Can YOU Handle the Truth about SOGI?

Video Transcript:

The truth! You can't handle the truth! Oh, you can't handle the truth! The Law can be read! The Law can be read as suggesting that it would be a criminal act to try and convince somebody to become heterosexual. It is very clear within the peer-reviewed medical literature that neither sexual orientation nor gender identity is remotely immutable or a fixed trait, as is so often portrayed. The Law can be read as suggesting that it would be a criminal act to try and convince somebody to become heterosexual. The Law can be read as suggesting that it would be a criminal act to try and convince somebody to become heterosexual. Paul, I'd like to start by asking you to state your full name for the record spelling your first and last name. Paul, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so how you got? My understanding is that roughly nine years ago, when Sochi began being pushed in our education system, you decided to dig into the peer-reviewed literature on sexuality and gender identity. That is correct. And literally for about five years, you did a deep dive into the literature which included reading over 700 peer-reviewed studies on gender and sexuality. That is correct. That is correct. Now, there are some world experts who we would call sex researchers. And my understanding is that every single sex research expert follows you on Twitter to see what you're speaking about on the topic. That may be only slightly exaggerated, but yes, most of the leading experts have followed me at least last time I checked. They still do. I'm not quite as active on Twitter specifically on this issue as I used to be several years ago, but yes, there has been contact with sex experts and researchers in this field by myself around these issues. I'm just just trying to make the point because that's actually, I think, one of the best forms of flattery when experts in the field are following you on social media to see what you're having to say on the topic. The other thing is, when the Senate was considering Bill C-16, you were called to testify in the Senate concerning the bill as an expert on sexuality and gender identity. I did indeed impure before Bill C-16 specifically on the issues of women's sex based rights and how they are undermined by gender identity rights so-called. And so on that basis, I did provide testimony to the Senate. When you and I were speaking some days ago, you indicated to me that the literature on sexuality and gender identity conflicts quite significantly with the public messaging on that. And you've prepared a presentation for us. I'm wondering if you can basically give us your presentation, but also answer, explain to the commissioners about this conflict between the public messaging on sogy, the public messaging about gender identification and what the research shows. Thank you, Mr. Buckley. Yes. There is considerable conflict between what is presented as a findings of sex research and what gets disseminated or percolated up to the level of the common discourse around issues. This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that much, though not all, of the research that is done on these subjects tend to be by LGBT advocates themselves. And so the literature that I'll be citing today, which does undermine the prevailing narrative around sexual orientation and gender identity, it's very interesting in light of the fact that the data itself points in a different direction than often the summaries. The summaries will indicate or as I guess disseminated up into organizations that use that information and then give that to our politicians and other people that need to make policy about them. And so there is a real disconnect that I hope to be able to point out to you this afternoon. May I begin? Yes, please. So the current state of affairs in North America here in Canada is that with an affirmation only perspective on sexual orientation and gender identity that there is a conveyor belt, especially in relationship to gender identity that leads confused children to a place where they are like they face lifelong medicalization, sterilization and mutilation. Mr. Dricks, can I just stop you because most people might not even know what you mean by an affirmation only approach to gender identity. So can you explain first to us what that is? Yes, so the perspective is that if any child presents their desires, their attractions, their identities as being in a sexual orientation or a specific non-heterosexual identity or as being a gender different than the sex they were born with, then the only perspective that is permitted within treatment, within social, official social circles and by professionals such as in our schools, by counselors, and increasingly this is put on parents as well is to affirm those identities, those behaviors, those attractions rather than to possibly question them or to relate them to a developmental process of exploration or identity formation. Or even to the development through puberty or of the brain, the brain is not fully formed until well into the 20s. And so this affirmation only paradigm is for instance, in sconce in legislation such as Bill C4 in which I think it's wrongly called a conversion therapy ban bill, it's how it's been portrayed, which only permits for instance somebody who has a child that has gender identity questions, who may claim to be a girl even though they were born male, the only way that a professional may treat such a person is by affirming their new identity and treating them along a medialized path if they desire that path. And I'm just going to jump in for a second. David, is it possible for my computer screen to be put up on the screen for a second? So what I have on screen here is out of our criminal code and I believe this is what you're referring to when you're speaking about conversion therapy. So the criminal code is our criminal law and section 328 decimal 101 defines conversion therapy and then following sections make it an offense to basically do conversion therapy or even to promote conversion therapy. And I just wanted both the commissioners and those watching to understand what you're talking about and that's been entered as exhibit V2041. But this is what you're referring to isn't it? That is correct. And so we literally have in here that conversion