I have copied and pasted the transcript, and tried to get it into paragraphs (and the paragraphing could be incorrectly placed) and fixed a couple of obvious spelling mistakes in the transcript. (I don't know if Oger deliberately called Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 'Bitter Ginsburg', so I left that).
Start:
Morgane Oger: I'm going to be talking about this really interesting topic from the my point of view which is a social point of view so every generation monster and a scandal to justify an attempt to grab some sort of a control. In the 1970s, it was Anita Bryant and her Save Our Children campaign that warned that gay teachers would recruit children. In the 1980s, people were jailed during the satanic panic, a tale of virtual abuse had never happened. In the 2010s, diversity education in Western Canadian schools was branded as a scheme to groom children. We had the DND panic. We had all kinds of other things, movements that come up in opposition to a group. And today we're told gender affirming care and transness is a medical scandal.
That doctors mutilate children, parents are deluded or misguided or given false information, and that trans people are dangerous like the gays were, like Dungeons and Dragons was. But as usual, the lines can lapse under scrutiny. And scrutiny is what matters. The claims rely on fear, not on facts, on anecdote amplified by tabloids and social media personalities, not on science. Science has a rigor. It has a process. It has validation. The urgency and the harm are manufactured. We discover so often, and I propose this is the case here in much of this topic.
Sociologist Stanley Cohen once wrote, "Societies appear to be subject everyone now and then to periods of moral panic. When a condition or group is defined as a threat to societal values or group is demonized, scandal is invented and control is sold as protection.
So across decades and continents, the evidence is consistent. Now we will probably have some debate about this evidence. The W path standards of care version 8 in 2022. Gender affirming care improves mental health and reduces suicidality. The Canadian Pediatric Society in 2023, maybe a less
ideological organization, recommends affirming multidisciplinary care, especially for minors. The AAP in 2018, that's the association, American Association of Pediatrics, I believe, and reaffirmed in 2023 that denial of care increases risk for trans kids. Stats can in 2025 this month reported uh said that trans Canadians report higher life satisfaction and lower suicidal ideation when affirmed.
The data comes in slowly but the data is coming in. The Lancet in 2021, Uh, long-term outcomes show lasting well-being. Affirmation helps, rejection harms, and this is the medical consensus today.
Of course, consensus is not absolute rule. There is always dissent. What happens when fear becomes policy though? In the UK, 17-year-old Leia Samson Grimley recently, not so long ago, died waiting for gender affirming care. She did everything right. Actually, she's like the gold star of how you go through looking for gender affirming care. She reached out. She trusted the system until delays broke her. She happened to do this at a time where the UK was going through a trans panic. The coroner ruled that her death was preventable.
That word preventable should haunt every policy maker hiding behind the cast review which is a politicized UK review whose findings were that we need to do better science and we need to get some better results and more evidence over time intended to improve care. However, the review caused paralysis. The UK utterly stopped providing care to trans youth and trans kids and we're starting to see the consequences of it. Since April 2024, NHS in England has withheld puberty blockers outside research and delayed hormones for minors. Caution is not neutral when young people die.
There's a difference between caution and being slow and caution and refusing thing and causing harm. Right? Caution that costs lives is actually cruelty. The British Medical Association refused to endorse the Cass review because it was quite flawed. A Yale analysis found the review biased and methologically unsound. But the government of the UK implemented it anyways having campaigned on it. And now a child is dead.
Now one child does not make a statistic. I know that. But there will be more. We know there will be more. Liar reminds us that evidence delayed is care denied. And this is really important I think in today's conversation. Canada chose a different path which has been criticized by some people in this room. The Canadian Human Rights Act added gender identity and expression in 2017 to formalize what the legal precedent has been had been saying since the 1990s.
The charter guarantees equality in section 15 and ensures equal rights for women and men. In the eyes of Canadian law, women and men is everybody. They don't take into account non-binary people, Uh so don't get all upset and don't laugh uh at the same time. Um so and that includes and but also that includes trans women under section 28. In ACV Manitoba in 2009 the Supreme Court upheld that minors may consent to care based on capacity not age.
