The Diverse Hats of Mr. Lyra Evans
- Katherine Jameson Digby
- 2 days ago
- 12 min read
Updated: 1 hour ago
By Katherine Jameson Digby
On the evening of November 27, 2025, I was starting dinner when I flicked on the radio. I caught the tail end of the news, which mentioned that Planned Parenthood Ottawa (PPO) was having to put a stop to front-line programming due to financial shortfall. Given what I'd heard about Planned Parenthood’s foray into dispensing gender medication in the United States, I wondered if this had anything to do with the story in Canada.
I googled “Planned Parenthood Ottawa” and who, of all people should pop up on my screen to explain the situation at PPO, but Mr. Lyra Evans!
Lyra Evans first came to fame in 2018, when at age 26, he declared himself the first “openly trans” school board trustee in Canada. He was initially elected in 2018 to the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB), otherwise known as the English public board, and the largest school board in Ottawa.
"But the journey to [his] election victory has been far from easy … [he] faced discrimination by coming out first as gay and later as transgender. A lack of education, understanding and nuanced language regarding LGBTQ issues in the school system and the community at the time contributed to this, [he] says." Lyra Evans photo: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld
Evans was subsequently re-elected in 2022.
The last two terms of the OCDSB have been highly entertaining and Lyra Evans played no small part in this, although he never managed to capture as many headlines as his colleague, Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth.
In 2020, Mr. Evans proposed a successful amendment to remove funding for police officers at two Ottawa high schools.
In March of 2023, he stormed out of a school board meeting when a father of four inquired about policies that allow male access to female change rooms and washrooms.
Nick Morabito at March 7, 2023, meeting of the OCDSB, @1:53: I became aware a few weeks ago that trans students, in particular students that were assigned a male gender of birth, are allowed to use the same bathroom unsupervised as my 12-year-old daughter. Having a 14-year-old-boy, and as a male knowing how sexually driven a male's body is at the age of 13 onwards, this did not sit well with me. I wasn't present at the board meeting that pushed this policy through, and I can't figure out when this was done. My oldest friends can attest to my belief in the safety and inclusivity of all people. I always have. But this is about having appropriate and safe boundaries … and doing things in line with the parental community's wishes.
Trustee Nili Kaplan-Myrth: I'm sorry, Mr. Morabito, um, on the grounds that this creates an unsafe environment for people who identify as gender diverse, I'm going to have to ask you to, um, end your end your delegation.
Photo: Lyra Evans "OCDSB chair Lyra Evans, a trans woman, left the board chambers on Tuesday night after the man’s presentation started.
Lyra, who uses [his] first name, said [he] did not fear for [his] emotional or physical safety. 'This person is not going to change my mind,' [he] said. 'This delegation is not going to convince me of anything. So, I stepped aside. I didn’t want to get into an argument.'"
In June 2025, Mr. Evans’ career at the school board came to a screeching halt when the Province of Ontario appointed a supervisor to take over the running of the school board.
From a CTV article dated June 27, 2025:
The Ontario government is taking control of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and appointing a supervisor, after Ottawa’s largest school board posted four straight deficit budgets, including a projected $9.2 million deficit this past school year.
…
"The OCDSB has completely depleted its reserves, incurred an accumulated deficit, and plans to use unsustainable proceeds from the sale of assets to balance its books,” the Ontario government said in a statement.
…
If you look at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, not only are they running multi-year deficits. Even when they’ve promised to come back to balance, they have not lived up to that responsibility. It’s a board where multiple trustees have resigned, where parents are frustrated over things that the board is doing.
With the Provincial Supervisor now in charge of the school board, things have been remarkably quiet for the past six months.
Imagine my surprise then, when the stern visage of Lyra Evans popped up on my screen, expressing his disappointment in underfunding, this time, not of the public school system, but of Planned Parenthood.
Evans explains in the November 27, 2025 CBC article that Planned Parenthood Ottawa is temporarily halting its front-line programming as the agency tries to address a major financial shortfall:
The [Planned Parenthood] board has looked at our financial situation, looked at our labour situation, and said, 'We need some time to sit down and pause what's going on,'" said executive director Lyra Evans on Thursday.
“We need this time — between now and the end of the year — to figure out what our programs are going to look like, to figure out what our finances are going to be ... and to make sure that we're not committing to things we're not going to be able to sustain long-term."
The same CBC article explains that “According to its 2024 Annual Report, Planned Parenthood Ottawa overshot its budget by nearly $100,000 in the last fiscal year.”
Hints of this situation appeared on November 5 when the CBC reported on a “cash crisis” at PPO, due to:
…an increasing demand for services like in-school education workshops and support for people seeking gender-affirming care, combined with stagnating funding, Evans said.
[Evans] said the charity, which has been operating in Ottawa since the 1960s, gets the majority of its funds through government and community grants, but many have not been renewed this year.
This article opens by describing the scene of Mr. Evans having taken on the front-line role of advising visitors to PPO:
In a small downtown office, Lyra Evans offers a young woman an array of sexual health resources, from educational pamphlets about sexually transmitted infections to information on abortion access.
