Gender affirming care in Canada comes with barriers and delays, especially in N.S.
Global News
Despite progress in Canada in the field of transgender health care, for the more than 100,800 trans or non-binary Canadians, access to gender-affirming care comes with barriers.
Despite progress in Canada in the field of transgender health care, for the more than 100,800 trans or non-binary Canadians, access to gender-affirming care comes with barriers and delays that vary by province.
Fae Johnstone, a trans activist and executive director of Wisdom2Action, a queer-owned consulting group working in transgender health, says that despite an improved national understanding of gender-affirming care, transgender health access seems to have “fallen entirely off the radars of most provincial and territorial governments.”
“We’ve got a patchwork system full of inconsistencies and a small set of phenomenal health-care providers who are going above and beyond to try to provide gender-affirming care,” she said in an interview Wednesday.
Each province and territory has its own set of regulations to access hormonal or surgical treatment for people who are transgender — those whose gender is different than the sex they were assigned at birth — or for non-binary people, whose gender cannot be defined as male or female.
Johnstone says Yukon and British Columbia are among the best Canadian jurisdictions for access to gender-affirming care, while Ontario and Quebec are somewhere in the middle. Atlantic Canada and the Prairies, meanwhile, “tend to be further behind.”
In April, Statistics Canada reported that 100,815 Canadians aged 15 and older identify as transgender or non-binary — which represents 0.33 per cent of Canadians in that age group. Nova Scotia has the highest proportion of trans and non-binary people in the country, with one in 200 people 15 and older self-identifying as trans or non-binary.
In Nova Scotia, barriers to gender-affirming care come from family doctors who are unfamiliar with trans health care, as well as from a “burdensome” surgery-request process, Halifax Sexual Health Centre executive director Abbey Ferguson said in a recent interview.
Gender-affirming care, which can include hormone treatments and surgery, is something any family doctor or primary-care provider can offer.
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