Juno News - August 29, 2025


Nova Scotia ignored science on child trans surgeries

Mentioned
Hilary Cass Pierre Brassard Stacey Burgess Stephen Levine Eric Andre Lois Cardinal Mia Hughes
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Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

160.52

Word count

3,127

Sentence count

227

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we re joined by Mia Hughes, the journalist behind The WPATH Files, who has been tracking this medical scandal with surgical precision. Across the country, provinces are steamrolling ahead with radical gender-affirming policies. They often ignore mounting evidence and international reviews, or even basic principles of medical ethics. Nova Scotia is definitely no exception. The province met with Dr. Hilary Cass while they were doing their gender affirming care policy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Across the country, provinces are steamrolling ahead with radical gender medicine policies.
00:00:06.860 They often ignore mounting evidence and international reviews or even basic principles of medical ethics.
00:00:16.080 Nova Scotia is definitely no exception.
00:00:18.880 The province met with Dr. Hilary Cass while they were doing their gender-affirming care policy.
00:00:25.180 Hilary Cass, whose landmark review, cast doubt on the complete suite of practices for gender-affirming care.
00:00:34.540 But Nova Scotia didn't really seem like they cared all that much and doubled down on their processes.
00:00:41.120 They refused to disclose the meeting with Dr. Hilary Cass in the FOI documents that they sent me.
00:00:48.640 That was pretty clear.
00:00:50.220 And they aligned their policies with the WPATH standards, which is hardly medicine.
00:00:55.480 And yes, they did confirm in writing that minors are being approved and funded for genital surgeries.
00:01:01.040 Joining you today is Mia Hughes, the journalist behind the WPATH files, who has been tracking this medical scandal with surgical precision.
00:01:10.080 In this episode, we're going to break down what really happened behind closed doors in Nova Scotia,
00:01:15.180 and what it can tell us about activist capture of our institutions, and what we might be able to do to stop it.
00:01:23.020 I'm Melanie Bennett.
00:01:24.960 This is Disrupted.
00:01:35.820 Hi, Mia.
00:01:36.580 Thank you so much for joining me today.
00:01:38.960 Thank you for having me.
00:01:40.040 I've been wanting to talk to you for quite some time because I've been looking into the new gender-affirming care health care policy in Nova Scotia,
00:01:50.940 and I have found a number of activists involved in the health care reforms.
00:01:58.200 And this was happening around the time that Dr. Hilary Cass was actually looking into some of the data,
00:02:06.760 but it also was going on during the period where she published her report.
00:02:13.060 Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Cass review came out in April of 2023.
00:02:19.180 The final report came out in April of 2024.
00:02:24.840 We had an interim report, I think, early 2023.
00:02:32.360 Yeah.
00:02:33.560 So they would have been aware, the Nova Scotia would have been aware of some of the research that was coming out around that time regardless.
00:02:42.100 And what I found curious is I heard through the grapevine a rumor that Dr. Hilary Cass was perhaps or had perhaps met with some of the officials at Nova Scotia Health
00:02:56.080 regarding some of the research that she was looking into, some of her reviews.
00:03:01.580 So I put in an FOI and I said, did you in fact meet with Dr. Hilary Cass and could I have meeting minutes?
00:03:08.880 Could I have presentations?
00:03:10.060 Whatever happened during that time.
00:03:11.400 And lo and behold, they did.
00:03:16.960 And some of the things that were in there I found quite curious because they met with Hilary Cass in April of 2023.
00:03:27.560 So that would have been during the interim period.
00:03:31.680 Yeah.
00:03:32.540 And I don't know if you knew this, but in my other article, I think I shared some information about who was who was consulted.
00:03:41.400 And there was a long list of people that were consulted over a couple of years.
00:03:44.840 And that did end in early 2024, I believe.
00:03:48.380 So that would have been before the full publication.
00:03:51.280 But in that list of consultees, I didn't see anything about Hilary Cass at all.
00:03:58.300 So that was actually kept out of the public eye or wasn't actually included within this report.
00:04:04.420 So you had a chance to look into the FOI that I received.