therapy means a practice treatment or service designed to change a person sexual orientation to heterosexual. So this is interesting. So the person is not identifying as a heterosexual, but it's basically illegal then to suggest to them that they become heterosexual. Correct or for especially in the issue in the area of gender identity for someone who claims to be transgender or to have gender dysphoria to say for instance that they ought to wait to go through the pubertal process to see it. To see if the condition persists or desists before making medicalized decisions. Right and I know you're going to go into that later in your presentation, but can we just pull this definition back up again? I just I wanted the commissioners to understand that what you're referring to is actually part of our criminal law where we've basically the law can be read as suggesting that it would be a criminal act to try and convince somebody to become heterosexual. And so you know conversion therapy includes subsection B. So in this is practice treatment service that would include counseling to change a person's gender identity to cisgender. I even had to look that up because it's a new term from the trans movement, which basically means your birth gender. See to change a person's gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth. So somebody's born a boy. If you are counseling them to change their gender expression to be that of a boy like they were born. This is now a criminal offense. That is correct. So just so that people understand it's literally a criminal offense to counsel someone who is not identifying as a boy if they're biological boy to be a biological boy. It is a criminal offense D to repress or reduce non heterosexual attraction or sexual behavior to repress a person's non cisgender gender identity to repress or reduce a person's gender expression that does not conform to the person's gender identity. It is not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth. This seems all one directional. So you could encourage somebody to gender identify in a non heterosexual way. You're not breaking the criminal law of Canada to suggest that somebody who's heterosexual identify as non heterosexual or somebody who's bisexual identify as some other gender. But it is criminal to have somebody who doesn't identify as heterosexual to basically counsel them to be heterosexual. Am I reading this correctly? You are. It is a one way street. And this is why especially in, yeah, in both the areas of sexual orientation and gender identity. We're talking about an affirmation only perspective in dealing with these two areas and especially it gets really problematic, a traumatic when we deal with gender identity because of the medicalized nature of the treatment. No, and this could this could terrify doctors and nurses and counselors and social workers and a they could in the very least lose their job or b they could lose their job and face criminal sanctions if they were to try and put the brakes on somebody who is trying to get their surgery to change their gender. Am I correct about that? That is correct. So this so we basically created this one side at legal system with criminal penalties to put a break at all on suggesting to somebody no matter how young, no matter how immature that perhaps they should be okay with being their their born identity gender identity for a period of time. Yes, that's correct. Okay, so I'm sorry for interrupting, but I just I thought it was important for the commissioner to understand. Thank you that we've actually criminalized this in our criminal law and it's completely one sided. Yes, okay, so please continue with your presentation. Excellent. Yes, so the we have arrived now to place in which in relationship to the issues we have just been discussing that young young children at the age even as young as eight years of age are undergoing puberty blockers children as young as 12 years of age are undergoing cross sex hormone therapy and as young as 13 are girls are having double mastectomies. Because of this so called treatment of their gender dysphoria. And so although much could be said about that treatment today, my purpose is actually to look at how it is that such an in my view, unconscionable, unthinkable sort of treatment has been rendered thinkable. How is it possible that that sort of treatment is not seen as unconscionable, but rather in many cases is seen as virtuous and supportive and to address with the peer reviewed literature to serve to undermine those positions, those erroneous positions that so many of our you know federal government agents and provincial government agents and school counselors are are operating from so my testimony will proceed along four major lines and I will do my best to summarize the literature under each one of these points, but also to to delineate where certain outcomes, certain findings within the literature are coming straight out of those find out of those studies and where I may be making comments on them myself. I'll do my best to to delineate those things. So just to summarize where we're going with this. First of all, I want to present on the fluidity of sexual orientation and gender identity. The it is very clear within the peer reviewed medical literature that neither sexual orientation, nor gender identity is remotely immutable or a fixed trade as is so often portrayed in the media and even within Bill C4 itself, for instance. Second of all, I want to point out the fact that the because of pure contagion and the promotion and celebration of non heterosexuality within our culture that these things have grown the LGBT population significantly and especially amongst youth. Thirdly, to discuss some of the literature and what it what it shows on the elevated rates of childhood trauma amongst LGBT people and then fourthly to to discuss the ineffectiveness of gender affirmation treatments such as sex reassignment surgery or what often is called gender affirmation surgeries now. So first of all, in regards to the nature of sexual orientation and gender identity, it is now been well proven through decades of research, although you would not know this from the media narrative and even how how this is portrayed among schools and organizations that advocate for LGBT people that sexual orientation and gender identity is not remotely