In 2017, military veteran Jeff Everly took his 14-year-old daughter to the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa to treat her depression. But last week, he was back in Ottawa to lead a coalition of de-transitioners, an advocate, a former therapist, a former school trustee, and a father, with his profound concern with gender ideology. (Gender ideology is the idea that gender, gender identity, and gender expression are disassociated with our biological sex.)
The main request in their press conference was for the federal government to repeal its conversion therapy ban so that children, adolescents, and adults alike could get counselling that would affirm their biological sex. Right now, such counselling is illegal, seen by the federal government as an attempt to “convert” someone who identifies as transgender, non-binary, or any other gender identity to identify with their natal sex.
But the unspoken petition was to ban medical gender transitioning for minors.
How did one father’s interaction with the mental health system lead to a press conference on gender ideology?
Evely, founder of Mayday, explained this journey in the press conference. Almost a decade ago, he took his then 14-year-old daughter to the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario’s mental health clinic in Ottawa to manage her depression. Without his knowledge, she was transferred to the hospital’s gender clinic. The clinicians assumed that her depression, mixed with some gender atypical behaviour, must mean that a gender transition would solve her poor mental health. Evely opposed this course of action and stopped taking his daughter to the children’s hospital.
But soon, Evely was deployed abroad and unable to personally attend to his daughter’s poor mental health and gender uncertainty. While on deployment, his daughter turned 16, the legal age of medical consent in Ontario. The gender clinic then considered it fair game to start calling his daughter and to start a medical transition, despite the wishes of her father. The clinician quickly offered her puberty blockers.
Alarmed by the prospect of his daughter medically transitioning, Evely took an early leave from his tour to attend his daughter’s medical appointments.
Over the next few appointments with various health care professionals, some of which he recorded, Evely asked what evidence supported their diagnosis of gender dysphoria and their prescription of a medical transition. According to Evely, one clinician confessed that “he had absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support his assessment, but that he looked into his daughter’s heart and soul to determine that she was actually a male.” An endocrinologist said that his daughter “would commit suicide if I [Evely] didn’t support her transition, that adolescent-onset dysphoria does not desist, and that puberty blockers were completely reversible.” When he asked about the evidence to support these extraordinary claims, she responded, “we’re not going to be able to give you that evidence.”
Evely did not elaborate on whether his daughter proceeded with the medical transition or whether her gender confusion resolved naturally.
But he summed up his daughter’s personal encounter with pediatric gender medicine: “This is not medicine. It’s time for Canada to join the civilized world by banning the barbaric cultural practice of childhood medical transition.”
Next up on the speaking roster was Scott Newgent. Newgent variously self-identified as a “medically transitioned transgender adult,” a trans man, a mother, and a lesbian at various points in the press conference. Newgent is the founder of Trans Rational Educational Voices who appeared in Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman? and helped write bills in the US to ban medical gender transitioning for minors.
Newgent has personal skin in the game, living “through something I would not wish upon any child in this nation or any other: medical transition.”
“We cannot change our sex and medical transition cures nothing,” Newgent insisted. Medical transitioning is not caring, compassionate, or just. Newgent imagines a world in which children aren’t stuffed into neat gender stereotypes and are assumed to be a different gender if they don’t precisely follow these stereotypes.
Because conceiving of gender in this way – and taking it down its logical road of a medical gender transition – has many costs. The cost of medical transitioning is more than just money paid to medical professionals. The cost is in lives and in preventing children from growing up to “be who they were meant to be,” Newgent said. Newgent didn’t explicitly say what children are meant to be, but the implication is obvious: boys are meant to grow up into men and girls into women. Medical gender transitioning profoundly interferes with this development.
If an adult could be convinced of the lie of gender ideology, Newgent argued, then what chance do children have? A medical transition didn’t help Newgent. Instead, it created lifelong struggles with chronic infections, vitamin deficiencies, pulmonary embolisms, heart disease, and shortened life expectancy. This is a personal testimony of how “gender-affirming care” is anything but caring.
Drawing from Newgent’s own nightmare of medically transitioning, Newgent ended by challenging Canada to stand against medical gender transitions. “Are you willing to stand today so that a generation of children may stand unbroken tomorrow? Are you willing to take the heat today so that a child does not bear the consequences forever?” Children “deserve truth. They deserve protection. They deserve a future.”
