classified ads, illustrations, collages and movie reviews. By and for transsexual, transgender and transvestite people, it addressed gender experiences at the individual and societal level and prioritized sex workers, low-income queer people, trans people of colour and prisoners. Articles frequently addressed the erasure of transsexuals from queer communities and the co-opting of trans identities and issues. Ross and MacKay contributed content to the zine, with Ross sometimes writing under the pseudonym Jeanne B. Their company, genderpress, also distributed other trans literature, corresponded with local organizations, and sold buttons.
Ross' videos, primarily short films, centre on gender, sexuality, animal rights and the transsexual body. Her videos are distributed by Vtape in Toronto. Ross described her filmmaking in her site's biography:
I have always seen my work as activist-oriented and as contributing to changing the terms of the conversations around transsexual issues. In addition, my video making has been motivated by my desire to contribute to the development of a small but radical body of work produced by a handful of transsexual film and video makers internationally. Until 1998, most of my videos were concerned with archiving transsexual histories while challenging audiences – particularly those from the lesbian, gay, and feminist communities – with uncensored and diverse representations of transsexual lives, sexualities, and political struggles [...] My focus has shifted to developing a visual language that articulates the joys and perils of living culturally, sexually, and spiritually in a transsexual body.
Laura Horak lists Ross as an important early trans porn filmmaker, along with artists like Christopher Lee, Stephanie Anne Lloyd, Buck Angel, Morty Diamond, and Cary Cronenwett. Amy Marvin points to Ross and MacKay's film Gender Troublemakers as an important early example of trans-for-trans, or t4t, publishing. Daze Jefferies compares Ross' art to that of Nina Arsenault, saying that each "explore the spatial and spiritual registers of transsexual womanhood". Ross donated her videos and those of her film festival, Counting Past 2, to the Arquives, making her fonds and Rupert Raj's the majority of the trans-related film in that archive. As of 2020[update], Ross' fonds were also one of the largest collections of trans films in the world.
Mirha-Soleil Ross
Mirha-Soleil Ross is a transsexual videographer, performance artist, sex worker and activist. Her work since the early 1990s in Montreal and Toronto has focused on transsexual rights, access to resources, advocacy for sex workers and animal rights. She is also known for art produced under the pseudonym Jeanne B.
Her notable works include gendertrash from hell, the Counting Past 2 festival, her show Yapping Out Loud, and the film Mateřština.
Ross grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Montreal, Quebec. Her family was francophone, worked in construction, and was mostly illiterate. She is Métis. As a teenager during the 1980s, Ross became aware of animal abuse, becoming a vegetarian and getting involved with animal rights activism. She credited this with increasing her awareness of the needs of other marginalized groups, like queer people and sex workers. She struggled to "pass" as a boy and was often attacked for looking too feminine. Ross moved from Montreal to Toronto during the early 1990s, where she did sex work and began producing zines and videos.
From 1993 to 1995, Ross and her partner Xanthra Phillippa MacKay published gendertrash from hell, a zine which "[gave] a voice to gender queers, who've been discouraged from speaking out & communicating with each other." They published the zine via genderpress, a company they began in Toronto. Gendertrash was distributed via queer and feminist bookstores, then shared widely among trans people and the queer underground scene, helping form a collective trans culture. In 2025, Ross and Cat Fitzpatrick compiled gendertrash issues and archival materials into a 2025 book, Gendertrash From Hell, published by LittlePuss Press. It has a foreword by Trish Salah and afterword by Leah Tigers.
The original zine included art, poetry, resource lists, serialized fiction, calls to action, classified ads, illustrations, collages and movie reviews. By and for transsexual, transgender and transvestite people, it addressed gender experiences at the individual and societal level and prioritized sex workers, low-income queer people, trans people of colour and prisoners. Articles frequently addressed the erasure of transsexuals from queer communities and the co-opting of trans identities and issues. Ross and MacKay contributed content to the zine, with Ross sometimes writing under the pseudonym Jeanne B. Their company, genderpress, also distributed other trans literature, corresponded with local organizations, and sold buttons.
Ross' videos, primarily short films, centre on gender, sexuality, animal rights and the transsexual body. Her videos are distributed by Vtape in Toronto. Ross described her filmmaking in her site's biography:
I have always seen my work as activist-oriented and as contributing to changing the terms of the conversations around transsexual issues. In addition, my video making has been motivated by my desire to contribute to the development of a small but radical body of work produced by a handful of transsexual film and video makers internationally. Until 1998, most of my videos were concerned with archiving transsexual histories while challenging audiences – particularly those from the lesbian, gay, and feminist communities – with uncensored and diverse representations of transsexual lives, sexualities, and political struggles [...] My focus has shifted to developing a visual language that articulates the joys and perils of living culturally, sexually, and spiritually in a transsexual body.
Laura Horak lists Ross as an important early trans porn filmmaker, along with artists like Christopher Lee, Stephanie Anne Lloyd, Buck Angel, Morty Diamond, and Cary Cronenwett. Amy Marvin points to Ross and MacKay's film Gender Troublemakers as an important early example of trans-for-trans, or t4t, publishing. Daze Jefferies compares Ross' art to that of Nina Arsenault, saying that each "explore the spatial and spiritual registers of transsexual womanhood". Ross donated her videos and those of her film festival, Counting Past 2, to the Arquives, making her fonds and Rupert Raj's the majority of the trans-related film in that archive. As of 2020[update], Ross' fonds were also one of the largest collections of trans films in the world.