fixed immutable. So this is a very important study or a stable trait. A major study on this point was done in 2007 by Riches 7 Williams and Jeffrey Reame. It was a large population-based study longitudinal study and what they discovered is that over 80% of same sex sexually involved teens became exclusively heterosexual over the period of this study over numerous ways. So just to be clear for our commissioners and those listening what this means is that if for instance within a high school you had a hundred students and ten of them claimed to be LGBT and we're not only claiming for instance same sex attraction or gender identity but we're actually sorry this yeah I'm saying LGBT this was focused on gender identity but we're actually, sorry this yeah I'm saying LGBT this was focused on gender identity but we're actually, sorry this is a very important study. So just to be clear for our community is focused on same sexual behavior interaction specifically that within those ten students that only two of them heading into their early adult years would remain non heterosexual. So for 80% of them would be exclusively heterosexual behavior after the period of their puberty their adolescence heading into adulthood. There's a bit of an interesting story with this study in that Riches 7 Williams essentially didn't believe his own data and he suggested later on that perhaps people had sabotaged. The study there were there were teens that were noting their own sexuality in a wrongful way but later on fish and rustle came to concluded the exact same thing verified the data and what we've seen more recently in the literature is this exact same point and it's been it's been concluded by research such as cats wise. And perhaps most notably one of the leaders in the field Lisa diamond so this is a well established finding within the literature that LGBT status for youth is often momentary and there's significant movement amongst LGBT youth towards heterosexuality coming out of your puberty. Can I just spend a bit of time on that topic with you because then the ramifications for pushing hormone blockers from let's say your female and taking testosterone or having a hysterectomy or having a double mastectomy. I mean these are decisions being made by young people that you know we won't allow to drive that we won't allow to vote that we won't allow to drink we know they're frontal lobe isn't developed we know that they're not competent to make such important decisions. But if it's true that they would you know if we're speaking about people that are same sex attracted and that's why they're undergoing these procedures the research is showing well by the time they're young adults is left to their own devices they become exclusively heterosexual so this research would be showing that our current policy could be extremely misguided for those the kids in theory affirming. Yes that is generally correct although one must always keep in in mind that there's debate about whether sexual orientation and gender identity how much overlap those two fields have or those two issues have. There is good reason to believe however that there's considerable conflation of those two ideas so I will be giving some data specific to gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria transgender presently but there is data that suggests that when transgender or gender dysphoric teens desist in a similar way when they move from a for instance a transgender gender dysphoric status to a to this dissisting to going away this gender dysphoria that a there's a high prevalence in that dissistant group of same sex attraction. I'm going to have to stop you again because most people don't know the language what is dissisting. Yes so dissisting is the language that's used in a clinical setting for gender dysphoric teens that had gender dysphoria throughout childhood and then as they hit puberty because prior to roughly five ten years ago gender dysphoria was recognized as a mental illness and so it was studied in a clinical setting in a different way than at least in recent history same sex attraction has been and so there was always an understanding from the literature going back to the 60s that puberty would resolve much of gender dysphoria. And again I even have to stop you with gender dysphoria because dissisting is basically going back to heterosexuality from a or I'm sorry back to your back to your gender to create a new term so so tell us about gender dysphoria and I'm sorry to slow you down but to a lot of people this is brand new. So gender dysphoria is a clinical is clinical vocabulary around a a felt a felt disagreement or incongruence between your natal sex whether you're male or female and what you feel your gender to be and so this began to be studied going back probably to the probably the 50s and 60s more so in the 60s we began to get literature on it in the in the late 60s and in the 70s and so gender dysphoria is what clinicians counselors would look for in order to be able to consider whether this gender what we might say in a more general sense gender confusion how it you know whether it's something that we can't do. How it you know whether it's something that ought to be treatable and and then heading into what those treatments were and of course that those kinds of treatments have changed considerably over the course of the last 30 or 40 years towards us now at least in North America this affirmation only paradigm. Are you aware or do you know pre soji so before we're you know basically in kindergarten suggesting if you know boy as long hair that maybe say girl so before we're we're raising the issue of gender to children do you know how prevalent it was for a person to you know how many people with gender dysphoria were there in the population what percentage were they. Yeah the percentage prior to this you know again as you say prior to soji was 0.02% there's different different statistics are given by different people but that's generally around the the prevalence very very low prevalence within the population more recently as you as you head into sort of the 2010s but still. Still you know still back. You know 15 years ago something like that you would the number had crept up for transgender people although again that's not a clinical number now but would have been around 0.3%. So the number was going up