Western Standard - February 01, 2024


＂Alberta is embarking on a genocidal campaign...＂

Mentioned
Danielle Smith
Winning the battle against red tape Alberta New Policies： Preserving choices for children and youth

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

156.36

Word count

660

Sentence count

44

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Transgender youth in Alberta are being denied access to puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone therapy, and the government is working to make it impossible to grow up and become a trans adult. Charlotte Dalwood explains why this is bad news, and what you can do to fight back.

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.
00:00:00.400 So if you haven't been following the news out of Alberta, you've missed a lot.
00:00:05.220 My name is Charlotte Dalwood. I'm a journalist with Extra Magazine and with Rabble.ca,
00:00:09.880 and I'm going to walk you through exactly what's come down the pipes from Premier Daniel Smith
00:00:15.120 with regards to trans people, and what's at stake for trans people, and what you can do to fight back.
00:00:21.940 So yesterday, Alberta's Premier Daniel Smith announced dramatic and draconian changes
00:00:27.320 to Alberta's approach to the health care, education, and inclusion of transgender youth.
00:00:33.080 Alberta will now prohibit children 15 years old and younger from accessing puberty blockers
00:00:38.720 and gender-affirming hormone therapy.
00:00:41.380 The province will now prohibit children 17 years old and younger from accessing gender-confirming top and bottom surgeries.
00:00:48.420 Alberta will now require schools to obtain parents' permission before recognizing the chosen names
00:00:53.620 and pronouns of students 15 years old and younger.
00:00:57.320 And for students aged 16 or 17, schools will only be required to notify their parents first,
00:01:03.160 which is basically a requirement to out them.
00:01:05.680 Alberta will prohibit trans women from competing in women's sports,
00:01:09.380 and it's going to start working with sporting authorities to create sex-segregated leagues.
00:01:14.080 And the list of changes goes on.
00:01:16.260 So what is going on in Alberta right now?
00:01:20.780 Well, what's going on is that Alberta is committing state violence against its trans population.
00:01:27.580 And we need to be very clear about the consequences here. 0.99
00:01:30.340 Trans people are going to die. 1.00
00:01:33.120 Now, you might want to accuse me of hysterics, 0.98
00:01:36.320 but just consider with me for a minute why gender-affirming health care in particular is necessary in the first place.
00:01:44.980 The reason it's necessary is that gender dysphoria wreaks havoc on the minds and bodies of those who suffer from it. 1.00
00:01:52.160 Now, by gender dysphoria, what I'm talking about is the felt incongruent some people, 0.98
00:01:56.940 people like me, trans people,
00:01:58.660 experience between the sex they were assigned at birth and the gender with which they identify.
00:02:03.120 Some youth with gender dysphoria end up needing long-term counseling.
00:02:08.280 Too many end up needing a funeral.
00:02:10.900 And that's because gender dysphoria is strongly linked to suicidality amongst gender-diverse children.
00:02:16.920 One study estimated that between 32% and 50% of trans people of all ages have attempted suicide at least once.
00:02:24.040 I'm one of them.
00:02:25.400 Another study found that trans youth in particular are five times more likely than their cis peers to attempt suicide.
00:02:32.180 And another study found that in 2014, one in three trans youth had attempted suicide.
00:02:40.080 But, okay, that's pretty bleak.
00:02:42.080 Here's the thing.
00:02:43.180 We know how to reduce that suicide rate.
00:02:46.080 And it's by affirming trans people in their gender diversity.
00:02:50.240 Trans people who want puberty blockers and receive them have a lower lifetime risk of suicidality
00:02:55.720 than trans people who want puberty blockers and do not get them.
00:02:59.060 Trans and non-binary youth who receive gender-affirming health care, including puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone therapy,
00:03:06.400 see their suicide risk fall by 73%.
00:03:10.440 And where 67% of transitioning people think about suicide pre-transition,
00:03:17.120 only 3% think about suicide post-medical transition.
00:03:20.680 This is exactly the sort of safe and effective care that Alberta is going to start denying to trans youth.
00:03:29.180 And the consequences are going to be more than academic. 0.99
00:03:32.660 Trans youth are going to die by suicide. 1.00
00:03:35.640 Okay, there's another thing we need to be clear about. 0.99
00:03:38.180 Trans lives matter.
00:03:40.140 The lives of trans youth matter.
00:03:41.720 And we should care that Alberta is going to eradicate many of those lives. 0.64
00:03:47.280 But don't lose sight of the long-term goal underlying the province's approach.
00:03:53.080 The point of making it impossible to be a trans youth is to make it impossible to grow up and become a trans adult. 0.98
00:03:59.420 The point of killing trans youth is to wipe out the next generation of trans adults. 1.00
00:04:04.960 The point of everything the province is doing is to destroy trans people as a meaningful population. 0.99
00:04:10.780 And what is that? 0.88
00:04:12.380 That's genocide.