For years LGBT activists have been warning that Canada’s largest gender identity clinic tries to prevent kids from growing up to identify as trans, and might even be putting them at risk of depression and other mental illness. But their concerns were unknown to the general public and to most health professionals.
Tara Paterson, an LGBT specialist and Rhodes Scholar in the Fellowship, heard about the issue from some mental health professionals and investigated the clinic at the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health — Canada’s largest mental health teaching hospital. Her investigative feature for The National Post was the first news about it in mainstream Canadian media.
Just before the story ran, the hospital announced it would review children’s services at that clinic. Shortly after the story ran, NDP Member of Provincial Parliament Cheri DiNovo introduced The Affirming Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Act, 2015, which would ban the practices that Tara’s story described. On April 1, Ontario’s premier endorsed the opposition member’s Bill and it passed second reading unanimously on April 2.
Bill 77, banning the practices that Tara described in her story, is now on the verge of becoming law.
