Jade Kulhawy-Bartlett

Jade (she/her) is a white settler trans woman who came to Chinese medicine after 8 years of work in activist communities where she honed collectivist values and observed a shared need to address our physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies alongside liberation work for the social body.

Moving to Victoria from Alberta to start on this path, Jade started studying Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) at Pacific Rim College in the Fall of 2017 and earned her Diploma of Acupuncture in December 2020. She has been licensed to practice acupuncture in this province since December 2021.

As a student of this medicine, Jade is interested in the ways in which the Daoist philosophy underpinning Chinese medicine and classical Chinese medical texts makes space for identities, bodies, minds, and hearts unrecognizable to mainstream Western culture. Part of this exploration has led her to undertaking mentorship as a Balance System Acupuncture certified practitioner under Shīfu Dr. Sonia Tan. She completed the formal certification in April 2025, but the mentorship provided by BSA instructors is a lifelong path.

As a trans woman, during a time when the rights of trans people and many other oppressed people are being offered up as sacrifices upon the altar of fear and division, Jade is particularly interested in how acupuncture and Chinese medicine can be accessed as an effective and financially accessible form of health care to fill in the gaps that many of us experience when engaging with the conventional medical system. She intends to provide a space where people can be seen and held in their unique embodied humanity while taking care of their earthly form and all its needs and intricacies.

She is also deeply passionate about the role acupuncture – and community acupuncture in specific – can play in helping communities and individuals to be more engaged in their own health care, and more aware of- and connected to their own bodies/hearts/minds/spirits. Jade finds the profoundly accessible, effective, and minimally invasive medicine we practice to be a radical intervention in the health of our culture as a whole.