39 Facts About Rupert Raj

Rupert Raj was born on 1952 and is a Canadian transgender activist.

Rupert Raj's father was East Indian and his mother Polish; they met in Stockholm, where Raj's father, Amal Chandra Ghosh, worked as a nuclear physicist.

In 1971, at age 19, Rupert Raj scheduled an appointment with the Harry Benjamin Foundation's endocrinologist, Charles Ihlenfeld.

Since Rupert Raj was not yet 21, the age of majority in New York, his older brother provided consent.

Ihlenfeld examined Rupert Raj and administered his first shot of testosterone.

Rupert Raj graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Carleton University in 1975, and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, following two friends, both trans women activists who had been involved in the Association of Canadian Transsexuals in Toronto.

In May 1977, Rupert Raj moved with his partner and the partner's two children to Calgary, Alberta, because they had learned that surgeons at the Foothills Hospital, in affiliation with the University of Calgary's gender clinic, were performing phalloplasties for female-to-male transsexuals.

Rupert Raj officially retired in 2017, and now lives in southern Europe.

In 2001, Rupert Raj graduated from the Adler School of Professional Psychology with a Master of Arts in counseling psychology.

Rupert Raj has been a member of the Canadian Professional Association for Transgender Health since 2007, and in 2015 became a Canadian Certified Counsellor and joined the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario.

In January 1978, Rupert Raj started an organization for trans people, the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Transsexuals ; the organization's newsletter was Gender Review: A FACTual Journal.

Rupert Raj moved back to Ottawa and then to Toronto in the following years, but continued to edit the journal until February 1982.

In December 1981, Rupert Raj decided to focus on the specific needs of trans men, for which there were very few advocacy groups.

Rupert Raj resigned from his role at both FACT and Gender Review, and both were taken over by Susan Huxford, a trans woman from Hamilton, Ontario with whom Rupert Raj had begun working in late 1979.

Rupert Raj had planned to partner with Mario Martino in Yonkers to research, develop, and market a penile prosthetic device as an alternative to phalloplasty.

Rupert Raj founded the bi-monthly magazine Metamorphosis.

In 1988, Rupert Raj decided to close MMRF and end publication of Metamorphosis due to cumulative burnout.

Rupert Raj formed a new organization in June 1988, Gender Worker, and published a new newsletter called Gender NetWorker specifically designed for "helping professionals and resource providers" who worked with trans people; it ran two issues.

Between 1990 and 1999, Rupert Raj was not publicly active as a trans activist, in hopes of healing from burnout.

Since then, Rupert Raj has been active in Toronto as a psychotherapist, gender specialist, and trans-positive professional trainer.

Rupert Raj assessed trans people for readiness for either gender-affirming hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgery.

In November 2002, Rupert Raj started working as a mental health counselor at Sherbourne Health Centre in Toronto, providing individual, couples, and family therapy for LGBTQ people and their loved ones, and co-facilitated SHC's "Gender Journeys" from 2006 to 2013.

Beyond his clinical work, Rupert Raj was active in the trans, genderqueer, intersex, and two-spirit community in Toronto, participating in numerous community advisory boards for local community agencies, spearheading the first annual Trans Pride Day at SHC in 2004.

Rupert Raj delivered public speeches at the 2011 Honoured Dyke Group event of Pride Toronto ; the 2012 Toronto Trans March; and the 2014 Transgender Day of Remembrance held at Toronto City Hall, proclaiming it as an official day in Toronto along with the raising of the first Ontario trans flag.

Rupert Raj coined the term "voluntary gender worker" to describe the unofficial labor that transgender activists do.

Rupert Raj worked to bring attention to the risks that voluntary gender work brings to those who do it in a 1987 essay titled "Burnout: Unsung Heroes And Heroines In The Transgender World", originally published in The Transsexual Voice.

Almost thirty years later, Rupert Raj announced that he had taken indefinite medical leave as a result of burnout, and he officially retired from his job as a psychotherapist at Toronto's Sherbourne Health Centre.

Rupert Raj wrote an essay in the 1997 edited collection Gender Blending.

Rupert Raj is the co-editor of Trans Activism in Canada: A Reader.

Since 1999, Rupert Raj has designed and delivered more than 20 trans-focused training workshops and presentations in Canada, the US, and the UK.

In 2017, an article Rupert Raj wrote called "Worlds in Collision" appeared in the anthology of writing about Toronto's queer history, Any Other Way: How Toronto Got Queer.

In 2000, Xanthra McKay made a 23-minute video entitled "Rupert Remembers" in which Raj discusses trans spaces and activism in Toronto during the 1970s and 1980s.

Rupert Raj has been awarded two Lifetime Achievement Awards: the City of Toronto's Pride Award and the Community One Foundation's Steinert and Ferreiro Award for leadership in Canadian LGBTTIQQ2S communities.

In 2013, Rupert Raj was inducted into The ArQuives' National Portrait Collection.

Also in 2013, the Trans Lobby Group, which Rupert Raj co-founded as the Trans Health Lobby Group, won an Inspire Award in Toronto for Community Organization of the Year.

In 2022, Rupert Raj received an honorary Doctor of Law degree from Simon Fraser University.

In October 2022, Rupert Raj was presented with Fantasia Fair's Transgender Pioneer Award.

In 2023, an entry on Rupert Raj was added to The Canadian Encyclopedia.

At this point, Rupert Raj was still using his earlier chosen name, Nicholas Christopher Ghosh.