CBC pulls plug on controversial documentary

Activists slam BBC production as ‘transphobic’

Only hours before it was set to air, the CBC cancelled the planned broadcast of a BBC documentary after transgender activists accused the film of being “transphobic” and “harmful.”

Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best? has faced condemnation for including in its coverage the argument that some children diagnosed as transgender may simply be suffering from treatable mental-health issues.

“It disseminates inaccurate information about trans youth and gender dysphoria, and will feed transphobia,” wrote Joshua Ferguson, a trans filmmaker, in a Tuesday tweet to the CBC.

Although a prior investigation by the BBC had deemed the film to be “impartial,” CBC removed it from its schedule within hours of receiving complaints on social media.

“We felt that we were not in a position to adequately support the conversation and debate that would be sparked by the airing of the doc and so, made a decision to pull it from the schedule,” said CBC spokesman Chuck Thompson in a statement to the National Post.

Filmed largely in Canada, the film follows the experience of parents who have raised a child showing signs of gender dysphoria — the feeling of being born in a body with the wrong gender.

First broadcast in the U.K. in January, much of the film focuses on parents deciding whether to pursue a “gender affirmative” approach in which they fully support their child’s wish to change gender identities.

“Increasingly, parents are encouraged to adopt a ‘gender affirmative’ approach … but is this approach right?” reads an official synopsis.

Even before the documentary had aired, a Change.org petition signed by 11,000 people warned that it “could spark a trail of prejudice; belittling transgender children, leading to them not being socially accepted by society.”

After the broadcast, the British charity “U.K. Trans Info” called the documentary “violent and one-sided.”

The broadcast even prompted a swath of British medical agencies, including the British Psychological Society and the Royal College of General Practitioners, to draft a statement denouncing clinical efforts “to suppress an individual’s expression of sexual orientation or gender identity.”

The documentary attracted particular controversy for prominently featuring Canadian sexologist Kenneth Zucker, a vocal critic of the gender affirmative approach who claims children may think they’re another gender because of trauma, anxiety or even autism.

“Little kids can present with extreme gender dysphoria, but that doesn’t mean they’re all going to grow up to continue to have gender dysphoria,” he says in the film.

At another point, he says, “A four-year-old might say that he’s a dog. Do you go out and buy dog food?”

Zucker used to head up Toronto’s Gender Identity Clinic, a facility run by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

The clinic was subject to an external review in 2015 following complaints that Zucker and his colleagues were performing “reparative therapy” attempting to “cure” transgender people.

The review did not explicitly find evidence of reparative therapy, but CAMH disbanded the clinic and fired Zucker. The centre then apologized, saying “not all of the practices in our childhood gender-identity clinic are in step with the latest thinking.”

Filmmakers spoke to three families who had taken their children to Zucker’s clinic, including a Toronto family whose daughter said she overcame her gender dysphoria after five years of strongly feeling that she was a boy. “I started to accept myself for who I was, which was being a girl,” she says.

Dissenting views are presented in the documentary, including profiles of two families whose children successfully underwent gender affirmation therapy.

Pro-affirmation advocates are also interviewed, including Norman Spack, a pioneer of hormone replacement therapy for minors, allowing people to transition before reaching puberty.

Hershel Russell, a Toronto psychotherapist, appears several times in the film to dispute Zucker’s claims and to say he’s practising “reparative therapy” — essentially, a transgender variant of the widely discredited “conversion” therapy that was once performed on homosexuals.

“The people doing it don’t use those words — that’s their problem,” said Russell.

However, critics accused the documentary of lifting up the views of a “discredited” academic.

A lengthy complaint by the British group Trans Media Watch, for instance, compared the documentary to promoting Andrew Wakefield, the widely discredited gastroenterologist who used a flawed study to propagate the myth that vaccines cause autism.