Lu McCarvill-Russo: 2025 Recipient of the Lambda Foundation & Jack Hallam Human Rights Award
Congratulations to Lu McCarvill-Russo, this year’s 2025 Recipient of the Lambda Scholarship Foundation Canada & Jack Hallam Human Rights Award at Gulf Islands Secondary School on Salt Spring Island, BC.
About the Award
In 2007, long-time activist and Salt Spring Island resident Jack Hallam created a lasting gift for his community: the Jack Hallam Human Rights Award. Through the Lambda Foundation, Jack ensured that each year a graduating student at Gulf Islands Secondary School (GISS) would be recognized for outstanding leadership in the fight against homophobia, transphobia, and intersecting forms of discrimination—including racism, ableism, and colonial violence.
Jack believed deeply in the power of young people to change the world. His award uplifts 2SLGBTQIA+ students and allies who take bold, public stands for human rights in their schools and communities. The award has been granted annually since 2007 and is currently valued at $1,000 per recipient. It is open to Grade 12 students at GISS who submit an essay, media project, or demonstration of community activism that addresses the human rights of 2SLGBTQIA+ people and those who face additional marginalization based on race, gender, class, disability, or other factors.
However, Jack’s original donation has left only $3,750—which means the award fund will soon be depleted. This is why Lambda has launched a campaign to raise $30,000 to build a permanent fund that will allow the award to grow and continue indefinitely. Our goal is to increase the annual award to $2,000, better reflecting the impact and importance of the recipients’ leadership and commitment to justice.
Meet Lu McCarvill-Russo
Hello! My name is Lu McCarvill-Russo. I am from Victoria, BC, and grew up on Salt Spring Island. I plan to attend UVic this fall, where I’ll be pursuing a BA in English. I am a writer and a music lover.
Lu’s Aspirations
I plan to become a high school teacher because I hope to be a role model for the 2SLGBTQIA+ kids I will teach. I believe it’s vital for every child to see a strong future for themselves—and often, that becomes possible when they have positive role models in their lives. This is especially important for queer and trans kids.
Today, the rights of 2SLGBTQIA+ people are constantly under threat. The future can feel uncertain and frightening. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know we can only face it together. The connections we build and the sense of community they create are some of the most important bonds we can foster.
Lu writes, “Thank you so much to the Lambda Foundation for selecting me for this award. I am extremely grateful. Winning this award will greatly assist me in meeting my future goals.”
Read Lu’s Essay
You can read Lu’s full essay, submitted as part of their application, below.
Support the Future of this Award
The Jack Hallam Human Rights Award exists because one person believed in the next generation’s power to lead. Help us honour that legacy—and ensure that 2SLGBTQIA+ youth leaders like Lu have the support they need to create change for decades.
Give today to keep this award thriving for future human rights champions.
“You’ve Got Nothing To Hide”: SOPHIE and Translating Pain Into Power Through Creation
By Lu McCarvill-Russo
“It’s okay to cry.” This is the opening chorus of producer, songwriter, and visionary SOPHIE’s sophomore album. It’s a message that is stated simply and truthfully. However, it’s a message that queer and trans people desperately need to hear. In a world that politicizes and criticizes something as simple as our existence, we are often forced into the position of being strong, resilient representatives of our entire community. We are made to hide the inherent pain that comes with queerness. A reminder that we are in fact allowed to feel this pain may be simple, but it is also entirely necessary for our survival.
Throughout history, LGBTQ+ creatives have taken their pain and translated it into art. Take the Black and Latino ballroom dance culture of the 70’s and 80’s, where queer and trans people of colour took shelter from the homophobia, transphobia, and racism they experienced through music and dance. Take Felix González-Torres, the conceptual artist whose “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) stands as a tribute to his partner, Ross Laycock, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1991. Take trans activist Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, her 1993 novel that encapsulates the highs and lows of the butch lesbian experience.
Queer people have repeatedly taken the pain the world has caused them and made it into music, art, and writing. For centuries, queer art has been complex, beautiful, and absurd, much like the queer experience itself. Indeed, there truly is no better example of queer pain, beauty, and absurdity than the music of Sophie Xeon, who tells us that our pain is also our power and that it really is okay to cry.
Sophie Xeon (stylized as SOPHIE) was born in Glasgow in 1986. She described her childhood as being isolating but regarded her early discovery of electronic music (through her father’s cassettes and the raves he took her to) to be life-changing, using music as a form of escapism from a young age.
Taking isolation and transforming it into passion is not an uncommon experience for transgender youth. It is often hard for trans people to fully understand how they are different from those around them before they have the language to define and explain themselves. Music acts as its own language, and this is perhaps why so many trans people—especially trans women like Sophie, who experience a uniquely awful blend of transphobia, misogyny, and fetishization—flock to genres like electronic music that use little to no words.