there although again maybe not quite the same measure and I'll get to some data here presently that shows that that number has gone up considerably from that point. Okay and I'm sorry for interrupting you it's just truly these terms are brand new to many of the people watching your testimony. Thank you so just to give one more study here there are other studies that could be marshal to just kind of bolster this point but I'm going to mention one more before turning to issues surrounding gender identity and the fluidity there. And that is that there was a study done by the Rona in 2018 and it was it was a longitudinal study they had good access to to this this data about inner city girls in in Pittsburgh I believe it was and what it found is that 63% of this female cohort reported at least one change in orientation over the course of eight years. So again just to be clear what that means that means that over the course of these eight years these inner city girls over 50% of them at some point claimed to be non heterosexual. Interestingly as the as the researchers classed their sample size into three groups that the heterosexual group the bisexual group the lesbian group. The lesbian group which you would perhaps expect to have less fluidity than for instance the bisexual group the lesbian class averaged three orientation changes over those eight years. So that just demonstrates the extreme fluidity of of LGBT youth teens as they go through this this pubertal and identity formation process where even their their brains are you are forming not yet fully formed it's a developmental process and experimental time as well for many of these of these young people interestingly an interesting footnote in regards to this study. So the research is that they remarked the researchers remarked that the highly elevated rates of non heterosexuality and fluidity within it may be because of low socioeconomic status. Now that's remarkable they didn't explore that a great deal within the within a relatively kind of short abbreviated sort of study but that may fit some of the some of the findings I'll present a little bit later in regards to the amount of adverse childhood events that LGBT people tend to face on average in youth and in childhood. So moving so Lisa diamond before I move to gender identity Lisa diamond is one of the leaders in this field and in a presentation a university presentation that she gave she just simply summarized by saying this the queers have to stop saying please help us we were born this way and we can't change as an argument for legal standing. She goes on to say I don't think we need that argument and that argument is going to bite us in the ass. Now we know that there is enough data out there that the other side is aware as much as we are aware of it and it is worth noting that Lisa diamond is herself a LGBT advocate and yet she is a reasonably good researcher and she recognizes what her researcher is finding namely that sexual orientation is not a good thing. Sexual orientation is not remotely immutable it's not remotely a stable trade in regards to gender identity and transgender youth and I'm going back to a study here now in 2011 and so this was prior to the language of sort of transgender being quite so ubiquitous at that time it is focused on sort of a clinical perspective on gender dysphoria. But Steensma looks at all of the data that's been given about 13 studies have ever been done on the question of whether gender dysphoria continues through puberty or whether it remits whether it desists whether it goes away through that time of formation and puberty. And Steensma says this by way of summary the vast vast majority of children grow out of gender dysphoria rates of persistence vary from 2% to 27%. The results unequivocally showed that the gender dysphoria remitted after puberty in the vast majority of children. And if you read the literature you will understand that the word unequivocally is not used lightly. If you for instance you say that something is unequivocal and it is you know discovered that that is that is incorrect your professional standing is greatly diminished by such errors. It is actually the case I've looked at personally read all except for one of these studies that was done this one was done way back in the in the 60s I can't get my hands on it I've looked at all of these of these studies and it is indeed true that in the vast majority of cases children grow out of gender dysphoria. And the caveat to that and Steensma looks at this in another or in his study is that if you socially transition a child if you affirm a child then these assistance rates can drop significantly rather than simply waiting on the pubertal process to to be navigated which may in some cases be a difficult process for a child with significant gender dysphoria. So just to summarize this point before moving on the way to avoid children being medicalized sterilized and mutilated is by waiting. By waiting for pubertal and psychological development to occur and this fact very clear in the literature in my mind makes it horrific and unconscionable that rather than permitting children to go through the normal pubertal process we are cutting off those pubertal processes we are affirming them in delusions essentially that will not last. And doing the sorts of medical interventions that are experimental that we do not know the outcomes of and will leave them sterilized and mutilated in many cases for life. And I just want to see if I understand what you're saying so the research is saying basically for gender dysphoria which is a very strong type of gender identity where you would believe that you're other than your biological sex the research is showing unequivocally that most kids grow out of that after puberty. So it stops being an issue they become heterosexual and are comfortable being heterosexual. Yeah it's the vast majority and if you were to summarize if you were to kind of focus on maybe one percentage that would sort of group you know those various studies it would be it would be over 85%. Okay so you know unequivocally the vast majority so if we're just if we just waited for kids to get through puberty and become young adults it would only be a small percentage then that would still be having gender identity issues to perhaps then do surgery and things like that when