Equality Matters newsletter: July 2024

With summer in full swing, we know you’re busy soaking up the sun and celebrating Pride Season! This special time of year provides an opportunity to deepen our understanding and celebrate the diverse contributions of the 2SLGBTQI+ communities. Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) wishes you a joyful and safe 2024 Pride Season.

In this issue of Equality Matters, we spotlight the security funding for this year’s Pride festivals. Additionally, we feature the Federal Pathway Annual Progress Report, a story on the TransCare+ team’s efforts to enhance healthcare for all, and a video on how Gender-Based Analysis Plus (GBA Plus) contributes to concussion prevention and treatment.

White background banner with a maple leaf that has rainbow colours of the Progress Pride flag, which are black, brown, light blue, light pink, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.

WAGE funding for security during Pride Season

Every Canadian deserves to feel safe. Unfortunately, across the country, there is a rise in hate towards 2SLGBTQI+ communities. That is why the Government of Canada has committed $1.5 million for this year’s Pride festivals to help offset rising security and insurance costs for events across the country.

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Tracking progress

The third Federal Pathway Annual Progress Report was recently released. It details the Government of Canada’s progress in fulfilling its commitments to the Federal Pathway to Address Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People, ensuring accountability and transparency in these critical efforts.

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Towards better care for all with TransCare+

2SLGBTQI+ communities often encounter significant barriers in accessing healthcare knowledge, support, and care in general. To address these challenges and foster a more inclusive future, the team at TransCare+ created an extensive information hub covering topics such as gender-affirming care, reproductive rights, and more.

Find out how in just a few years, TransCare+ has delivered 121 workshops, established 13 community partnerships, and published over 2,000 resources, making a substantial impact on these communities.  

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GBA Plus in action: Concussion prevention and treatment

Watch this video on how GBA Plus enhances the development of targeted health policies for preventing and treating concussions.

While anyone can suffer from a concussion, GBA Plus helps identify key factors – such as sex, gender, and age – that influence how individuals experience and recover from concussions.

GBA Plus in action: concussion prevention and treatment

Transcript of the video

Did you know that sex and gender influence our health? Yet they are often overlooked when it comes to health research, practice and policy development.

Gender-based Analysis Plus is an analytical process that assesses how diverse groups of women, men and gender-diverse people might experience government initiatives differently. It’s an intersectional gender lens that takes into account sex and gender as well as other identity factors such as ethnicity, religion, age or disability.

Concussions are a kind of traumatic brain injury. They do not discriminate, affecting people of all ages and backgrounds. But there are a number of identity factors that influence how people experience concussions. Let’s take a look at how we can apply GBA+ to improve their prevention and treatment.

Consider sex. Sex refers to our physical and physiological features. After a concussion, females have been found to experience more symptoms, poorer reaction time, and greater cognitive decline than males. Yet very little is known about how brain injury affects the female body specifically, since medical studies historically have used male animals or have not given explicit consideration to sex differences. GBA+ ensures that medical studies increasingly include male and female subjects.

Consider gender. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, expressions and identities of individuals. There is a strong gender dimension to lifestyle choices and high risk behaviours that traditionally make men more likely than women to sustain injury, including concussions. At the same time, it is a conservative estimate that more than one third of all women going into transition houses and shelters have had a traumatic brain injury. GBA+ ensures that the impact of gender on incidence and recovery are considered.

Consider how sex and age intersect, creating additional challenges. The highest incidence of concussion is found among children and adolescents. Young children of both sexes have similar concussion rates and symptoms. However, with the onset of puberty, females increasingly experience more concussions, different and more severe symptoms, and are often slower to recover from the injury. The symptoms of both sexes begin to converge again after females go through menopause.

Applying GBA+ to research will help us better understand the relationship between sex, gender and other identity factors, allowing us to develop more targeted health policy and training. For example, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research asks researchers who apply for funding to indicate if and how sex and gender are integrated into their research design. This ensures that sex and gender are taken into account in research that aims to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment for populations most at risk of concussions, including diverse groups of children, youth, women, and seniors.

What we are learning about the role of sex, gender and age in the prevention and management of concussions could be applied to awareness and prevention of a broad range of issues, such as illness, gender-based violence, safety, or sports injuries. Use GBA+ to examine the intersecting identity factors of diverse groups of people so that your initiatives are effective and inclusive.

Visit Status of Women Canada and check out our Demystifying GBA+ job aid on GCpedia. Information is available upon request for those outside the Government of Canada.

Did you know

The Intersex-Inclusive Pride flag is now the official Pride flag of the federal public service. It’s an inclusive symbol of 2SLGBTQI+ communities globally and was raised on Parliament Hill on June 3rd, launching the 2024 Pride Season.

You can review the new official Pride flag protocol and learn about general flag etiquette.

 

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