Experimental music is a reinvention of language—and instead of words, trans femme artists often utilize instrumentation in order to express themselves. In 2013 Sophie released her debut single, Nothing More to Say. As a lyricless—not vocalless—track, Nothing More to Say established many of SOPHIE’s iconic musical properties that cemented her as a groundbreaking producer. One of them, which became a key part of the hyperpop genre that came after and because of her, was playing with and modulating the voice as one would with an instrument. It’s Okay to Cry is one of the only songs that features SOPHIE’s voice. Usually, she used the vocals of her female friends and collaborators, largely due to vocal dysphoria (another common convention with trans women and electronic music).
Sophie’s music includes heavily pitched-up and autotuned vocals, which makes her music as odd and alien as it is uniquely beautiful. On tracks like 2013’s Bipp, Sophie plays with vocals in a way that redefines what voices can be. By chopping specific sounds up, repeating them, and pitching them up, we hear something entirely new. When this bright, girly, robotic effect is amalgamated with SOPHIE’s simple lyricism (“I can make you feel better/if you let me/I can make you feel better/if you want to”), the effect is unprecedented.
Through SOPHIE’s unique approach to pop songwriting (which included playing with the sound effects of bubbles popping and balloons squeaking, pitch-shifting, and speeding them up), she essentially invented a new genre of music. This was a genre in which queer (and especially trans) people could take their pain and turn it into joy in a new way. The kind of music SOPHIE created is one in which pain and joy would be expressed in tandem, so intense, loud, and complex that it begs you to feel all of those contradictory feelings at once.
The music Sophie created was celebrated but not well defined until collaborator and friend A.G. Cook began the P.C. Music label in London. Cook described a strong interest in fusing the high and lowbrow culture that exists in music fandom. When you take heavily produced, heavily capitalistic, heavily inauthentic pop music and combine it with the uniqueness and often absurdity of many electronic genres, you get something that is so overproduced it becomes, oddly enough, the most authentic sound of all. However, even though A.G. Cook defined the intentions behind the kind of music that he and Sophie were creating (hyperpop and bubblegum bass are just some of the terms used for this genre), there is also something beautiful to be said in not defining it, in letting this odd music exist independent of definition.
Immaterial—a popular track off of Sophie’s grammy nominated OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES—stresses the importance of existing in the undefined, especially when it comes to queerness. In Sophie’s first album, Product, she spends careful time creating clear aesthetics with songs like Lemonade.
Before she came out as transgender in 2017, SOPHIE was almost entirely anonymous. This is reflected in the music she made—it intentionally exists independent from a person or place. Instead, it often relies on the aesthetics of a singular, tangible thing (take 2015’s Lemonade, which is about, you guessed it, lemonade). However, on her second album, Sophie explores both what it is like to have a tangible identity as an artist and what it is like to have a tangible identity as a person. Immaterial is about both the importance and impermanence of gender identity, with the phrase “immaterial boys/immaterial girls” (a riff on Madonna’s “Material Girl”) repeated throughout the song almost spiritually. For a genderqueer person, the idea of being “immaterial” may be as scary as it is comforting.
Before coming out, Sophie was often criticized for being male and using female vocalists in her songs, obviously quite a hurtful comment for someone trans and in the closet. This message of being immaterial—existing outside of society’s definition of your identity and only within your own—was as powerful for Sophie as it is for the millions of transgender people experiencing the same. If It’s Okay to Cry is a song reminding queer people they are allowed to feel their pain, then Immaterial is a song reminding us that it’s okay to reclaim both our pride and our power. In this song, Sophie reminds us that we should be ourselves “Anyhow, anywhere, anyplace” we want.
On January 30th, 2021 Sophie died tragically by falling off of a balcony. She was only 34, and her death greatly impacted the friends, collaborators, and fans that surrounded her. For a huge majority of her career, Sophie was almost entirely an anonymous figure. She believed that music ought to exist—aesthetically and sonically—independent from its creator, and that it should speak for itself. Because of both the anonymous role she took on and the hyper-futuristic value of her music, SOPHIE was often viewed less as a human being and more as a mysterious, otherworldly being who stood in the shadows creating music. In a way Sophie assigned herself this role, and in a way she actually liked it. However, it’s hard to deny her humanness when the way in which she died is brought to light: tragically and accidentally, two primary realities of the human condition.
SOPHIE’s impact lingers, much like other queer visionaries before her, long after her death through her work. SOPHIE clearly impacted an entire generation of transgender musicians, including Kim Petras, Dorian Electra, Laura Les, Angel Prost, Ethel Cain, Jane Remover, Black Dresses, and countless others. It’s also clear to see that she indirectly revitalized pop music as a whole and that her unique approach to pop songwriting lives on through today’s biggest acts, queer and straight. It’s both easy and necessary to mourn Sophie’s death, but it’s also important to understand the ways in which she will forever live on.
In her lifetime, SOPHIE took the pain of her queerness and translated it into music that was as absurd as it was beautiful. After her death, her influence lives on through the queer and trans artists that carry her legacy and translate queer pain into power through creation.
Resources
- https://www.vanvoguejam.com/ballroom-history
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INSugJy1BBw
- https://www.lennyletter.com/story/sophie-interview
- https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/sep/20/sophie-posthumous-album-interview
- https://maxmadethat.com/publishing/transvocalmodulation
- https://articles.roland.com/label-to-genre-what-is-pc-music/