00:04:09.060 What do you think?
00:04:11.220 Well, I did look at it.
00:04:12.420 It's nice that this information is publicly available now.
00:04:15.840 We've known about it behind the scenes for a long time.
00:04:18.920 But there were Hilary Cass was the only name that was there.
00:04:24.480 To my understanding is that Hilary Cass was there.
00:04:28.540 Perhaps Dr. Stephen Levine was there.
00:04:31.220 Erica Anderson, who's a trans-identified male, but has spoken out very strongly against pediatric medical transition.
00:04:38.960 And so it's interesting that the information is there because it was we knew it was happening at the time.
00:04:46.200 And let's be clear on this.
00:04:48.560 Nova Scotia Health did not invite Hilary Cass to talk.
00:04:52.180 What actually happened was a group of Canadians who are very dedicated behind the scenes who understand this medical scandal arranged the meeting because they knew that Nova Scotia Health was updating its policy on so-called gender affirming care.
00:05:08.160 And they wanted the province to understand the truth about this.
00:05:13.780 So they arranged the meeting.
00:05:17.080 What you can tell from the FOIA request, the response, it looks like Nova Scotia Health tried to wiggle their way out of it with some kind of bureaucratic...
00:05:29.260 Let me read from that.
00:05:31.740 So it says here in the email, so we'll bring this up.
00:05:34.200 It says here in the emails that the Canadian Gender Report arranged this meeting.
00:05:38.160 OK, so those are the people that you're talking about.
00:05:40.620 And Dr. Hilary Cass, for some reason or other, that's unclear in this FOIA, requested a letter.
00:05:45.780 But and this is days before the meeting actually happened.
00:05:49.040 Nova Scotia Health came out and said, I'm not sure this is appropriate because we're not asking for her expertise.
00:05:54.420 Right.
00:05:54.900 They did not ask her.
00:05:59.360 They didn't want, from what I can tell, they didn't really want to talk to her, but they were being forced to and they tried to get their way out of it by the technicality of this letter.
00:06:08.600 I think the reason they didn't feel that her expertise was required is because on, well, first of all, you've got to understand how activist driven Nova Scotia gender medicine is.
00:06:24.440 So you've got that organization Pride Health.
00:06:27.540 Have you seen those guys who are just basically.
00:06:29.520 I covered it in my reporting.
00:06:31.040 Yeah.
00:06:31.840 They're basically shaping all of it.
00:06:34.120 It's they consult with various other activist groups.
00:06:37.260 It's all activist led.
00:06:39.060 Nova Scotia Health had already done their chosen consultations, making sure that their gender, their approach to gender medicine aligns.
00:06:47.440 They're so proud of it that it aligns with WPATH standards of care eight.
00:06:53.080 And so they didn't really want this to go ahead anyway, but then they were forced into it.
00:07:01.760 They, I believe they had absolutely no intention of listening because they have this.
00:07:06.980 The science is settled in Canada.
00:07:09.680 The science on gender medicine.
00:07:11.600 We've got it right. 0.97
00:07:12.840 Anyone who opposes it in whatever nation that they're in, they're only opposing it because they're a bunch of transphobic bigots.
00:07:21.360 And therefore, we won't listen to them because we're so much better than everyone else.
00:07:26.000 We're the ones who are doing it right.
00:07:28.020 That's the mentality in Nova Scotia. 0.99
00:07:29.820 That's the mentality in other places in Canada.
00:07:33.400 So, of course, they didn't want to listen to Hillary Cass.
00:07:35.680 And I think they had the meeting.
00:07:37.420 And my understanding is this meeting went on for hours.
00:07:39.980 It was hours and hours of experts giving a different opinion to what they would have heard from the activists.
00:07:48.640 And they listened to absolutely none of it.
00:07:52.080 I think they went through the...
00:07:53.140 But not just experts.
00:07:53.800 I'll include there was also parents of trans kids from Nova Scotia, but also detransitioner from Nova Scotia in there as well.
00:08:01.980 So it wasn't just the experts.
