 Vancouver police emergencies. I need some help. I'm so sick and tired of being harassed by people. I'm really angry right now. I went to my car the other day and somebody had written a spag on the back of my car and they flattened my tires. I don't know what to do anymore. I really need somebody to help me. We can help you. Can you tell me your name? My name's Carolyn. Okay, Carolyn, can you tell me where you are? I'm too scared to tell you where I am. My name is Jake Pine. I'm speaking today on behalf of Transpulse, which is a community-based research project exploring the impact of discrimination on the health of trans people in Ontario. What's emerging already at this preliminary stage is a very clear picture of the way the discrimination in employment, in housing, and the provision of services is shaping the lives of trans people in this province. Our findings show extremely low incomes at or well below the poverty line, despite high levels of education. Trans people report being fired from jobs or turned down for jobs because of discrimination. Many are reporting that during the past year they did not have enough money to buy food. Trans people are reporting unusually high levels of homelessness. They're moving to other cities for safety reasons and to access health and other services they should be able to obtain in their own regions. Many report that they currently fear they'll lose their housing because of discrimination. I'll draw your attention specifically to the extraordinary levels of violence that we're finding. Violence is, of course, the inevitable conclusion of a lack of rights, but beyond that, trans people are reporting that they've also been denied access to the services that are intended to support survivors of violence. Most disturbing is the vast majority of our respondents reported that they've seriously considered suicide in their lifetime. I have had some experience of being discriminated against in jobs. I've been assaulted many times for being who I am. I remember at the some times, like skipping classes, I thought I got older, just not wanting to deal with it, not wanting to be there. I face a bit of social anxiety. I feel left out. I couldn't even go out my door of my apartment. I literally became a recluse. In everyday life, most people think of sex and gender as exactly the same thing and they consider those equivalent terms and they wonder why would anybody want to make a difference. When you talk about transgender people, those two terms become very important. And so for transgender people and also for the medical community, by and large, sex refers to the physical body and the characteristics of the physical body and gender refers to how someone feels about themselves and sex refers to the shape of your body and gender refers to what you do to tell other people how you feel about yourself. There was a pioneer of transgender activism by the name of Virginia Prince who said it in a very succinct way that helps people to understand. She said that sex is between the legs and gender is between the ears. Transgender people face some of the worst rates of violence, some of the worst rates of discrimination in our country today and it's sometimes big things like a violent assault, sometimes what we might see as smaller things but are just as important. Having somebody misname you, having somebody misgender you, having somebody say, well, you're in the wrong bathroom or this isn't your kind of shop, discrimination in housing, in employment, getting on or off a bus, getting a cab, like simple things that most people would take for granted can become dangerous things when people bring hatred or discrimination to bear against transgender people. Do I feel comfortable? Do I feel safe going into, say, a coffee shop on the east side versus North Vancouver or wherever we're talking about? I'm very aware of my environment always. I don't feel as safe in a nightclub as it would have been in a coffee shop in the daytime. I feel comfortable in my community going out at night. I do not feel as comfortable, definitely not, going to straight clubs at night because I have been harassed in straight clubs. I have been clocked, as you would, what might say. Transgender people live in a society that doesn't understand them, in a society that does not have systems set up to support them. Transgender people live in a society where there are many people who are still very hostile to their existence and refuse to accept that they are the people that they say they are. I go back to an incident that happened when I was assaulted and I had to get the police involved. And the shock and amazement from the officers who attended the scene at the time when they figured out the jig was up, right, with me, they went from being really attentive with me to standoffish. And, you know, they were close and then suddenly they backed off and then the rubber gloves came out. Sitting on the Diversity Advisory Committee, I was there for two meetings and it was very clear because there was quite a few people that were sitting on there from different communities around Vancouver and I'm talking ethnic as well, that I wasn't being listened to, I wasn't being addressed properly, being totally ignored and rudely treated. I remember I wanted to actually go out and have coffee with a friend and I got ready and I was feeling okay. And I put my hand on the door handle and I just, I could not turn the door handle and I froze. And I had never been in that spot before in my life. Prior to that, I was a world competitive fighter. I had a kickboxing gym. Prior to becoming a mental health worker, I was a plumber and I left that trade to make my transition and then I went back into that trade again and my life changed like that. And then from that point, it actually, it just got worse and worse. The depression got deeper. This takes a huge toll on transgender people starting from when they're very young. And so we see that toll materializing in very high rates of poverty, problems with completion of education because of harassment by other students, harassment by teachers, refusal to accept. We see substance abuse problems. We see mental health problems and we see suicide problems. And as we see greater acceptance and greater respect for transgender people, we will see these high degrees of problems start to subside. But at the moment, we're still far from that. We live in the real world, social change is very uneven and there are many people who are transgender, who are very successful and have not been held back by these attitudes in society. But there's many people who have suffered a great deal because of these attitudes and we have a long way to go to change the world enough so that it's not the case. We see the younger generation finding greater acceptance. What's exciting about young people today and particularly trans youth is that there's a lot more people out, visible, more role models. And so you're seeing a lot of younger people come out at an earlier age as trans and as, you know, I find that so exciting but it's also challenging because parents, teachers, authority figures, they don't always know what to do. They don't always trust young people's judgment and that can drive people away. That can in some cases end up with people on the streets and that's challenging itself