There's very very few things that are limited on age. One of them is gender affirming surgical care. One of the very few things where we with Canadian policy is to say, no, until you're an adult except in extraordinary situations.
Canadian law already balances autonomy and protection and we don't need new exclusions. Just respecting our rights and understanding why rights exist. But opponents of equality disguise control as caution and ideology as science says Menoji. Autogynophilia. The claim that trans women transition from fetish is rejected by all medical bodies that matter. Yet it persists.
W Path and the APA call it unsupported by empirical evidence. Rapid onset dysphoria came from an online parent survey, not clinical research. They literally went and found a chat room of moms who were upset their
kids were trans and pulled them in into creating the subjects for a survey. who found that there's no such thing as being trans and it happens suddenly, says the mom of the trans kids who reject transness. The AAP and CPS state it's not a recognized diagnosis, not a diagnosis, yet waved around under words like
scandal.
In the UK, rape by deception is a thing.
Laws centered around that have been weaponized against trans people for not disclosing gender history. Never been used for not disclosing anything else. and not used against people who don't disclose that they hate trans people. Trapping poor innocent trans people into a relationship with a bigot.
Clutch my pearls.
(So, lost my place.) Legal experts such as Alex Sharp in 2020 condemn this distortion of consent law used to police identity. I invite you to consider how many identities people don't want to find out about you and you shouldn't go to prison over the UN expert on Soji in 2023 warned of a coordinated anti-gender
movement eroding democratic norms.
The southern poverty legal law center in 2023 found overlaps between anti-trans activism and far-right networks. And every time identity equality ideas expand, someone calls it an emergency. Every time I come to a talk like that, someone from some weird violent extreme right group contacts me without fail.
Happened this time. This time it was a slightly different topic, but it's the same thing. When inclusion is practiced, though, harm drops. And this is really about harm.
The Canadian Center for Ethics and Sports found no evidence transincclusion undermines women's sports. UN women in 2024 reported that individually individualized assessments improved fairness and safety. You
respect the rights and the harms fall. You restrict rights and the harms rise.
It's that simple.
But we also have to address women's services and sex based rights. Terms twisted to justify exclusion. I'm sure we're going to get into it tonight. In Canadian and international law, these rights protect from discrimination. They do not authorize discrimination. The CHRC, Canadian Human Rights Commission, CEDAW, I always forget the acronym, but the convention on of the I forget the acronym. It's UN women's rights. And uh, the UN and UN women affirm that women's rights include trans women's rights.
Trans women rely on the same shelters, clinics, and prisons because our risks are the same as cis women for the most part. There might be some specialized differences, but very, very few. And everybody deserves equal. Everybody deserves dignity in a service, especially in a crisis.
Nevertheless, um discrimination is not based on someone else might need something. Discrimination needs to be based on you need something more. You're more vulnerable. We're going to give you a special thing for you because you're more vulnerable. That's the fundamental of our law. TERF rhetoric in the end isn't about protection. It's about power. And when I say TERF, I mean it respectfully, not how I normally mean it.
Transexclusionary radical feminist, which is like a second wave of feminism that talks about the winds women need in the physical world.
So equality is not a zero sum game. And safety built on exclusion isn't safety at all. Limits painted as
safety are still oppression. Ruth Butter uh Bidder A Ginsburg, of course, US Supreme Court judge whose fall brought down Row versus Wade.
Let's put that in context, right? Warned that laws protecting women often kept them in a guilded cage. She talked about this a lot. She talked about how the people in the cage didn't have the key. Justice Bertha Wilson in RV Morgan Tyler the abortion case wrote the right to liberty guarantees a degree of personal autonomy over decisions of fundamental importance to them.
That's why human right, that's what human rights mean protecting autonomy against the comfort of the majority.
Every expansion of rights once seemed radical because it was unknown before it became obvious. Equality in marriage, the right to autonomy on your body, the right of children. That rhythm of progress is how we keep Canada free, fair, and kind. And that's the right way to go. Thank you.