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McGill University in Quebec has denied gender-affirming care to at least two trans American students since March, when the school adopted a preemptive policy denying hormone replacement therapy over fears the Trump administration would retaliate, two sources say.
The new policy is an embarrassment, said an American staffer for The Montreal Trans Patient Union (TPU), who spoke to CBC on the condition of anonymity.
“These are American laws. American laws don’t apply in Canada,” they said.
The staffer and another member of TPU, Emma Gimbert, were at a meeting at McGill’s Student Wellness Hub in March when doctors brought up the change in policy.
“They said they wouldn’t be prescribing HRT to American citizens who were under 19 because of the executive order that Donald Trump issued,” Gimbert said.
The student was referring to Trump’s executive order, Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, issued a year ago in January, which directs federal agencies to carry out the American president’s crusade against transgender identity across the U.S. government.
“If you told me a month ago that a U.S. executive order would be influencing how doctors do their job across the border, I would have been like, no, that can’t be the case,” Gimbert said.
Canadians have been overwhelmingly critical of Trump and his trolling threats to their sovereignty since the start of his second term. McGill’s decision, from fiercely independent Quebec, no less, would seem antithetical to the rest of Canada’s posture facing Trump.
About 1000 Americans are currently enrolled at McGill, a public research university in Montreal known as “the Harvard of Canada.” Among nearly 40,000 students, a high proportion are from abroad.
Adding to the absurdity of a Canadian university bowing down to an American president, the decision may have been based in part on a clerical error.
The TPU staffer explained.
“The doctors said the reason for this was specifically the fact that the form the U.S. released had provisions for targeting Canadian doctors and taking down their information.”
The document in question was a snitch form issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to report health professionals administering gender-affirming care to minors in the U.S.
The drop-down menu, like many forms online, included the word “province” along with “state.”
Panicked administrators at McGill apparently thought that word put a target on Canadian medical professionals’ backs. HHS had even removed it by the time McGill denied the HRT to their American students.
McGill would neither confirm nor deny the existence of a policy barring Americans from gender-affirming care for fear of retaliation by Trump.
“Access to gender-affirming care is available to McGill students, including international students,” the university said in a statement.
“The medical aspects of this care are provided by licensed physicians. These decisions are not made by the university,” the school added, in a probably doomed effort to evade accountability from Canadians incensed at McGill’s failure to defend their independence.
“I think it’s definitely important for them to acknowledge what’s been going on because the way they’re currently treating this, it’s kind of covert,” Gimbert said.
“We know this is something that they’re aware of. It’s just not something that they’re publicly talking about.”
Added the American TPU staffer: “I mean, we don’t say that 18-year-old Americans can’t buy alcohol here because the drinking age in the U.S. is 21.”
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