Yes. One of the things that I've noticed.... I finished my academic training in 1988, and I think in the 1980s and previous to that, after we started questioning ourselves around sexual minorities and gender minorities and looking at deconstructing many of the things that we'd learned, what happened in university and college training programs was that we just stopped talking about it.
The pathologization of gender and sexual minorities, in terms of explicit content, may have ended. We stopped talking about people as being mentally ill and needing treatments and those kinds of things, but then it was just total silence. I have a foot in training students and I also have a foot in training professionals who have finished their studies years ago, and what I notice is that an awful lot of the content dealing with sexual and gender minorities is optional. It's not transversely integrated into training programs across the board, and there's no guarantee that you can finish studies in health or social sciences in this country and have adequate information given to you during your basic training, unless you went and looked for it yourself in other courses or other programs offered across the university.
There are people who come and take classes that I give at McGill because in their own universities they can't find anything, so they get permission to take a class at another university because there's something being mentioned about gender and sexual minorities. I deal with students who are taking.... I teach optional courses because I teach courses on gender and sexual minorities, and hopefully, at some point that content will be integrated across the board into all classes. It's not the case yet.
Then I meet people who finish their training five or six.... Just Tuesday, actually, I was in the Lanaudière region of Quebec, and one of the people following a course that I was giving for the Quebec ministry of health and social services on this issue had finished her training two years ago, and she said, “I got nothing. I got absolutely nothing.” Other people who had finished 20 or 30 years ago were still trying to figure out if electric shock treatments were still being used or if people should be referred to psychiatrists for potential treatment. We have all of this happening out there in a kind of void of adequate information.
I think the recommendation that you've heard many times, I'm sure—and you heard today—is that somehow we have to put our finger on the scale around accreditation services for programs and around professional associations about accreditation, so that people start to have adequate information. What this translates to is the doctor who says to a trans person, “I can't treat your cut because I don't know anything about trans people”, and ultimately, all that—