Lukas Walther has lived an extraordinary life full of peril and resilience. His remarkable stories would make a captivating, inspiring series for those able to stomach the earlier episodes. Lukas is an articulate and passionate wearer of many hats. His resume includes community counselor, group facilitator, mentor, advocate, educator, resource developer, and consultant. These experiences accommodate his ongoing drive to identify and bridge critical gaps in care outreach. His front-line mental health work spans 50 years, 25+ specializing in gender diversity.
Lukas plays a unique role alongside local clinical specialists, supporting and informing BC’s trans youth and adults, their loved ones, care providers, employers, and schools. Since 1997, he has donated his time to countless doctors, teachers, and mental health professionals. His comprehensive, compassionate way of articulating trans identity issues has made deep inroads into the ability of these professionals to work effectively with trans populations. In 2006, he was awarded international recognition for a lifetime of activism and advocacy for the trans community. In 1998, he established a still-active discussion group for transmasculine adults. In 2004, while coordinating BC’s Transgender Health Program, he established a peer-led support network for trans-identified people involved in survival sex work, and in 2012, he established a support network for parents struggling to understand and support their trans kids, including those parents with deeply-rooted faith- and cultural-based conundrums.
Well-known for his impactful, customized workshops, Lukas is also a repeat invited speaker at numerous post-grad institutes, in their nursing, social work, and psychology programs. He utilizes aspects of his own lived experience to provide context for the more polarizing aspects of trans identity and gender dysphoria, interweaving common threads of human experience to ignite his audience’s empathy and understanding on these particularly complex matters.