00:08:03.300 Yeah, again, but it's just they don't...
00:08:07.460 We all do it, I suppose.
00:08:09.400 We filter out the information that doesn't align with our strongly held beliefs.
00:08:15.660 You have to actively fight against that.
00:08:17.980 It's a psychological mechanism that we all suffer from.
00:08:20.980 And they obviously didn't listen to any of it because in, what, July 2023, they come out with their updated guidelines policy on gender-affirming care.
00:08:34.400 And it's all WPATH, Standards of Care 8.
00:08:37.140 And I think in your reporting, was it the lady, Stacey, someone, she says,
00:08:41.780 And so I glanced, I had a look at Standards of Care 8, WPATH Standards of Care 8, and I didn't see anything wrong with it.
00:08:49.300 It's like, did you see the eunuch chapter?
00:08:52.500 Did you, like, didn't see anything wrong with a eunuch chapter?
00:08:57.000 Yeah.
00:08:58.120 So some of the things that Hilary Cass brought up in the meeting is, well, all of the stuff that she brought up in the meeting,
00:09:05.140 looking at those slides, were essentially a boiled down version of the report that came out later.
00:09:11.780 So she's talking about the strength of the evidence.
00:09:15.080 We've got the pyramid there explaining that most of the evidence for gender-affirming care is under the standard,
00:09:21.160 or it's under a standard that the systematic reviews don't have a lot of data behind it.
00:09:25.640 And through showing some of that evidence, she talks about some false assumptions about the affirmative model.
00:09:33.160 And some of those false assumptions, curiously, are some of the things that the Nova Scotia Health are,
00:09:39.900 or did put forward for their gender-affirming care policy.
00:09:44.700 And that's certain things like, this is Dr. Hilary Cass, she says,
00:09:49.280 the role of psychiatry is psychology to inform and to assess readiness for treatment.
00:09:55.020 Now, in the gender-affirming care, new gender-affirming care policy for Nova Scotia,
00:09:59.860 that is exactly what they were pushing for, that it's, and that includes minors.
00:10:04.320 So if the minor says that they are ready, in fact, Stacey Burgess, the person you were talking about,
00:10:09.760 when I asked her if they were doing bottom surgeries on minors, and she said yes,
00:10:13.000 she pointed to me, to their policy, which said, if they're a minor, and they show that they're ready,
00:10:20.400 then we go ahead and do it.
00:10:22.120 But they knew this, they knew this well before they actually put that in place, and they did it anyway.
00:10:29.580 Of course, but then the thing is, you can only choose one side, I suppose is the point I want to make.
00:10:41.320 Like, if you're following WPATH, you absolutely must reject everything that Cass and whoever else was in that meeting.
00:10:49.900 You've got to reject it, because it's in direct contradiction.
00:10:52.740 And it's not like there's a middle ground.
00:10:55.100 It's not like you can take a little bit from WPATH and a little bit from Cass.
00:10:58.780 You cannot, you absolutely must pick a side, and Nova Scotia clearly has picked their side.
00:11:07.220 They picked WPATH.
00:11:08.200 I mean, performing surgeries on minors, look at WPATH standards of care 8.
00:11:13.420 There is, there's only one minimum age recommendation, and that's phalloplasty.
00:11:18.200 You can get an arm flesh appendage attached to your groin at 18.
00:11:21.760 They recommend no younger than 18.
00:11:23.660 But other than that, there are no lower recommendations.
00:11:27.960 And that's WPATH.
00:11:29.820 In fact, Marcy Bowers is famous for saying that the best age to have vaginoplasty, 0.99
00:11:36.480 the best age to have your penis inverted, is 17. 0.98
00:11:41.220 Because you're finishing high school, but you haven't gone off to university yet. 0.99
00:11:44.980 You can, you're in your parents' house, and you can, they can look after you during the arduous recovery process.
00:11:51.420 So, of course, they're going to be on that side that you can't, you can't be both.
00:11:58.280 You've got to choose one or the other and look at where they are.