the role during can be making those decisions. That is correct now for my for my own opinion I would state that these sorts of medical interventions are never appropriate even for adults that's my own personal view and for reasons that maybe you come apparent a little later in my presentation. Nevertheless I view that what is taking place amongst children is particularly harmful and of course that is our focus today with these hearings. Yeah well the next point I was going to make is I would think we'll wait a second so if the majority of children that we are it's now illegal to stop the train if if they're being encouraged or decide they want to you know physically change their sex with hormone blockers and surgery in the like if the majority of those will then end up regretting what they've done because the research is showing that they grow out of it that it's a temporary thing. So they're we're basically making it illegal to stop them from making permanent decisions when we know because of the research that that's something that they're going to regret later on. Yes that's correct. So this isn't helping I mean just using the research and my correct that the research is suggesting what we're doing is actually extremely harmful to a vulnerable group our children. That is exactly the case and in fact the the issue actually gets even worse and I want to turn your attention to Bill C4 back back again so first of all to Bill C4 it states the preamble or the surrounding documentation to the bill it states that these include and I'm quoting from it these include myths and stereotypes now let me let me read back a little bit further. People would discourage and denounce harmful practices and treatments that are based on myths and stereotypes about LGBTQ to people these include myths and stereotypes that the sexual orientation gender identity or gender expression of LGBTQ to people are undesirable conditions that can or should be changed and I just want to point out for this for our commissioners that this idea that it is a myth that they can be changed. So when it can be changed is so is so counter to the evidence that is hard to exaggerate that when it comes to children and youth that not only can it be changed it changes more often than it stays the same. So we have now embedded within Bill C4 something that is completely counter to what the evidence indicates. Now I want to say one thing further about how this harms the most vulnerable and it gets really at back at the question or the discussion about how this is a one way sort of treatment path. Treatment path or change path in regards to Bill C4 because of the fact and I hope that those listening can follow the logic here because of the fact that those who experience gender dysphoria are far more likely 50% in the literature 50% of those who experience gender dysphoria and then it goes away and the fact that those who are going through to being medicalized sterilized and mutilated are in fact far more likely to be same sex attracted. And on that account what Bill C4 really is doing is it is ensuring that the worst kind of conversion therapy is actually taking place. So again I don't know if all of our commissioners can follow that but if conversion therapy if what is so bad about conversion therapy is that we are saying to someone who has a personal identity or set of attractions or desires that we are going to do these significant harmful invasive sort of treatments that we're done in history things like shock therapy and other sorts of things. So I'm saying that those sorts of therapies are unconscionable towards people like same sex attracted people. Then what Bill C4 does is it actually ensures that those things will happen through medicalization, sterilization and mutilation because of the fact that so many of these gender dysphoric teens are in fact same sex attracted and that gender dysphoria would remit if they were allowed to go through puberty. I want to continue by another line of evidence and that is the growth of the youth LGBT population through pure contagion and promotion or celebration within our culture. I'm a researcher by the name of Good Now who did early work through gay straight alliances in the state of Massachusetts. I did a bunch of work in the 2000s and in 2016 released a study that showed that the amount of youth had increased. I believe this was within the state of Massachusetts from 3% 12 years later, this was around the turn of the century or millennia as you will, to 6.3% 12 years later. And so there you have within a very short period of time a growth of this population, this at risk population that is doubling in size. The research in 2022 did a poll that found that 5% of youth and young adults claim to be trans now or non-binary. And again as I mentioned earlier, traditionally a little earlier not much before this, that number was way down at 0.3%. Some of the work that the Williams Institute did in some of their polling, some of their research. And so here you have an exponential rise in the amount of youth and young adults claiming to be trans or non-binary. We also find other, there's other polls that have found similar amounts of increase or even more than that. Maybe I'll mention one more, a Gallup poll in 2023 found that of Gen Z adults, so these are very young adults ranging from ages 18 to 26, that 22% of them identified as LGBTQ. This was in 2023. So we find that there are significant rises as non heterosexuality has been promoted, celebrated within schools by various organizations within our society as various organizations that promote LGBTQ advocacy have been funded to the tune of millions of dollars, government dollars, as well as private institution dollars and big business dollars that we've seen the incredible amounts of the prevalence, the rise to an enormous degree in this population. Perhaps more serious yet are the increases in children and youth who are accessing gender treatment around the world. Where we have some of the best data out of the UK, we find that there was a 20 fold rise in those children and youth who are seeking gender services treatment with gender services. This was between the years of 2009 and 2016, but even though the UK is perhaps one of the places where we have the best data, where we have data from other places, Australia and Canada and the United States, we