Justice committee  Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I am quite honoured and humbled to speak to you today. I thank you all for your time and your kind consideration. My name is Sara Davis Buechner. I am a classical concert pianist. Since 2003 I have been a professor of music at the University of B

Justice committee  Just a moment please. I wish I could speak French fluently.

Justice committee  Yes, thank you. Pardon me.

Justice committee  It's impossible for me to speak to the specifics of everything that they would do, but I think that, in terms of my own experience of the past, to be able to procure legal representation and to have such rights guaranteed in the Constitution, in the Human Rights Act, means that t

Justice committee  Yes, this is absolutely true. In fact, I cited specific instances. When I was asked to leave a job, I consulted a lawyer—a rather high-priced one, I might add—who advised me simply to quit, that it would not be worth my time and money to fight the case, and that it would make me

Justice committee  In Canada, I myself have had no problems with that. I think the best anecdote I can tell is a rather humourous one, of going to an emergency room in New York City and sitting down because I had a raging flu. The nurse asked me various questions about my age and weight and so for

Justice committee  That's a bit of.... I'll be here all week. Thank you. Don't forget to tip the server.

Justice committee  But what's pertinent to the story particularly is going into a hospital emergency room, when one might be in great distress and maybe not in one's most communicative state, being able to say “I am a transgendered woman”, and having the nurses and doctors know, okay, that means A,

Justice committee  I should add in a more serious vein that because I was rather butchered by a doctor in Bangkok, where I originally went for surgery, it was after I moved to Canada that I sought corrective surgery. There were no doctors who performed this kind of surgery anywhere west of Montreal

Justice committee  I've just been watching about an hour of Parliament, and I don't ever want to go in that room again.

Justice committee  No, I'm going to let my colleague speak to that. I wouldn't put myself in the position to say what the Canadian Parliament should do.

Justice committee  Oh, greatly, I think, simply because I think it's a very fundamental human need to belong. We all want to know where we belong, with whom, and who our peers are. Certainly when I was an adolescent I knew I had gender issues and questions, but when I first went to college and I

Justice committee  Well, without question, it was when I was transitioning that I would be accosted on the street by people, or things said to me constantly on the New York subways—over and above the way that people talk to you on the New York subway anyway—with various opinions about how I looked

Justice committee  It's a humorous story, but it certainly tells of one of the perils that we face as transgendered people. We're made up of so many things. We're born in the way that we're born, and yet society is the part that gives us the sheet of paper and says, okay, here's your box. Well, wha

Justice committee  I want to answer your questions with a question: why did you choose to have red hair?