Thank you, Chair.
Thank you so much to our witnesses for being here today. This is a really important conversation.
Some of us, Andréanne, Leah and I, were at the launch of The Jackie Shane Story here on Parliament Hill just last week, and I can tell you I haven't been able to get those images and that story out of my mind. Imagine a transgender lounge singer in the 1960s trying to make it work.
In the mid-2000s, I was a journalist at CHCH, and I got to know a trans woman quite well. She nominated me for a woman of distinction award because I was one of the few people who treated her like a human, and I know that you brought that up today, too, Fae.
That really moved me, and I ended up going with her to Montreal to do a documentary, a three-part series, on her transition, and I spoke to other trans people having surgery there. What I learned from them and from the doctors was that it wasn't cosmetic; it was life-saving surgery. This was surgery that was literally saving people's lives, and you could tell that the doctors were passionate about it. It was the only place in Canada at the time where you could get the surgery.
That was really important and then, after that period, I felt like our society was starting to accept trans people more, and we started to move towards this openness and acceptance, and now suddenly we're back. We just heard from CSIS last week, which warned us about increasing violence against trans people in particular.
Fae, I haven't really asked a question, but can you comment on that trajectory and where we find ourselves from the 1960s to 2024 going backwards?