Bill 42, the Bill to Push Trans Healthcare Services to Youth

The NDP is back at it again, trying to force woke gender ideology down the throats of Ontarians. 

You may recall that last year NDP MPP, Suze Morrison, introduced Bill 17, the Gender Affirming Health Care Advisory Committee Act, which passed first and second reading within 24 hours and was then referred to the Standing Committee on Social Policy. It died before making it to third reading when Parliament was dissolved for the June election. On November 16, 2022, four other NDP MPPs introduced a new version of Bill 17--Bill 42—with the same name as before, which passed on first reading.

These bills set out to make “gender affirming” health care—care that supports gender transition, including through hormone blockers and surgeries,--more easily accessible to ALL Canadians, including minors.

To promote greater access to and enhanced insurance coverage for medical treatments related to gender transition, Bill 42 would establish a committee, the majority of whom are to be from the LGBTQ+ community.

Parents should be very alarmed because if this Bill passes, it will make it all that much easier for children to start the process to change their genders. This Bill could also make it easier for experts to refer children for care—with or without parental consent! Some parents are already being kept in the dark by school authorities, when their children have begun to socially transition at school.

The Bill provides a list of who should be consulted for advice, and guess what? Parents are not even listed. In fact, the word “parent” isn’t mentioned even once in the Bill.

Bill 42 proposes that the committee take its guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) instead. This organization is staffed by physicians and activists with a pronounced bias toward the gender affirming model of care, which will compromise their ability to issue neutral, objective guidelines on the treatment of gender dysphoric individuals.

Such a biased organization should not be in charge of drawing up guidance which ought to reflect the best scientific evidence available.

There are numerous groups of people whose experiences should be considered when such guidelines are drawn up, including the numerous Canadian “de-transitioners” who choose to reverse their transitions. Trans regret is very real, and has already affected too many real people and their families. To read a story on a Canadian group that was founded to speak for Canadian de-transitioners, please CLICK HERE. Another group that deserves recognition is young people with co-morbidities such as autism, ADHD, anxiety and trauma. Such co-occurring conditions tend not to be taken into account under the gender affirmative model of care. As with parents, the bill makes no reference to recruiting people from these communities.

In countries where a systematic review of the outcomes of various approaches toward the treatment of gender dysphoria has been performed prior to adopting guidelines for their health care systems, such as Finland, Sweden and the UK, the affirmative approach has been discarded in favour of a model that prioritizes mental health. A report from the Swedish Board of Health recently concluded that since a high percentage of dysphoric children suffer from co-morbidities such as depression, anxiety and self-harm behaviours that may require lifelong treatment, proper treatment for dysphoric children needs to allow comprehensive counselling for these conditions. 

An approach to the treatment of gender dysphoria which allows time for thorough mental health evaluation is known as "watchful waiting."

Instead of travelling further down the road of incredibly damaging and life-altering “health care”, the Ontario government ought to scrap this unproven and high risk “care” model.

The child abuse of hormone treatment and surgical mutilation that is hidden behind the “gender affirmation”, the euphemism of choice for radical gender ideologues, has no business in Ontario or in Canada.

When schools push gender transition it is the students who pay the price.

Sometimes they pay the ultimate price.

In 2020 a California mother named Abigail Martinez filed a civil lawsuit against LA County and its Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), asserting that the government was responsible for the death of her child, Yaeli Martinez, later known as Andrew.  

Her public school and an LGBTQ group encouraged Yaeli to take cross sex hormones and undergo sex change surgery, while failing to properly treat her severe depression. 

An older trans student apparently coached Yaeli on how to convince social workers to put her into foster care, so that the state would pay for her gender reassignment. 

After a failed suicide attempt, Yaeli was placed into foster care and began going by the name of Andrew.

Tragically, though Abigail advised social workers that her child needed mental health supports rather than counselling about how to turn into a boy, Andrew committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train.

In moving this bill along MPPs are out of step with the majority of Canadians who believe that watchful waiting should be equally offered to gender dysphoric kids. In a recent Nanos poll on Canadian attitudes toward gender-affirmative healthcare, a majority of Canadians- 72% - said they thought healthcare providers should provide information on a range of counselling options to minors, including the “watchful waiting” option, and not solely the gender-affirmative approach. 

ACTION ITEMS: 

1. Sign our petition to express your disgust with Bill 42 to the Members of the Ontario legislature and Premier Doug Ford.  CLICK HERE to sign the petition!

2. Please also write to your local MPP to let the Ontario government know that we will not stand for the abuse of children in the name of woke politics. Ask him or her to oppose Bill 42 because it will allow gender affirmative activists to hold Ontario’s health care system hostage. Explain that this would be extremely unwise because the value of gender affirmative care is increasingly being rejected due to lack of evidence of its benefits.

a. Find your MPP’s contact information by clicking this link and scrolling down to the bottom of the page to the “Find My MPP” box.

b. Please also cc. the Conservative MPP and Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones: [email protected]

c. Write to us at [email protected] and let us know you contacted your MPP.

3.

Watch our video about Bill 42 and send the link on to your friends: https://youtu.be/H5GNZiHJvuw