If you have followed me for any amount of time, you know the deep love I have for martial arts.

As a pre-adolescent, I was obsessed with ninjas, but it wasn’t until I turned 13 and started going to high-school in the big-scary-next-town-over that I decided to follow in my big sibling’s footsteps and enroll in Karate classes at our little island’s local Shotokan Karate club, which ran out of the elementary school’s gymnasium. I instantly fell in love with Karate, and shortly afterwards I also started private Sil Lum Kung-fu lessons with the local glasses shop owner. By age 15, I was helping to teach students at the club, and by the end of my teens, I was making money on the side running Karate Summer Camps for kids and teaching at my sensei’s other dojo in that big-scary-next-town-over.

Then I went away to Art School in Vancouver and didn’t have much time or money for formal training with a dojo, so I just kept training on my own. Here and there I would find myself teaching karate, such as when I was volunteering in Nepal and I taught karate classes of literally hundreds of students at a time in a village outside of Kathmandu. Later on in my 20’s, after my bout with cancer and I found myself training more actively to rebuild myself, I got a job teaching at what was essentially what many would call a “McDojo” – a chain of commercialized martial arts schools with a poor reputation and dubious traditional pedigree. I didn’t care, I was just happy to be teaching martial arts.

It was when I was laid off from that job that I began pursuing art as a career more seriously, and once again I found myself with little time/money to train in an organized manner, and I certainly wasn’t interested in working as a teacher when I had a big exciting art career to focus on 😉

But I never stopped training – except for a couple of years there – and I never stopped thinking martial arts are cool as hell.

Flash forward to around this time in 2023, my friend from art school and former colleague at the McDojo, sensei Kyle Duske, reached out to ask if I would be interested in teaching once again. His dojo, Kumakai (“Bear Society”), was set to take over a large Kyokushin ryu dojo out at UBC and they needed more instructors to help cover the large classes. Naturally, I said yes.

Kyle sensei also hired me to draw up this animal mascot for the club – of our four mythical animals, The Fire Bear.

I have now been teaching at Kumakai for almost a year, and in 2025 I will be teaching classes all on my own!

Karate used to be a thing that I thought was a coping mechanism for my life in the closet – an “alternate masculinity” that I could hide in. I thought after I transitioned that maybe I needed to let it fade into the background and allow myself to explore other things. I think I needed to spend some time away from karate in order to understand just how important it was to me. Today I understand that Karate is an integral part of who I am, even going so far as to half-jokingly say that Karate is my Gender (maybe more on that another day).

So if you live in Vancouver and are interested in learning some martial arts, why not head out to the Wesbrook Community Centre or to our dojo at the Vancouver Mind-Body Centre to train with yours-truly at Kumakai?

Or if you are a martial artist passing through town, we’d love to have you for a drop-in guest training session.

I am also thinking that I may perhaps create my own little club.

Over the Summer I ran a seminar at CampOut!, the 2SLGBTQIA+ youth Summer camp, called “Buff Aunt Bria’s Real Ultimate Karate Club“, and I’m thinking I might bring that out into the world outside of camp. I think a queer/trans community martial arts club might just be what this city needs. I could also put up aspects of our training online.

What would you think about that?