Health committee  Thank you for the invitation to be here today. We're greatly honoured to have travelled here from Vancouver, B.C., where the two of us work on unceded indigenous territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh nations. I'm Lorraine Grieves, provincial program director

Health committee  I feel very privileged to be the program director, as a Cree Métis and British Columbian. I also identify as two-spirit, and am the proud parent of a 29-year-old. We've submitted a brief for your reference, with 10 recommendations in it, and we'll be focusing our presentation to

Health committee  In B.C. it has been essential to undergo policy, service planning and educational resource development work by including, consulting and directly collaborating with those who have trans lived experience. This includes youth, adults, parents, caregivers, indigenous trans and two-s

Health committee  Lastly, we want to highlight the diverse needs of gender-creative and trans children, youth and their families. Psychosocial care, peer support and access to health care are key determinants of health for trans and gender-diverse children and youth. We know from research that m

Health committee  Education is needed broadly from the age of day care through to the rest of our lives. Young people get gendered and start getting put into those gender boxes right when they start encountering, sometimes at the hospital when we think about what people ask when babies are born: I

Health committee  That's a big question. I'll start with indigenous communities, and I'll speak to the B.C. context, because that's where we're working. B.C. has 203 first nations. To begin to understand how Trans Care BC as a program can be relevant to the communities in B.C., we've taken our tim

Health committee  The pathways are really variable for people, so it's a really hard point to speak to. I think, as you heard, the journey is very long for people. Often, someone might think for a long time about coming out and talking to a professional, and then the search to find that first pro

Health committee  In B.C. the genital surgeries are funded by MSP, which is our provincial insurer, and they have an agreement with the Montreal clinic to pay for services there.

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.

Health committee  It's a term that gets used sometimes for those who would be on the autism spectrum, or have diversity in how their brains work. Interesting numbers are being seen in the research literature around those who are neurodiverse more prominently presenting as gender-diverse as well. S

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 ver

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 t

Health committee  It really is.