because getting into shelters, if you're in a shelter, it may be male only. Well, if you're not male identified but people say you are because it still says that on your birth certificate even though you yourself know you're female that can lead to a whole bunch of hardship. There's some interesting research that's been done in Ontario that shows that transgender youth who do not have acceptance from their family, do not have support from their family have extremely high rates of suicide ideation and attempt. If you don't fit in the round hole and you're a square peg, people try and bash in to that round hole when often that of course doesn't work. 57% of youth who do not have family support report suicide attempts. If they have family support that number goes down to 4%. Those youth that have that family support will grow up resilient and they will grow up able to bounce back and survive and be successful despite what society throws at them. But this is just the first generation that has seen that kind of support. True Wilson, thanks for being part of our video walk with me. What does transgender mean to you? Transgender means that you were born in the wrong body. What you feel on the inside is not what's on the outside. And what body were you born in? I was born in a body that I wasn't happy with. I was born in a boy's body. But what I felt like was a girl. And have your friends accepted you for who you are? Yeah, a lot of my friends have. Some of my friends at my old school didn't. They had trouble realizing that that it wasn't a phase and that it wasn't something that I would just forget about in like a year or so. Was it tough to explain to your friends that this and people in general that this was just not a phase you were going through? No, I want to educate people because a lot of people think that that kids don't know what they want to be. Like they don't know, like they don't know who they are and they're still finding out who they are. Gender is something that people feel and they experience. People's gender identity is the gender that they feel describes them the best. And so for people in everyday life who are not transgender and the term we use nowadays for that is cisgender people. So for cisgender people, their gender identity matches with the sex that they were assigned at birth and the gender that they were assigned at birth. Because generally we say if you're male then that means you're a boy and you're going to grow up to be a man and if you're female, that's your body, you'll grow up to be a girl and you'll grow up to be a woman. But for many transgender people, there's a mismatch there. And so they feel themselves to have a gender, their gender identity, that doesn't match with the gender that they were assigned at birth. Tell me about your bathroom experience. How has that experience been with you using a boy's bathroom or a girl's bathroom or a gender neutral bathroom? I had to use a boy's bathroom for a really long time and it felt really uncomfortable. Like when we were in the change room getting ready for gym, it felt like I was an outcast, like I wasn't supposed to be there. Now that I get to use the proper bathrooms, it's really good. I hated using the washroom when I was a kid. I was terrified of it. I was terrified of it. Gym class was, oh, I did not look forward to that. I couldn't stand it. I mean, I wouldn't change in there. I would go back to class sweaty. When it was grade school from grades one to six, gym class was co-ed. We were all together. And then when it was seven and eight, suddenly it was the boys and the girls. And when I hit high school and I had the option to opt out of physics, I did. Because I was continually being ridiculed. I didn't have the strength that the boys did. I didn't develop the same way that the boys did. And it was the same thing. I would literally try to find other washrooms that were not on school grounds, that I knew safe, washrooms, yeah. If you had some advice for police officers or words of encouragement, we're working with trans youth or adults out in the community. What would you say to a police officer? If you're not sure what pronouns they want to use, ask them and respect their pronouns. If they want to use guy pronouns or girl pronouns, accept that. Imagine if someone walked up to you and called you a sissy little girl, like to be mean. Then how would that make you feel? That's the feeling that trans kids get when somebody, when somebody says, oh well, oh well, it says here that you're a guy, so I'm gonna call you by your guy pronouns. It feels like you're telling us that we're not, that we're not who we say we are. And it already makes us feel bad enough that we don't have our identities changed. Calling them by the right name, it means a lot. It means that you accept us and you understand us and you're not against us. What I would say to the police when they're dealing with individuals now, when they meet or come across individuals in any situation, whether it's something that they're being called out to or someone just on the street or in passing or higher, whatever it is, is active listening. I would really encourage them to listen properly and with non-judgment. In the earlier days of my life, I didn't know that I had resources available to me to go back in and say, this isn't cool. You know, to go and say, I want to take this to court. I want to challenge this. I didn't know that I could do that. You just, you kind of know when somebody's being or discriminating against you, it's just you get this feeling that this person really doesn't want anything to do with us or doesn't want anything to do with me because of my gender. You want to be treated just like everybody else with just the exact same amount of respect. You want anybody else, really. Be receptive and sensitive and don't jump just to transgender as the terminology right after that because really you don't know until you've actually engaged in active listening from that individual as to what's going on. And because it is sensitive, be careful of the word you use. Be careful of the terminology and that, for me, goes back to sensitivity issues. If you don't know what gender, if you don't know what name, what pronoun, how to be respectful, just ask. You know, I think that's the simplest way. We all want to be respected. And if people don't know about us, we all appreciate somebody wanting to get us to know us better. My name's Adam Palmer. I'm the Chief Constable of the Vancouver Police Department. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for watching the Vancouver Police Department's training video, Walk With Me. This video was a collaborative effort between the Vancouver Police Department's Diversity and Aboriginal Policing section, as well as the Education and Training Unit and members of our transgender community. We're proud to partner with members of the transgender community to bring awareness and understanding along with continued support to issues faced by this community. The Vancouver Police Department strives to go beyond the call and to build and maintain trust and acceptance with all members of our community. On behalf of my friend, True, and the Vancouver Police Department, thank you again, and we hope you enjoyed watching the production of Walk With Me. Thanks for watching Walk With Me.