Health committee  I think some people who would have faced a lot barriers to travelling to Montreal may now be able to access surgeries, though people have to be fairly stable in their lives, and able to weather the recovery period, in order to access the surgery. We may see an increase.

Health committee  I'm not an expert on this topic, but I know there are very few people who actually go by X as their gender marker. I've heard from many folks in the community that they would rather see a range of options, or the removal altogether. It's a step in the right direction. I think we're encouraged by that.

Health committee  I'd say two-spirit is a really simplified English term to represent a set of very complex concepts. For me, in terms of my own position around being two-spirit, I've been following the breadcrumbs to figure out, first of all, my Cree Métis history and whether there is a word for two-spirit within the people who I come from.

Health committee  Not strictly; I think it's just any therapy that's not honouring who an individual is and which attempts to erase or convert that person to a cisgender or heterosexual identity. I don't know of a sort of boilerplate definition that is being used commonly across groups or provinces.

Health committee  The clinic is supposed to open this summer, with surgery starting in the fall of 2019. It will be in Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.

Health committee  I think our next challenge will be making sure that people have a very safe and smooth journey both into surgery and out of surgery. There's a lot of work to do to train, because our province is large. People are coming from many communities to Vancouver, so there is also travel within province, but a great distance.

Health committee  Not prominently. I think some of those groups that were protesting GSAs in schools would probably be some of the same groups that would invalidate the identities we're talking about and would suggest that it is a choice. You've heard everyone talk about conversion or reparative therapy.

Health committee  In the end, once those young people are assessed and get through all those gates, they're often affirmed in their gender and are allowed to be themselves. It's an area of particular attention around working with young people right now.

Health committee  That's the point. We have been in conversation in B.C. with various professional bodies and with the medical schools, and in partnership with the UBC medical faculty and online, we've been building a set of online modules that will be CME accredited. Most importantly, we're very interested in how to get this training into pre-service curriculum so we're signalling that this is a normal part of health care all the way through to those who are getting trained to be in those professions.

Health committee  More and more so, and I think a lot of physicians are seeing more and more people present for this care in their practices. We've been barely able to keep up with the demand for training in our province. Actually, there aren't enough of us to train all of those reaching out for training by us.

Health committee  It really is.

Health committee  Yes. We're working on a “train the trainer” network model so we can train more because some of the training has to be live training. Online modules only go so far.

Health committee  We're grappling with this in B.C. right now. There's been a fair bit of organized protest to the rollout of GSAs, and we think there's a ton of research to support that work. In B.C. we have a research centre called the SARAVYC. It has been able to show, by linking health data with the presence of GSAs in schools, that we see health outcomes improve not just for queer and trans students but for the heterosexual male population in schools and the cisgender population.

Health committee  Can I speak to one point on that? Just with regard to chest and breast surgeries, in many provinces there are really narrow criteria for trans women to access funded breast augmentation surgery, and often there is more open access for trans masculine people to get chest surgery.

Health committee  On the east coast, I think it's a newly funded procedure.