Western Standard - February 02, 2024


'Kids need to know we love and support them'

Topics
transgender policies proposals
Premier Danielle Smith Preserving choices for children and youth Notley says Smith being insincere with gender identity policies

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

177.47

Word count

856

Sentence count

49

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we talk with Alberta s premier, Shelly Glover, about her government's new policy on transgenders in public school and the support they need in order to make the transition process easier for children and their families.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Premier, we know this is an extremely sensitive topic. It's an extremely important topic.
00:00:05.940 Can you tell us more about what you've announced and why?
00:00:09.380 Well, it falls into three categories, but what are the main ones, of course, and the overriding
00:00:15.300 principle is we want to preserve the choices that kids will make so that they don't make
00:00:20.960 irreversible decisions before they're mature enough to understand the consequences of those
00:00:26.140 decisions. And so there's a series of policies we've put forward on health care to make sure
00:00:31.960 that kids know at what point they'll be able to get hormone therapy as well as top and bottom
00:00:37.580 surgery, and then to have long-term support for those same individuals. I mean, when you make
00:00:44.140 a decision like this, it requires ongoing care, not only mental health care, but also physical care.
00:00:51.520 And so we're going to ensure that we have the appropriate number of medical professionals
00:00:56.440 to ensure that those young people, as they grow into adults and then beyond, are taken care of.
00:01:03.200 We also know that we want to make sure that the families are involved as these discussions unfold.
00:01:09.100 And so it's part of the reason why we want to make sure that our education system is aligned
00:01:13.920 with involving parents and making sure that the materials that are given in school are age
00:01:20.640 appropriate. So that's another part. And then we also want to protect transgender athletes so they
00:01:25.920 have the ability to do their sport in a co-ed environment while also protecting the biological
00:01:33.380 female females who are, especially in certain sports, face potential harm if they're having to 1.00
00:01:41.060 compete against biologically stronger transgender female athletes. So we want to be able to create
00:01:46.140 a women and girls only category so that we can preserve the choice for everyone. So that's the
00:01:53.720 package of proposals we put forward.
00:01:56.340 Well, your government's not the first to do it, as you well know. It's been done in many European
00:02:00.500 countries, several U.S. states. I think we're now the third province to come forward with policies.
00:02:05.000 I think one part of the announcement, Premier, that's especially important, and maybe it gets
00:02:08.240 overlooked a little bit, is the additional access to health care services for Alberta's transgender
00:02:13.800 community. That's very important. I was very struck by this because, as you know, I've been in politics
00:02:17.280 for some time, and so I've had transgender constituents before and spoken many times over
00:02:22.520 the years about some of the challenges those who have transitioned faced. And I'm struck particularly
00:02:28.280 by the story of Lois Cardinal, who felt rushed into getting bottom surgery, and then after her
00:02:37.000 surgery, there just wasn't appropriate aftercare. And I thought, we've got to be able to remedy that.
00:02:42.320 So it's part of the reason why we're working on recruiting a doctor who can perform surgeries
00:02:46.680 in Alberta. Right now, we send those who get transgender surgery to Quebec so we can provide 1.00
00:02:53.160 the ongoing care. The other, and I'd also heard over the years, the difficulty finding a doctor
00:02:57.760 who can specialize in transgender medicine, as well as the ongoing hormone replacement support
00:03:02.720 and the consequences of that, that requires specialized medicine. So we want to be able to create a private
00:03:07.080 registry of doctors so that we can more easily match the transgender patients with an appropriate
00:03:12.520 care provider. And I think that's important. I think that that is something that I've heard over
00:03:16.680 the years is necessary. And that's one of the reasons why we've added this to the package.
00:03:21.480 All right. Listen, I'll ask you one more on this. I know it's a very important subject.
00:03:24.760 You're also bringing in more social social supports for children identifying as transgender and their
00:03:30.840 families. Can you tell us a little bit more about what the province will be offering?
00:03:34.280 Yeah, this is a family journey, really. When a child makes the important decision that they want to
00:03:41.240 do this transition, that's not something the family can be locked out of. The family is going to be
00:03:46.520 their long-term support group. And these are hard conversations to have. There's no question.
00:03:52.680 So we feel that by having additional support so that families can be kept in the process,
00:03:59.480 understanding the best way that they can support that transition and be able to support their
00:04:04.120 child. I think that that's going to be the healthiest environment that we can provide here.
00:04:08.680 There, sadly, are going to be some cases, we understand that, where families might not accept
00:04:14.040 their child's choice. And if a child ever feels like they are at risk or could be harmed,
00:04:21.080 we have child protection laws. And we're going to make sure that those children are protected as well.
00:04:24.040 So we just want to make sure that the kids are able to explore and become who they want to be,
00:04:30.840 and make sure that they're not prematurely making any decisions that are going to cut off
00:04:34.520 their choices as adults. And so that's the reason why we put this group of 10 proposals forward.
00:04:40.600 Thank you.
00:04:45.400 Thank you.
00:04:47.400 Thank you.