The Ottawa Hospital announced the opening of a clinic for sex change surgeries, offering the most comprehensive suite of sex-change procedures in all of Ontario.
Ottawa’s new “gender-affirming” surgery clinic is offering three kinds of procedures; facial surgery to masculinize or feminize the patient’s appearance, “top surgery” to sever the patient’s breasts or to create artificial breasts, and “bottom surgery” to surgically create a penis or vagina for the patient.
Ottawa Hospital’s gender-affirming clinic is the first of its kind in the province to offer all three kinds of sex change procedures.
The clinic is being led by the Ottawa-based surgeon Dr. Nicholas Cormier, a doctor trained at Harvard and Western University who is said to be skilled and passionate about performing gender-affirming procedures.
“In my residency, I was always interested in gender-affirming care, and that led me to seek out a fellowship in San Francisco, where I was able to train with world-renowned experts in gender-affirming care,” said Cormier in a Ottawa Hospital press release.
Under the Canada Health Act, provinces are required to finance all procedures that are deemed to be “medically necessary.”
Ontario parents are expressing their concern that children seeking treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, located right next to Ottawa Hospital, will be referred to the new gender-affirming clinic for sex change surgery.
Parental rights activist Shannon B Douglas expressed concern with CHEO accepting referrals from school staff on a podcast, saying that CHEO does not undertake sufficient medical examinations to conclude that a child ought to pursue sex change treatments.
“They [parents] go to the gender clinic, and then the child in most cases is prescribed cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers on the first visit,” said Douglas.
“In most cases there is no psychological evaluations, no psychiatric evaluations, there’s no requirements for those sorts of things, and it’s an automatic prescription.”
Douglas’ co-host Melanie Bennet criticized the role schools play in referring their students to gender clinics.
“Schools have a lot to answer for in terms of breaking up relationships in families,” said Bennet.
An Ottawa Hospital statement congratulating themselves for opening the gender-affirming clinic says that CHEO provided Cormier and his team with help with opening up the clinic and will be referring patients to the clinic.
On CHEO’s website providing information on their gender diversity clinic, patients can be referred to the clinic by school guidance counselors and teachers. Parental consent is not stated as a requirement to see a CHEO clinician.
On the CHEO’s referral form, there is a section titled “family information” where applicants are asked if the patient’s parents are supportive of gender-affirming treatment with a sidenote that states that youth do not always want parents to know about visits to the gender clinic.
The Ottawa Hospital clinic joins a Montreal clinic in being the only clinics in Canada to offer facial surgery, top surgery and bottom surgery.