It’s like any other drop-in day at Planned Parenthood Ottawa, where community members can access free materials or supplies including condoms and pregnancy tests…
Evans, the organization's new executive director, is the only staff member here. (Evans is also trustee with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, which is currently under provincial supervision.)”
Not having myself needed the services of Planned Parenthood in a couple of decades, I did have to ask, how on earth has Lyra Evans resurfaced as the Executive Director of Planned Parenthood?
In an article from October 6, 2022, in Xtra* magazine, Evans describes his dissatisfaction with the Ontario sex education curriculum as a key motivation for running for the position of School Board Trustee:
Evans first decided to run for the school board in 2018, after Doug Ford’s Ontario government announced plans to revert to the 1998 sex education curriculum and scrap updates on gender identity and sexual orientation. “I was very upset about that,” says Evans. “I felt like it was undermining the work of the community to educate young people about the existence of LGBTQ2S+ people and foster understanding.
Unlike his colleagues Kimberly Nixon and Mridul Wadhwa, two other gentlemen who settle for nothing less than front-line roles in advising women on reproductive health, Evans does not employ makeup or female-typical clothing to try to “pass.” He wears his long hair in a masculine-style low ponytail and dresses in sober, dark clothing.
His lack of effort with his “she/her” appearance reinforces just how compelling a male demand for acknowledgement of gender identity can be. Though he doesn’t look remotely female, none of his almost-all-female school board colleagues ever dared defy him in his gender demands.
From the October 2022 Xtra* interview:
Evans says [he] plans to remain openly trans—regardless of how well [he] passes—because [he] rarely saw people like [him] when [he] was young. […T]he stories we hear about trans people today tend to be solely focused on their transition. Evans is committed to showing that there’s much more to trans people than transitioning narratives."
The same carefree approach to appearance is not seen in Mr. Evans’ erstwhile colleague Steph Wobensmith (they/them), hired in 2024 as the Gender Affirming Care Navigator at Planned Parenthood.
Wobensmith was given a seven-minute segment on CBC Radio Ottawa's All in a Day program in 2024, to describe her new role at PPO. She managed to talk for a whopping four-and-a-half minutes about her own hair, until the interviewer gently changed the topic.
So what qualifications are required for a man to take over the front-line role of advising women of reproductive age on sexual health at PPO?
Or am I asking the wrong question? Am I hopelessly out of date, assuming that visitors to PPO are there primarily in search of information on reproductive health?
As it turns out, PPO has substantially broadened its mandate in recent years.
Annual Reports for Planned Parenthood Ottawa are available on their web site, although notably 2018 and 2020 are not accessible.
Skimming through the reports takes the reader on a journey through the last decade of intersectionality which will be uncannily familiar to many Gender Dissent readers.
Here are some highlights:
The reports are available as far back as 2010. It’s in 2014 that we get the first mention of Gender Identity:
We are dedicated to supporting any individual regardless of age, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, religion, race, ethnicity, financial circumstance or the language they speak.
In 2017, we get the first Land Acknowledgement, tailored for PPO purposes:
As an organization, PPO committed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2017. All staff and board members reviewed the TRC’s Calls to Action to identify our obligations as a Canadian non-profit organization operating on unceded Algonquin Territory. PPO will consistently strive to integrate healing and reconciliation into our programming, given the legacy of trauma that sexual and reproductive health services have caused – and continue to cause – in Indigenous communities. We created a resource for Indigenous people to increase access to birth control and will continue to work ever more closely with Indigenous partners.
In 2019, we see the first images appear in the annual report, in what, up until then, had been an all-text document. This year’s report states that “We continue to learn so much from these unprecedented times about the intersections of inequities in health care access, systemic racism, and sexual and reproductive health.”
In 2021, a person named Jaisie Walker (they/them/theirs) takes over as Executive Director, and the mandate and values of PPO continue to grow:
Anti-oppressive: We take into account the ways in which systems of oppression operate and impact marginalize people and their access to SRH care. We strive to ensure that our services are actively fighting against the manifestations of these interlinked systems of oppression.
Sex-positive: Sex positivity as a movement has gaps in addressing cultural competency, accessibility, race and supporting sex work. We work towards validating experience of sexuality and sexual expression outside of heteronormative and Eurocentric perspectives. Therefore, as an organization we acknowledge we must change to address a more nuanced understanding of what the sex positivity movement can do to be better. To us sex positivity means that all experiences are valid and supported. We created spaces for vital conversations and learnings on how to serve the organization and community that is actively anti-oppressive.
2021 also set the stage for some new blood in the organization:
This foundational work is well-timed as we began a significant board member recruitment in 2021 that continued to spring 2022, replacing several outgoing members.
We see new language meant to challenge the notion that only women get pregnant:
People have found out their pregnancy later than usual due to delayed medical appointments and lack of pregnancy testing available in their community.
And for the first time in the Annual Reports, we learn that PPO has a mandate to provide information on “trans-inclusive affirming health support”:
Meanwhile, amidst a culture of transphobia and gender exclusionary care, people continue to reach out for trans-inclusive and affirming sexual and reproductive health support.
