“Every Girl Deserves To Shine” is a campaign to support trans girls everywhere and is the principle that guides RUBIES, a form-fitting clothing line for gender non-conforming kids founded by a Canadian father-daughter team in Toronto, Ontario.

When Ruby Alexander was 11 years old, she decided she wanted to wear a bikini, just like her friends. No more baggy board shorts! After an extensive search, her father, tech entrepreneur Jamie Alexander, realized there really weren’t any suitable bikini bottoms for his daughter, nor for other transgender and gender non-binary kids. 

So he set out to make them and founded RUBIES in 2019. Since then, RUBIES has sold over 1,000 black and pink shaping bikini bottoms in more than 20 countries worldwide.

Ruby and Jamie tell Out in the Bay producer Kendra Klang what makes their swimwear special, about their campaign to send free swimwear to trans girls who might not be able to afford them and other ways they help trans girls shine!

In the second half of this week’s show, author David Perry reads from and talks about his murder-mystery novel Upon This Rock, a tangled tale of homophobia, corruption and sex scandals at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church that takes place over five centuries in Italy and Vatican City. The book is a finalist for the Ben Franklin Award: Best Gay Novel of 2020.

Ruby Alexander enjoys her RUBIES swimwear. Photo courtesy of RUBIES.