00:12:00.520 Yeah. It's very, very clear looking at the policy changes, the gender, transgender care policies in Nova Scotia,
00:12:08.300 that they've definitely taken an activist pathway and they're ignoring scientific evidence.
00:12:13.540 That's clear.
00:12:14.140 But you mentioned the WPATH files, which you wrote.
00:12:17.460 And one of the things that came out to me, well, you didn't mention it, but I'm going to mention it.
00:12:22.420 One of the things that popped out to me when I was doing my research is that Nova Scotia employs one of the people in your WPATH files,
00:12:31.900 the GRS clinic, Pierre Brassard.
00:12:33.680 Pierre Brassard is the one doing some of the, well, the bottom surgeries.
00:12:37.460 And I found it very curious and I don't, you might not have an answer to this, but we'll talk about it anyway.
00:12:43.900 When I was told that, yes, we were confirmed that minors are in fact being approved and funded for bottom surgeries.
00:12:54.300 So, and these are males.
00:12:55.540 So these are vaginoplasties, oophorectomies and panectomies.
00:12:58.700 Okay.
00:13:00.020 Orchiectomy.
00:13:01.440 Orchiectomy.
00:13:01.940 Thank you very much.
00:13:04.140 It was with Pierre Brassard.
00:13:05.800 So I obviously asked the GRS clinic, are you in fact carrying out these surgeries on minors?
00:13:11.740 And I, after asking Burgess over at Nova Scotia Health.
00:13:16.540 Now, Burgess did respond to me and that made it into the article, but GRS clinic responded to me weeks after I'd published.
00:13:24.280 So we didn't really make an amendment, but he said, no.
00:13:27.440 He said, we don't do it on anyone under the age of 18, which tracks with the WPATH files.
00:13:31.960 Because in your, in your reporting, he says the same thing.
00:13:36.500 He's saying, no, of course we don't.
00:13:38.600 They're talking about doing it for 16 and over in there.
00:13:40.940 And they said, no, we don't.
00:13:42.380 So I can't tell what's going on.
00:13:45.600 It seems to me there's somebody who's not telling the truth.
00:13:49.000 And I, I'm sharing this because I'm hoping that other people will pick up on this and maybe put a bit of pressure on Nova Scotia Health to find out what's going on.
00:13:56.540 But somebody is not telling the truth.
00:13:59.180 Yeah, I'm not really sure. 0.99
00:14:00.320 You see, my problem is for me, there's no difference between inverting the penis of a 17 year old or inverting the penis of a 19 year old. 1.00
00:14:10.240 Both are a crime, both are as big a crime as the other. 1.00
00:14:15.100 Like, to me, you're so immature before age 25. 0.99
00:14:19.460 We all know this, but I mean, even I think inverting anyone's penis is a crime. 0.99
00:14:23.800 But at least under age 25, I, I, I struggle to even disentangle them. 0.99
00:14:31.840 I struggle to pull them apart.
00:14:33.120 So I do remember him, he was in conversation with Bowers, that was that whole conversation in WPath Files where Bowers is saying, oh, yeah, 17 is the best age.
00:14:42.500 And he's like under 18.
00:14:44.740 Who cares?
00:14:45.740 Doing it to an 18 year old, that's a crime.
00:14:47.980 Doing it to a 19 year old, that's a crime.
00:14:50.280 Doing it to anyone who is mentally compromised is a crime.
00:14:54.760 So I think I believe them if they if he says he's not doing it to anyone under 18, I guess I believe him. 0.99
00:15:04.460 I give him the benefit of the doubt.
00:15:06.380 But the fact that he's doing it to someone 18 and over that I hold against him.
00:15:12.620 Yeah, I don't know.
00:15:13.280 I feel I agree with what you're saying.
00:15:15.160 But when I put out the article about doing gender, sorry, bottom surgeries on minors, that he was confirmed by one of the heads of Nova Scotia Health who spearheaded this, I thought that that would have got more traction and it didn't.
00:15:32.520 And part of me wonders what what can we do to get Canadians to pay attention?
00:15:39.880 Because that's supposed to be illegal was it, you know, we keep getting told it's not happening.
