Western Standard - May 12, 2026


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


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

163.05193

Word count

1,258

Sentence count

31


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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,
00:01:41.720 are weak and cowardly and have not bothered to look at this tour. The mainstream media does not
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
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
00:04:15.960 gender-confused child's mind to help them feel comfortable in their own body. And effectively,
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
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.