Significantly, this annual report was written a year into the pandemic, when dating was largely forbidden, and everyone was online discovering new genders. It is also the first year that priority-setting board meetings would all have taken place online.
In 2022 we get the reiteration of “sex positivity” as a mandate of PPO, and now it takes the form of decriminalizing sex work. It also explicitly states that no sexual encounters are bad in and of themselves.
Sex-positive: We support and affirm diverse genders and sexualities, support the decriminalization of sex work, and believe pleasure and access to contraception are basic healthcare needs. To us sex positivity means that all experiences are valid and supported.
2023 saw an expansion of PPO’s commitment to Truth and Reconciliation:
Our Anti-Colonial Responsibility: Planned Parenthood Ottawa acknowledges both historical and ongoing colonial violence within the healthcare and social service sectors and are committed to supporting and advocating for the diverse needs of our Indigenous service users - ensuring all sexual and reproductive health decisions made with our team are grounded in informed consent and free from coercion.
And in 2023, we again get the understated inference that PPO now has a mandate for “gender-affirming care.”
The impacts of a fractured and underfunded sexual and reproductive healthcare landscape on communities and families is particularly challenging for sexual health education, gender-affirming care, and abortion access, both at home and abroad.
In 2024 we get the full list of priority populations for PPO attention:
Prioritizing support for marginalized communities, including 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals, Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities, newcomers, and uninsured people, ensuring they receive the care they deserve.
And this is the year that PPO formally introduced a new program:
We proudly launched the AFFIRM: Gender-Affirming Care Program this year, modelled after our Options care model. Gender-affirming care is an essential part of reproductive healthcare, and as a trans-led team we are more committed than ever to improving access to these services, contraception, sexual health testing, gender-affirming care, and emotional support.
By 2024, the Annual Report has bumped “Pregnancy Options” down the document, under three pages of information on “Affirming.” Notably the budget for 2024 went up substantially, with an increase of $44,817 for "Professional Fees” and $18,842 for “Program Contracts.”
The look of the reports evolves over time too, with more and more images mixed in, larger text, more colour and cartoonish layout. By 2024, all of the couples depicted in photos appear to be same-sex couples.
With the doors of Planned Parenthood Ottawa now closed for the foreseeable future, will PPO be able to recover from its ambitious expansion into territory that funders never committed to supporting? Let’s hope so.
Allow me to share some contentious observations for PPO, from what used to be known as “the real world”:
“Funding” is not some miasma that moves mysteriously into and out of organizations for no discernable reason. Funders tend to follow community priorities, so it’s a good idea to keep your finger on the pulse of the community, which is not the same thing as being online all the time.
In spite of all the progress made in recent years, heterosexual people still make up the majority of the population.
One heterosexual couple is all it takes to make an unplanned pregnancy.
Since women do all the childbearing, and most of the childrearing around the world, women are generally more motivated than men to seek out birth control.
Same-sex couples don’t need birth control.
Sexual health needs for lesbians and gay men are different from each other because they have different types of bodies. 2SLGBTQIA+ people should not be grouped together as a separate health category.
Asexual people need even less birth control than gay people.
The fewer people you have sex with, the less chance you have of catching a sexually transmitted disease.
Most women do not want to make a living selling their bodies.
A young woman in a new relationship seeking out birth control faces a daunting task. Making her access contingent on declaring allegiance to other political ideas makes the task even more unpleasant.
As the daughter of a nurse who volunteered for Planned Parenthood in the 1970s, I would get no satisfaction from the demise of the organization. I think I may echo the thoughts of many Ottawa residents when I wish sincerely for a return to the Planned Parenthood of yesteryear, and I hope, even more sincerely, for some other occupation for Mr. Lyra Evans.
— Katherine Jameson Digby
EDITOR'S UPDATES AND END-NOTES
FOR THE RECORD August 23, 2025
Lyra Evans (back to the camera), front and centre at the 2025 Ottawa Dyke March, celebrating "21 years of SHOWING UP as dykes with all dykes and alongside everyone that loves dykes" while:
refusing to obtain a protest permit;
encouraging pro-Palestinian flag-waving and medical mask-wearing three years after enforced federal safety measures for the pandemic had ended:
NEW! January 14, 2026
"Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) trustee Lyra Evans says [he’s] running for city council in Rideau-Vanier, one of the two wards in the zone [he] was elected to represent as a trustee."
Evans said [he’s] already achieved what [he] set out to do on the school board. Now [he] wants to get results at city hall on the environment, health and homelessness.
In [his] view, serving as a trustee is ideal preparation for city council.
"I learned a great deal about negotiation and compromise at the school board," [he] said. "It's an arena where you have to sit down with people who were also elected [and] who might hold very different views than you, and it's about how you work together to achieve your policy goals."
"How you work together."
Like, storming out of a school board meeting when a father of four properly challenges school board policy?
An OCDSB policy that provides teenaged males ready access to his 12-year-old daughter's changeroom, Mr. Evans?