00:15:44.380 We were told for a while the mastectomies weren't happening.
00:15:46.360 And those are happening on scale in Nova Scotia.
00:15:48.640 And that's confirmed in the data.
00:15:50.400 But they also seem to be confirming that we're doing another thing we're told wasn't happening, which is bottom surgeries on minors, which is, in fact, illegal.
00:15:57.400 So if that's the case, they're doing something illegal over there in Nova Scotia.
00:16:03.120 And nobody seems to care all that much.
00:16:06.020 Is it is it actually illegal?
00:16:07.620 I don't know.
00:16:08.080 If you're following WPATH standards of care, if that's what you're saying openly, then sure, you're doing it to minors because WPATH standards of care has no lower limits that they have no limits say that then that's not allowed.
00:16:22.180 So maybe maybe it's not illegal.
00:16:24.320 I don't know.
00:16:24.960 But the federal the feds do say in their own guidance that absolutely shouldn't be happening.
00:16:31.620 So I'd be curious if that is happening.
00:16:34.860 I'd like to know what would those consequences be?
00:16:39.640 Yeah, isn't health provincial, though?
00:16:42.320 Mm hmm.
00:16:42.800 I think there's some guidance, federal guidance.
00:16:44.940 I don't know how that how that would actually impact a province at all.
00:16:49.540 Yeah, for me, for me, the whole issue has to come down to, is it medicine?
00:16:56.500 Is it medicine for if it's not medicine for a 17 year old?
00:16:59.920 Is it medicine for a 23 year old?
00:17:02.100 Is it medicine for a 30 year old?
00:17:03.780 And whenever I think it all the way through to the end, I just come back to the fact that, no, it's not because, first of all, no one knows what what they're treating.
00:17:15.340 You don't know.
00:17:16.020 There's no diagnosis.
00:17:16.940 It's just you're medicalizing a self-declared political identity that is part of a cultural fad.
00:17:23.600 So you don't know what you're treating.
00:17:25.380 You have no follow up to say that there is a positive outcome.
00:17:29.000 You have no follow up to say that it's safe or beneficial in any way.
00:17:33.780 You have no decent studies, randomized control trials to show that the medicalized route is better than the non-medicalized route.
00:17:40.660 Literally all of it is not medicine.
00:17:44.160 And so that's where you need to reach Canadians.
00:17:48.300 They need to understand that they need to stop accepting the fact that this is the best way to treat people who identify as transgender. 1.00
00:17:56.640 And they need to start demanding proof.
00:17:59.160 If you're telling me that that's the best way to treat someone who identifies as trans, show me the evidence. 1.00
00:18:04.420 Don't just expect me to believe it.
00:18:06.440 Yeah, Lois Cardinal is suing Pierre Brassard because he says that he wasn't prepared.
00:18:14.700 He wasn't given the the basically that there was no informed consent in this particular instance.
00:18:20.280 Right.
00:18:20.660 So maybe the question is that, you know, we have to bring more cases forward.
00:18:24.820 Who knows?
00:18:25.140 Maybe that's the approach.
00:18:26.060 But I thank you so much for joining me today, Mia.
00:18:29.940 And hopefully some more intrepid sleuths might be looking into this a little bit more deeply.
00:18:36.420 Thank you.
00:18:37.120 Thanks for having me.
00:18:38.160 It's a shame that my episodes are so short.
00:18:40.520 Mia and I had a really great conversation after we stopped recording and she made it very clear to me that perhaps it doesn't really matter whether these policies are legal or illegal.
00:18:52.500 The fact is that they're following WPATH SOC-8 and even if there was legal cases brought forward, doctors can easily say it's not malpractice.
00:19:02.580 I was following WPATH.
00:19:04.560 So that was something really interesting that I learned off camera that maybe it's worth us all knowing.
00:19:10.860 We need to start asking questions.
00:19:12.520 Why are doctors are being led by activists who aren't even following medicine?
00:19:19.720 That'll be a discussion for another day.
00:19:22.560 If you like this episode, please like, subscribe and join us next week for another episode of Disrupted.