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On that particular day, the friend texted her and told Panas if she didn’t hear from her by 8:30 p.m., to assume she needed help.

When Panas did not hear from her, she called multiple times and sent a flurry of text messages, but had heard nothing by 9:15 p.m.

Five minutes later, she decided to call police. Police eventually sent a car and determined Panas’s friend was not in danger.

Panas says during the first call, the 911 dispatcher called her “sir,” despite being corrected.

Panas made a second, more troubling call to police around 9:40 p.m. She identified her friend as a trans woman because she felt it would make police better understand her concerns.

Panas said she was “horrified” when the civilian emergency communications officer responded, she claims, by saying, “Well they shouldn’t be in that profession now, should they?”

“They’re meeting with a client for something, maybe they shouldn’t be meeting with these people, is what I’m saying,” the police official said in a recording of the call reviewed by Postmedia. The dispatcher later suggested, “She met somebody online, as an escort or something.”

Panas’s friend is not a sex worker.

“I never said the word escort, I never said the word profession,” Panas replied to the employee. “You made an assumption. Once I said she’s a trans woman, you made an assumption that she’s a prostitute with a client, and that’s so wrong, because you completely dismissed my concerns.”

During the remainder of the nine-minute call, Panas says the dispatcher called her “sir” and “buddy,” even after being corrected. She has never learned the identity of the dispatcher, who only gave his ID number for the purposes of a complaint to EPS.