find almost exactly the same sorts of charts. I'll put that chart up so you can see the exponential rise. One of the things you note about this rise is that here the female population is in a different color than the male population, and you see a great rise, almost a hockey stick exponential type rise within adolescent females. This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that prior to the last few decades, if you go back 20 or 30 years, that gender dysphoria was a male domain issue or mental illness exclusively. There really was hardly any women that had gender dysphoria or girls that had gender dysphoria. And yet now what we see is that gender dysphoria and transgender identities among teen girls is the largest segment of this population. Let me just unpack that. So when you were talking about gender dysphoria historically, those are people presenting for psychiatric or counseling services because basically they're born as a boy, but they're feeling like they're a girl and there will be a clinical finding that they're gender dysphoria, but it was never female before. And yet now that we've introduced soji and we've culture cultural arise, literally gender dysphoria or gender identity that it's prevenently females that are presenting for these services in the UK. Is there an explanation? Is it social pressure on females? What's going on here? Yes, so that is correct and the research is doing some work on this, although the research is often not permitted to go ahead or sometimes there's retractions as advocates get a hold of research that in their minds is homophobic or transphobic. But Lisa Litman is somebody that has done some excellent work on this point. And her findings are that girls within peer groups, peer networks, and I'll say some more about peer contagion presently, that they are influencing one another, especially through online media and online groups. And so this social network sort of contagion or pressure, not dissimilar to the epidemic of bulimia, perhaps, that took place in the 70s and 80s, that there is this responsible in a significant way for this tremendous rise. Okay, thank you. And I'm going to ask you to continue, but I just see from the time that we need to tighten things up a little bit. There are, yes, so there is, there's been just just a, the question that you asked was pertinent to my next point, but maybe I'll just say a tiny bit more about that. And that is that starting with Nicholas Christakis' work in network contagion, peer contagion, which began in I think around 2007 or so. It has been shown, and again, the literature is very clear in this point now, that behaviors are contagious within society and peer groups. So things that you would never perhaps have assumed previously to be contagious are things like obesity, divorce, or contagious behaviorally. And things like happiness or conversely mental illness are contagious. And so it really is not surprising that things like gender identity or gender confusion or gender dysphoria, for instance, are likewise contagious, which is exactly what I think we are seeing. I want to proceed with the next line of evidence. And that is the vulnerability of this group of LGBT people, and especially looking at childhood. And that is the elevated childhood trauma rates amongst LGBT people. It has been well recognized in the literature for decades now that there are very, there's very high prevalence of childhood sexual abuse amongst LGBT people. The human 2011 is just one example of this data. So here you can see that females who are homosexual, sorry, who are homosexual are roughly twice as likely to have been sexually abused in childhood with bisexuals, the numbers actually even higher. But for those homosexuals, homosexuals are more than four times as likely to have been sexually abused than heterosexuals, and the numbers are similar for bisexuals. So this is a finding that's been known for quite some time. But what has occurred more recently in the literature is an investigation of more diverse, adverse childhood events. And this language of ACEs is just a vocabulary that's used within the literature to get at a variety of traumatic events that children will often face. And these traumatic events are often associated with health risks of various kinds, whether mental or physical in adulthood. So amongst LGBT people, we find not only for instance, as I look at the data that Anderson in 2013 provides, not only higher levels of sexual abuse, for instance, and not only emotional abuse and physical abuse, but also higher levels of household mental illness, household substance abuse, and incarcerated household member. This is really important to understand because I mean, maybe I'll just quickly note that these same findings have been found for transgender persons as well. You can take a look at that data, Schnaurs 2019 trend 2023. But what I want to note about these things is that even though these data are well recognized by even LGBT advocates, the reason that is often given for these sorts of correlations is what is called the minority stress theory. I'll try to very briefly, I don't see what this theory is, it states that because these children may be gender non conforming. So whether they end up being, for instance, gay, lesbian, or transgender, it presents similarly in childhood as gender non conformity. And so as parents interact with gender non conformity, it may be that they face within households, and maybe those just barely outside those households, they face these additional risks, specifically from their households. The problem with this theory is that it can't explain many of these adverse childhood events. It is very conceivable, and I suspect it does indeed happen that, for instance, a predator, a sexual predator may prey upon a gender non conforming child seeing them as vulnerable, which would then indicate that some of this elevated rates of sexual abuse amongst LGBT people are on account of you might say this gender non conformity or proto homosexuality amongst those children. That would fit with the minority stress theory. However, having household members that have elevated amounts of mental illness or substance abuse, or having an incarcerated household member can in no way be explained by the minority stress theory. And so what this indicates is that within the LGBT