Western Standard - May 12, 2026


“Children are not experiments”： Protesters call for gender care reform

Mentioned
Jesse Strang Danielle Smith Bill C-63 Katchadourian
Motorcycle left hanging from stoplight after Surrey crash Smith says Alberta will appeal independence petition ruling

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

163.05

Word count

1,258

Sentence count

31

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I sit down with the Director of Genspect Canada and Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Mia Hughes, to discuss the importance of pediatric gender dysphoria, and why Canada is lagging behind the rest of the world on the issue.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 just one clear voice that children are not experiments.
00:00:04.840 Children are not profits.
00:00:07.160 Children are not mistakes.
00:00:09.460 Children are human beings.
00:00:11.740 So I ask you again,
00:00:13.600 are you willing to be considered a bigot today,
00:00:16.580 to be a hero tomorrow,
00:00:18.440 to save a generation of children?
00:00:26.360 I'm Mia Hughes.
00:00:27.840 I'm the director of Genspect Canada and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
00:00:33.640 Mia, I sense a bit of a British accent with you, and you mentioned earlier today at the press conference on the Hill
00:00:37.840 that the UK, for example, along with other European nations, has already taken steps from reviews to policy changes
00:00:45.540 on the issue of gender transition care. Why is Canada lagging behind? Is it more the society or the leadership?
00:00:52.260 I think it's a mix of both. So it's not just the UK. Every nation that has looked at the evidence for pediatric gender medicine, so that's puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even surgeries, has reversed course because they've realized that there is no evidence. There's no good quality evidence to justify doing this.
00:01:14.960 I think Canada is lagging behind for a number of reasons.
00:01:19.860 First of all, weak leadership.
00:01:22.980 We're standing here on Parliament Hill.
00:01:25.260 I would say to the politicians, you have to take a stand on this.
00:01:29.820 I think the federal politicians think that it's none of their business
00:01:32.960 and that it's the business of the provinces because healthcare is provincial.
00:01:37.640 And the provincial politicians, with the exception of Daniel Smith, 0.98
00:01:41.720 are weak and cowardly and have not bothered to look at this tour. The mainstream media does not 0.98
00:01:49.440 cover this issue. So therefore, Canadians themselves are not informed and therefore
00:01:54.220 they don't know that this scandal is happening. So they don't know to demand change. And then the
00:02:01.020 last point is our professional medical associations and our gender clinics follow the World's
00:02:07.380 Professional Association for Transgender Health, which is a group that masquerades as a medical
00:02:12.980 association, but it's an activist group that has no respect for the Hippocratic Oath, scientific
00:02:18.700 principles or evidence-based medicine. So you're with the McDonnell Lawyer Institute and you've
00:02:24.920 been, as an organization, the think tank has been able to engage with politicians on a number of
00:02:30.540 policy issues, but in your experience professionally, have you managed to get any sort of communication
00:02:35.680 dialogue started with politicians at the federal or provincial level in Canada on this issue?
00:02:41.200 I just recently I did have a meeting a very encouraging positive meeting with a conservative
00:02:48.700 MP whom I won't name because I don't believe I have permission to I think it was a private meeting
00:02:55.580 so I think provincially nothing I have had no luck talking to I've written to my own MP I've written
00:03:05.240 to mpps i've tried i've submitted briefs nothing has ever come of it but the it's perhaps starting
00:03:13.160 to change it's it's remarkable it's 2026 we've had at least eight years of the rest of the world
00:03:21.480 waking up to this medical scandal and we're just about starting now possibly so just the organizer
00:03:27.960 of the event and jeff let me ask you just a couple of questions about again what i refer to as the
00:03:32.200 transgender enterprise what kind of support or opposition have you received from politicians
00:03:38.360 or political parties with respect to what you're pursuing um zero uh support and zero opposition 0.96
00:03:47.960 we we didn't invite any politicians for this event the whole house of commons is complicit
00:03:54.600 in this crisis and it's the worst medical scandal and child abuse scandal in canadian history
00:04:00.680 The thing is that in 2021, all 338 MPs of the House of Commons unanimously consented
00:04:08.680 to Bill C-4, which would impose a five-year jail sentence on anybody who changes a systematically 0.89
00:04:15.960 gender-confused child's mind to help them feel comfortable in their own body. And effectively, 0.72
00:04:20.760 the only treatment option that's legal for them is biomedical transition. So they're all complicit
00:04:29.400 in it and they they don't even really want to acknowledge this this issue i don't think okay
00:04:35.960 so given what you just described as a broad disinterest neither opposition nor support from
00:04:40.280 anyone what about informal grassroots public support are you seeing a growing in support
00:04:45.960 or opposition towards you or with you from the public writ large i think the public writ large
00:04:51.640 is on our side there are a handful of radicals out there as always but i have seen a shift in
00:04:57.080 the last several months which is what inspired me to do this in the first place it seems like
00:05:02.040 there are cracks forming in this narrative so we just wanted to come to parliament hill
00:05:06.280 and give it a kick um we uh you know around the time of uh the tumblr ridge shooting the um
00:05:14.680 the police were describing jesse strang as a man in a dress when he was or sorry as a woman in a
00:05:19.000 dress while he was a shooter at large when in fact he was a man in a dress we also had several
00:05:23.640 The families have to relocate the wakes for their slain children because of threats that they received for referring to Jesse Strang as a male.
00:05:33.980 I'm not saying I know what drove Jesse Strang to do what he did, but there is a level of institutional capture that we see with the police, with the media and the reporting that I think really started to cause a lot of scales to fall from eyes.
00:05:48.760 And since then, several other dominoes have started to fall.
00:05:53.620 We had Dr. Katchadourian come out recently, who was one of the first doctors in Canada to perform biomedical transitions on children.
00:06:00.900 And she says now that the whole practice needs to be reviewed.
00:06:05.660 So in recognition of that shift, I thought this would be an opportune time to put the politicians on blast and knock this thing over the finish line.
00:06:14.240 okay now as far as legislation goes or policies is there anything specific or even general that
00:06:21.760 you would like to see implemented uh or removed that's currently existing again in terms of either
00:06:27.360 law or just customer convention yeah the uh bill c4 definitely needs to be repealed it was marketed
00:06:35.520 as a don't pray the gay away uh bill when it in fact is effectively a trans the gay away
00:06:42.480 bill that is what they're doing is they're they're back to castrating gays um because of this bill so
00:06:47.680 that it that has to be repealed bill c16 i would also like to see that one go that brought uh
00:06:52.880 gender identity and gender expression under the canadian human rights act as prohibited grounds
00:06:56.720 for discrimination it has a lot to do with why males are going into women's prisons in uh in
00:07:01.680 women's washrooms um and it basically imposes gender ideology on the rest of us uh in violation
00:07:09.760 of our freedom of conscience so i think that one should go as well and we probably should bring in 0.97
00:07:14.960 an additional bill banning these kinds of procedures for under 25s for our young people
00:07:21.200 this that is the recommendation that comes from genspect and i think that everything we know about
00:07:25.360 the human condition right now would indicate that even though you are a legal adult at the age of 24
00:07:30.080 you're still biologically an adolescent and we never used to sterilize people at that age but
00:07:36.800 Because this is trendy and has an ideological movement behind it, we now consider it to be a virtue.