Faith Groleau, a 26-year-old woman, provided a third personal testimony of the dangers of medical transitioning. She described being born with a hole in her diaphragm that required extensive surgery as a newborn to fix. At the age of two, she was sexually assaulted. That assault broke her collarbone, reopened that diaphragmatic hole, and rammed much of her intestines further up into her chest cavity. These internal wounds affected her health for most of her childhood but were misdiagnosed as mere asthma. These physical issues also left her in poor emotional and mental health.
Eventually, the same hospital that provided the life-saving surgery as a baby suggested that she medically transition as the fix. “A pediatrician overrode a psychiatric diagnosis – several of them,” she explained, to clear her for a medical transition. “Instead of assessing my mental health thoroughly, they decided to assume in the emergency room that my suicidal ideation came from the gender confusion. It did not. It was already there long before.” And yet, the medical professionals used this fiction to fast-track her medical transition, giving her hormones at the age of 16 and approving her for top surgery at 18.
Faith had further indictments against the team that pushed her to medically transition. “As a minor, I was emotionally groomed to manipulate my mother to tell her that, if I didn’t receive drugs or surgeries, I would kill myself. But that was not true.” Her suicidality long preceded any gender dysphoria. Beyond that, she claims that medical professionals mischaracterized the effects of drugs.
Faith explained that she was trans-identified from 16 to 24 but stopped cross-sex hormones at age 22. The withdrawal was brutal, but no medical help was offered.
“Everything that had happened to me was wrong and had nothing to do with evidence-based medicine,” she accused. (You can hear both fury and sorrow in her voice during the entirety of her remarks.) “I was experimented on. I was not told they were experimental. I was told it was medicine and that it would help. And it did none of that. It gave me complications that the doctors ignored or would treat as separate illnesses. It made my already pre-existing mental health worse. And my physical health continued to deteriorate.”
“These people do not know what they are signing up for because they are children,” she continued. “I was a child. I wanted help. That’s all I wanted. I did not need to be medicalized. I did not need to be cut up. I did not need to be drugged. I just wanted to be loved the way I was.”
Faith is currently suing the College of Physicians for malpractice, but the College maintains that the doctors did nothing wrong.
In contrast to these three intensely personal stories, Mia Hughes, a senior fellow at the McDonald-Laurier Institute and the Director of Genspect Canada, came armed with the academic evidence that Let Kids Be has been repeating for the past couple of years.
“Without any clear diagnosis, clinicians are halting the natural puberty of healthy young people, administering irreversible cross-sex hormones, and even surgically removing healthy organs, all long before these youth can possibly comprehend the life-long consequences,” Hughes claimed. She highlighted the low quality of evidence to support medical gender transitioning for minors and how this approach carries real lifelong risks. She pointed to how the UK, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, France, Italy, New Zealand, Queensland, 27 American states, and Alberta have limited hormonal transitioning. And she called out the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards as “lacking developmental rigour.”
“The truth is we are witnesses of a reckless medical experiment on distressed young people, many of whom have simply misinterpreted their normal pubertal woes for a sign they are transgender,” she concluded. “The time for looking the other way is over. Indeed, the very fact that we looked away for so long is a national disgrace.”
Hughes opined that the medical professionals won’t self-correct. Governments must step in. She explicitly asked the federal government to review the evidence behind medical gender transitioning and repeal their conversion therapy ban “before more innocent youths are harmed.” But again, the unspoken ask was to ban medical gender transitioning for minors.
Three others offered very brief comments to show their support. There was Kellie-Lynn Pirie, a detransitioner and founder of the Detrans Alliance Canada. Dr. Ann Gilles lent her support as a former therapist and pastor. And Barry Neufeld, the former Chilliwack school trustee who was fined $750,000 by the BC Human Rights Tribunal for speaking out against gender ideology, also spoke up.
We applaud all seven at the press conference for their courage to stand up against gender ideology and call for an end to the federal government’s ban on conversion therapy. Just as important would have been to ask the federal government to ban medical gender transitioning for minors. Both changes – repealing Canada’s conversion therapy law and banning medical transitioning for minors – are indispensable steps to let kids be.