population, and specifically I'm looking at youth, that there is tremendous amounts of trauma that may be connected with confusion about same-sex attraction, behavior, gender identity that needs to be able to be explored within counseling by professionals, the sorts of counseling that Bill C4 does not permit, and this is, again, another example of harms towards the most vulnerable segments of our population. I want to finish by noting the ineffectiveness of gender affirmation treatments. Much more could be said about this, but there have been many different studies that have been done, as you might imagine, on the effectiveness of things like cross-sex hormones or surgeries. The challenge within the literature is that there are tremendous problems that attend these studies. The largest of them is the loss to follow-up rates. If you are doing a treatment, especially treatment as invasive as experimental cross-sex hormones or especially sex reassignment surgeries, and you treat, let's say, 100 individuals, you want to get as close to 100 individuals looking at the most vulnerable ones. There are also individuals looking at that same group 10 or 20 years later to determine whether that treatment has been successful. Yet, very many of the studies that are done on these treatments have lost a follow-up rates of 30, 40, and even 50%. Especially problematic in light of the fact that where research touches on what we would expect to find in those loss to follow-up rates, the research shows that those who are lost to follow-up tend to be lost to follow-up because they are experiencing worse outcomes than those who are able to be followed up. There are a few studies that are long-term and avoid those problems because they look at a more population-based approach, especially out of the Nordic countries that tend to keep very good records for follow-up and for studies. So one of these studies by Cecilia Desjane in 2012 found that death by suicide was 19 times higher amongst those who had undergone sex reassignment surgery than in controls in the control population for the study. Psychiatric hospitalization after adjusting for prior morbidity, and I'll explain that in a second, was 2.8 times higher. In other words, you are comparing not just those who went through sex reassignment surgery with those who had with average people that are demographically mixed who had not gone through sex reassignment surgery, but you're also comparing them with those who have similar levels of psychiatric problems and hospitalization. And even when you account for that, those who had undergone sex reassignment surgery were almost 3 times as likely to face psychiatric hospitalization after the fact. Simonson in 2016, a study that was done in Denmark, found that there was statistically significant difference in the amount of psychiatric diagnoses in the group before and after treatment. Actually, one of the only studies that we have in which we're actually able to follow, we're going to do a study all the way through of our initial cohort prior to having the treatments and then afterwards able to follow-up on them after a good amount of time. And one of the best studies, although one of the ones, in my opinion, that is the most biased in how they move from how the researchers move from the data itself to observations and the interpretation of that data is done by Linquist in 2017. It's a longitudinal study, one of the only ones that really we have that has multiple markers in determining how successful this treatment was. And their markers for both mental and physical health and what it found is that mental and physical health deteriorated to the same level or lower than prior to surgery after five years. This is really remarkable and I want to enter this into evidence with our commissioners. You can see some of the data up there, but almost everything except for, I believe it was physical functioning, was the only measure in this quality of life measurement scale in which it was not lower after five years than prior to the surgery. And it's actually well recognized within the literature that there is a honeymoon period in which treatments seem to work for a very short period of time because it's expected to work by those who undergo it. And yet we see the deterioration significantly from that. Another just finishing up here, one of the recent reviews that has been done out of the UK is the CAS report. And I encourage people to take a look at that report in which there was this review of all of the gender identity services that were done in the UK. And there was significant changes that came out of this, including that no further medical treatments of gender dysphoria would continue for those under 18 years of age. And similar things have been taken place in other European countries, but sadly in Canada as well as in the United States, we are moving ahead. It seems full steam with a set of treatments that is not evidence based. So just now to my recommendations in conclusion. Generally speaking, my recommendation is that all cultural or institutional promotion of LGBT identity or behavior directed towards children and youth must stop. More specifically, Bill C4 must be repealed as being factually and demonstrably false in his premises and as removing parental and professional responsibilities. Bill C4 essentially takes on the role of parents to children and of counselors and professionals to their clients. Secondly, Soji and other LGBT programs and initiatives directed at children and youth must be stopped. Less school districts and trustees be held financially and legally responsible in lawsuits, which are beginning to be launched by detransitioners who have lost sexual function or body parts due to medical treatments and interventions. And then thirdly, government must stop funneling millions of dollars to Soji organizations which influence and sexualized children and youth. