My Story

My name is Christine (Lee) Sandhu and I am a born and raised Canadian from the west coast of British Columbia. I have strong roots in Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland and have been living in Toronto, Ontario, my beloved second home, off and on since 2017.

I am 38 years old, an Aries rising, Virgo sun and moon (an avid fan of astrology and my own version of spirituality), and strongly identify as a diehard intersectional feminist, lifelong learner, academic, intellectual, and all-around compassionate and empathetic human being (but with the need for strong boundaries). 

I am also of South Asian descent and Punjabi, as well as a bisexual woman. My pronouns are she/her, and I’m a progressive Liberal/left-leaning socialist in some ways, if you can’t already tell.

Throughout my life, I have experienced all manner of bigotry and discrimination from racism, sexism, misogyny, and xenophobia to outright physical violence, sexual abuse and drug-facilitated rape— primarily within the City of Vancouver, as well as Human Rights and legal violations within the workplace (in both provinces). Whether it be from an individual(s) or systemic, and possibly rotten right down to its core, my personal motivations are often social and/or legal justice-oriented, while my broader interests lay in finding solutions and pushing for greater accountability from our public institutions.

I am a strong proponent of finding one’s voice, agency, and capacity for advocacy in all its forms, though learning to pick your battles comes with wisdom and age, and the two are by no means mutually exclusive. I believe life is often as long as it is short, depending on whether you're truly living, or just trying to survive. These days, I am increasingly leaning into joy and trying to find and cultivate even more of it.

I try hard to bridge gaps and create room for growth, but have also learnt the hard way that you can't teach or fix everybody, or every system alone. That said, I am and will forever be invested in the need for community-betterment, and have witnessed how positive social connections, environments, and mental health actually are intertwined.

This space is a space that is meant just for me, but also to present myself in all the ways in which I am a person worthy of speaking my truth, which I have often been told is truth to power, and sharing myself with the right people so that they may continue to find me. 

An important autoethnographic work based on my traumatic experiences with cancel culture, white feminism, my former favourite musician, and post #metoo whiplash is pending.

For more about me, you can simply look up the Globe & Mail's 2017 award-winning series "Unfounded" by investigative journalist Robyn Doolittle, who later went on to write a book in which I was mentioned. Specifically, our exchange at the annual Ontario Library Association’s Super Conference in 2019.

A point of pride is that out of the 54 participants, I was told that I was the only woman of colour to participate, and the only woman regardless of race to always be willing to show my face and have my real name attached.

“Unfounded” was ground-breaking and helped implement changes to how police services nationwide handle reports of sexual assault and their subsequent investigations. While that work is never finished, it was a daunting but necessary piece of journalism to be a part of and even moreso as it was published approximately eight months prior to the social media popularity and cultural explosion of #metoo.

The fact that I could even play a small part in contributing to that positive cultural, systemic, and societal change within Canada is something that will always remain deeply precious to me.