Smith totally wrong in her trans-policy

I didn’t think The Honourable Danielle Smith was ever going to text me again after I lost it on her for refusing to learn the lessons of our incredibly extralegal response to COVID as she moved to coerce treatment onto homeless people, as though it was addictions and not tax policy that’s causing us to have a homelessness crisis... But she did this Wednesday, January 31st at 4:07 PM:

“Thanks for your input on the need for trans educated docs to provide hormone and surgery care. I announced today we are moving on that advice. Premier DS”

This was untrue. I was on the Honourable Danielle Smith’s radio show three times and at no point did I say that we should have better education among doctors with respect to trans issues. I said that doctors had no right to discriminate on the basis of sex and orientation, that Albertan case law said that included trans status, and that their college of physicians and surgeons should apply their own rules to their own doctors... also that Hormone Replacement was a very-safe form of medicine, certainly as safe if not safer than Mifegymiso, a pill which is dispensed by pharmacists with little screening, and at public expense, to terminate pregnancy.

I also appeared on her show to discuss how Lupron, as opposed to Hormone Replacement, which her announcement refuses to differentiate from Lupron, was a dangerous orphan drug given to trans adolescents because to some doctors and parents, not-looking-trans is more-important than the health of their child. At one point, a mother defending the use of this Hypothalamic Suppressor (which is a more-accurate name for Lupron than ‘puberty blocker’) on her daughter texted in to say that her child was fine, but merely that she couldn’t walk for a period of time after she got her Lupron injection.

Lupron is linked to mandibular necrosis, to liver issues, cancers, lupus, and more. It is, to my mind, to the treatment of sex dysphoria, as Remdesivir is to the treatment of COVID-19: A terrible solution that doesn’t show greater efficacy than safer and cheaper drugs. But Lupron is given because then hormones won’t mark someone for life in a way where they may have difficulty blending (i.e. appearing to be cis)... And ensuring trans people, trans women especially, still have difficulty blending, is the political prize for many of the people who cheered on the Premier’s announcement today.

The Honourable Danielle Smith, like most politicians I’ve met, operates from a presumption that you are stupid. The reason I know this is that I’m a policy expert, I have a one-in-eighteenhundred IQ, and she thought I wasn’t going to notice that she released a much larger policy announcement than the one she texted me about. She also thought I wasn’t going to notice that the whole time, I was telling her that the problem is inability to buy HRT on an equal basis.

Imagine if doctors thought it was normal that trans men wanted abortions, because they associate childbirth with femaleness, but that in the case of women it was exceptional, and they required them to go through different doctors to get the same medicine, with the same contraindications, and the same potential sideeffects. That is the situation in Alberta today. That situation violates the Canada Health Act. That situation violates the Alberta Human Rights Act, and That situation violates the rules of the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons.

People like me aren’t surprised that government and doctors think themselves above the law... after all, The Honourable Danielle Smith, while recognizing that transfeminine athletes are female in her announcement, also said government would work with sports governing bodies to create “Women’s only” divisions. This, quite simply, is the government using public money to subsidize some people’s conception of womanhood. It does so in a way that does not demonstrate good faith, given the Premier’s own statements, and it does so in a fashion not-intended to spark discussion as she has asked that the discussion remain depoliticized, which is very-rich for someone whose policy choices are nakedly politicized. As always with elites, the Honourable Ms. Smith included, they know they won’t be subject to the laws, including those that criminalize incitement of hatred.

This impunity comes from experience: While campaigning against the vaccine passport and relying on the political support of people who believed with some justification that it violated both international and Federal Law to enforce such a measure, which disproportionately impacted Albertans of Colour, Ms. Smith also took public money to keep her business open and enforce those mandates, mandates that were an element in what she called the worst discrimination she’d ever seen in her lifetime. She knows that she’ll face no sanction, including because many of the people who faced that discrimination have grudgingly gotten behind her coalition and are now emotionally-committed to same.

There were good things in her announcement... given worrisome dynamics in schools with respect to sex ed that appears to problematize trans girls, especially when closeted. I support a parental optin to formalized sex education, unit by unit... this is a long way from the very anti-speech bill in Florida which served to criminalize casual discussions. Those same dynamics mean that those teachers who use their positions to bully and to seek social capital (and yes, they exist, I have PTSD in part thanks to many teachers like that), won’t be the only adults in a teenager’s life when they socially transition. Surgical recovery is expensive...

But genital surgery has also been coerced in Alberta for a very-long time, by tying public accommodations and employment to having photo ID whose markers match someone’s presentation. For decades, to get that marker, you had to have genital reconstruction, and those who believe that sterility is the goal of that didn’t have to look far during the Notley Government when the Hoffman Health Ministry was referring to vaginoplasty as “Final Surgery.”

I’ve been saying this now for twelve years: If Danielle Smith cared about trans people, she’d be talking about HRT gatekeeping, and now she has the legal tools to end it very-quickly. Thanks to the Alberta Sovereignty Act she could move many pharmaceuticals beyond the restriction that is scheduling. After all, you can get Mifegymiso from a pharmacist, why can’t you get Estrogen? This would cut down on the number of doctors’ visits, and I regularly hear that our medical system is overwhelmed. But the truth is: Neither the UCP government, nor the NDP opposition, who entrenched barriers to transition when in power, seem interested in reducing the workload on doctors, by taking any of the power they have over your and my lives. They would rather you stay in crisis, desperate enough to keep supporting them as they claim to lead, and yet only follow the worst impulses to which they are exposed.

Valerie Keefe, Alberta