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dirks commissioners. Do you have any questions of this witness? Yes, thanks, Mr. Dirks. I'm interested in your views on this rather strange to my mind concept of sex assigned at birth, which has now found its way into laws like Bill C4. Is it not simply a way of avoiding the uncomfortable truth that sex is determined at the point of conception and not assigned at birth? The short answer, a commissioner is yes, it is. The slightly longer answer and perhaps where some of this began is a compassionate effort to deal with intersection individuals, which tends to be a extreme minority of individuals. Again, you're down at into 0.0% of individuals. And even in those case with intersex individuals, it is clear that they're intersex relative to either male or female. But the short answer is yes, and I think that we need to do a way completely with this language of sex assigned at birth. I have a couple of questions for you. What strikes me in this so g narrative, it's the flaws in the reasoning. So I will ask a basic question that needs to be asked, but maybe you will just have comments probably no answer to give. So first of all, if you are not defined by your sex at birth, why you need surgery to change it later, what just defies it? How can the narrative explain this fundamental problem in logic? Yes, and in addition to that is the rather uncomfortable truth that transgender itself connotes a binary that you are always moving from one to the other. So now of course that does undermine to some degree in general senses in regards to gender non conformity or non-binary status. But when it comes to the sorts of treatments that are done, the treatments are over to the other sex. Yes, I would agree with that. And also, when you are a woman, how can you know what it is to be a man? And when you are a man, how can you know what it is to be a woman? So how can you say, I feel I'm a man. And there is, thank you, there is, you know, there's clinical research that has been done in your, you know, in the earlier years especially when the research was probably more evidence based in trying to address the incongruity that people felt. But you are absolutely correct. And I think also in line with that thinking and that that idea is the question of how can you know when you are eight or 10 or 12 and you are a female, how can you in fact know without going through a through puberty, what it means to be a woman even. You may have some idea, but without going through that process, especially a process that will resolve gender dysphoria in the vast majority of cases. There is just this great lacuna that is that is missing in this, you know, in all of this conversation. And you said that way to avoid children being medicalized, sterilized and mutilated is by waiting for a pubertal and psychological development. The thing is like in Quebec at 14 years of age, a children, a teenager could do a sex change without experience even knowing. So how can we do anything about that and do you know about cases where you protection was involved because they tried to prevent our children to change sex? Yes, so I believe that what needs to happen here in North America is what has taken place in recently in the UK for our elected officials, especially to protect children by putting in place more evidence based guidelines and safeguards for children when it comes to these decisions that they're not prepared to make. And yes, I am aware, there's a case, there's a notable case here in BC that in fact I'm still unaware of or unsure of whether I can even say the fellow's name because of corporate protection orders in which a father did not want his daughter to go through a medicalized treatment. She was not permitted, not only did the judge say that the daughter was permitted to do as she wanted, but also that the parent was not permitted to speak to the media about this issue and was jailed for a period of some time because he refused to adhere to those court orders. So there are there's tremendous pressure being placed on on parents in this regard currently. There are plenty of examples where in schools, children are transitioning behind their parents backs and and then let off to counselors under this affirmation only paradigm in which they're then started on this road to medicalization. There are cases even in the United States where where parents where children have been removed from the care of their parents because of of these issues. And I was saved by some professionals that before we'll see for I guess it took two years of treatments psychological treatments before there was an approval for sex change. And now it takes 20 minutes the hospital children's hospital to have a prescription for all our motorbite can you confirm that? I can confirm that that has been confirmed in fact by detransitioners. There are currently detransitioners and thinking about a case in the United States, the names escaped me, but there are detransitioners who have indeed said that that was the case with them. And themselves and are now beginning to sue doctors that did not do their due diligence in adhering to proper protocols in this regard. So yes, that is indeed the case. The last question is do you have data or do you know about the influence of hormones in water for example or in other things that can explain the exponential growth of this dysphoria? The data on I am aware and I have looked at that on studies that would relate to that. In my view data relative to water supply is not conclusive in regards to it being involved in this. It is an area that does deserve far more attention is the area of microplastics and phi-lates. There has been research that has been done that I think is credible at least in the sense that it ought to be more greatly researched. The challenging aspect of where this rise may be coming from other than the most obvious, which is simply social pressure and the promotion within the culture, peer contagion. That is probably the lion's share of the responsibility, the cause of those in my opinion. But I do believe that there is some research that ought to take place in epigenetics. That it is well demonstrated now and especially over the last 10 years, that changes in behavior can affect the expression of the genome and can be passed down to your children. The other area that interacts with that to some degree, in my opinion, is the area of hormones and how prenatal hormones can affect same-sex attraction. And there have been those who have done significant work on this, like Alice and others. So there are areas and avenues of research that I think are important. I am not certain whether water supply would be one of them. For you, lots of people talking to you of them now. So, love a woman was created below.