In this two-part conversation, former Assistant Deputy Minister Barb Simmons reflects on her remarkable 30+ year journey through the Ontario Public Service. From her early internships just out of university to leading complex, multi-ministry policy initiatives, Barb traces how she built a career defined by curiosity, integrity, and a drive to expand opportunity. She discusses championing women’s economic empowerment, improving responses to gender-based violence, and supporting Indigenous women’s leadership, while navigating the ethical challenges and political shifts that shape public service work. Barb also opens up about burnout and recovery, parenting through family transitions, rediscovering creativity, and her passion for mentoring the next generation. This episode offers an intimate, inspiring look at a public servant committed to leaving lasting change.
In Part One of our conversation with former Assistant Deputy Minister Barb Simmons, we explore her decades of leadership within Ontario’s public service and her commitment to advancing women’s social and economic opportunity. Reflecting on her years as ADM of Ontario’s Office of Women’s Social and Economic Opportunity, Barb recollects her meaningful work championing inter-ministerial collaborations, improving access for women entrepreneurs, and strengthening responses to gender-based violence across the province. After retiring from a demanding career, she shares how travel, rest, creative writing, and playful diorama-making helped her rediscover herself beyond work. Grateful for her happy home, Barb also opens up about her family’s experiences with transition, emphasizing inclusion, resilience, and the importance of supportive communities.
Disclaimer:
Any statistics, facts or data references mentioned in this episode have not been independently verified and may not reflect the most accurate, complete, or current data. Please consult reliable sources for up-to-date and authoritative information.
00:00:01 Katie Jensen: Applaud is proud to showcase the dedication of those who make decisions for the greater good and strive to leave the world a better place for all Canadians. All personal views expressed by guests and our hosts are their own opinion. Will continue to recognize those in public service. Offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives and operate in good faith to build trust with applaud members and all public citizens.
00:00:31 Barb Simmons: When I got the most senior job I had had in government, I really felt like this is my last job. Right from the get go, I was like, “What's the legacy? How do I hand off to my successors? How do I train up and send off to fabulous careers as many incredibly bright, empowered young women as I possibly can?”
00:00:53 Katie Jensen: I am Katie Jensen, and this is the Path of Public Service from Applaud, celebrating people who have spent their lives working in Ontario's public sector. Today we're talking with Barb Simmons.
00:01:05 Barb Simmons: I'm Barb Simmons, Assistant Deputy Minister, Office of Women's Social and Economic Opportunity. So I had two different jobs. I was the policy director for about a year and a half there, and then I acted as assistant deputy minister for three years, which tells you nothing about what the job is.
So. The actual job was to support the minister and to administer $60[million] to $80 million worth of programs, and mostly during my time, we worked very closely with other ministries to effectively target and adjust their programming and come up with policy or joint initiatives we could do, with the overarching goal of making Ontario a safe place for women to thrive and grow.
00:01:52 Katie Jensen: As you can imagine, that's a big mandate, and it required shooting out collaborative tendrils across many ministries. Barb describes it as a
00:02:00 Barb Simmons: big spider web of inter-ministerial cross-government relationships.
We did a lot of work with the Ministry of Education on gender-based violence education for men and boys.
The thing that always resonated with me and my team as we were working on it, every single person in the room knows someone intimately, has a close friend or a relative, who has experienced sexual assault or at least sexual harassment. Everyone in that room had instances of microaggression and micro-assaults at minimum, where you're talked over or you're dismissed, or you're treated as less than, or the woman who's chairing the meeting walks into the room and the man asks her to get coffee because she must be the admin assistant. So the spectrum of gender-based violence is kind of huge.
00:02:49 Katie Jensen: Naturally stepping back from a role like this would be challenging for anyone. How do you turn off your brain when it's been trying to solve some of society's biggest problems for 30 years?
00:03:00 Barb Simmons: When I retired, I took six months and I did almost nothing, and that is not unusual, right? My son who does counseling and tutoring and peer mentoring through U of T and is becoming a teacher, I'm incredibly proud of him, can you tell, tells me that for as long as you've been burnt out, you need that amount of time to recover.
00:03:20 Katie Jensen: So she did perhaps the most cinematic thing possible, a trip to Europe.
00:03:45 Barb Simmons: I took 10 weeks and I did a solo trip to Paris and Italy and Switzerland, and it was such a good reset break. I'm on my own, I'm figuring stuff out. I am going to do art, whatever art I want. And November in Paris is kind of cold and rainy, so I didn't mind spending half days in my tiny, tiny, flat, you know, doing that work.
And then I came home. With a kind of a, right, so I am an independent person. I am not defined by my work or my family, though I love them dearly, right? I can make choices and tackle things and do new things that are hard. I started to write a fiction novel. My other completely wacky thing that I do, I have a window well in my basement.
