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When Zane Bernhard, then six years old, arrived for an appointment with a psychologist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, his parents had no idea that the clinic was ground zero in a global debate over children who don’t conform to traditional gender roles.

All they knew was that Zane refused to put on his snow pants, and his school wouldn’t let him outside in the winter unless he did. His parents didn’t have a problem with the fact that he played with Barbies and dressed up as Disney princesses. But they felt that Dr. Ken Zucker, the pioneering Canadian psychologist they were seeing that day, did. The real problem, Dr. Zucker told Zane’s parents, was Zane’s gender presentation. They remember being instructed to confiscate Zane’s dolls and discourage any feminine behaviour — or Zane could grow up to identify as a woman.

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“We were pretty horrified by the whole experience because there was really no support for who Zane was,” his mom says.