And it's got a heavy duty plastic dome over it so that the raccoons don't have babies in it, which is a thing. And it has sliding windows on the interior of the basement stairwell. So I make dioramas. My family is all nerds. So like the first one I did with Star Wars.
00:05:03 Katie Jensen: More on those in a hot minute. First, how did she know it was time to take a step back and make room for miniatures and manuscripts?
00:05:12 Barb Simmons: When I sort of came into the job, we were about halfway through a program review of all of our programming and how effective it was, and we made some adjustments and tweaked stuff sort of in two dimensions.
So one was the target audiences. Women experiencing the most significant barriers to success. So in small business world, for example, we actually had a politically-led table under the previous minister, Jill Dunlop, where we did a lot of consultation with successful women entrepreneurs. And we came up with the identification of a number of areas where women were experiencing barriers.
So one of the well-known ones was many, many women experienced difficulty in tapping finance to start up a business. When they did get money, it came with strings and handcuffs attached. So it was often less than comparable male entrepreneurs would've given it often was below the thresholds that even a bank's own lending policy would have directed.
So there was a perception in the financing circles that women were, by definition, like automatically higher risk for starting a new business. Now when we looked at the stats and the federal government had collected some really, really excellent stats on this, when we looked at the stats, women were actually more likely to succeed in starting up a small business by a significant margin.
So that was fascinating. And so we began to work with the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade to do a specifically targeted call for proposals out to women entrepreneurs and profiled it and designed it such that small business startups would have a significant chance of getting that money. The thing with government programming is always that there's never enough money to go around.
So, you know, we would put a call for proposals out, hoping to fund 15 projects, and of course, you know, 150 worth of outstanding projects would show up, and then we would have to make some really, really difficult decisions with the funding criteria. But that was sort of one example in particular on the entrepreneurship side.
On sort of the other part of our mandate, the social opportunity part of our mandate. We found a lot of that centered around lack of access to things like childcare or education or returning to work education. And so in the same way we worked with our colleagues at labor training and skills development to figure out how to target.
Their existing programming, like Second Career, which supports you to go back to school for an in-demand job if you've been laid off, we worked with them to target those programs more towards occupations in which women [00:08:00] were successful, that were in demand occupations for the economy, and then we marketed.
All of those initiatives out through our existing network of service providers that we directly funded. So it was like a big spider web of kind of inter-ministerial cross-government relationships. That worked really well. When we did our own program reviews, we were hitting all of our goals and targets and exceeding many of them as well, so that was kind of cool.
00:08:24 Katie Jensen: Definitely. Can you tell me about gender-based violence initiatives that you participated in? And maybe give people a primer to where the province is at with ending gender-based violence?
00:08:38 Barb Simmons: You know, the federal government declared it to be in an epidemic in Canada. Several other provinces signed onto that, that, and unlike a lot of our programming initiatives, no economic or sociodemographic group is spared.
From gender-based violence, it is under reported ridiculously anywhere from one in 10, one in 15. Actual incidents of gender-based violence are reported to the police. It's estimated one in three women will experience sexual harassment that some point in their lifetime. One in six women will experience sexual assault.
The thing that always resonated with me and my team as we were working on it - Every single person in the room knows someone intimately has a close friend or a relative who has experienced sexual assault or at least sexual harassment. Everyone in that room had instances of microaggression and micro assaults at minimum, where you're talked over or you're dismissed, or you're treated as less than, or the woman who's chairing the meeting walks into the room and the man asks her to get coffee because she must be the admin assistant. So the spectrum of gender-based violence is kind of huge. We did a lot of work with the Ministry of Education on gender-based violence education for men and boys, which is important 'cause the attitudes start really early in school and you pick up what society is putting down really quickly in school. We also funded specific initiatives, again for victims of violence to get out, to get safe, to get free. We partnered with the Violence Against Women programming that the Ministry of Children and Community Services provided and funded, and we worked with them to bridge people into supports and services for employment, for regaining independence, for therapy, quite frankly, etcetera.
So a lot of what we tried to do was lever existing programming, kind of bridge them through our initiatives into recovery programming. But we also had this huge role at the federal provincial territorial table with the federal government to guide where Canada's national strategy to end gender-based violence went.
Ontario is a big partner at that table with an emphasis on supports for Indigenous women and girls. That is a huge scourge, and again, under-reported, under-acknowledged, underserved right across the country. We pushed for recovery type programming as well, and we pushed for leveraging and targeting better the existing intervention programs and health and therapy interventions that are funded primarily through healthcare systems and services across the country. So in all the federal, provincial, world, it's always this frustrating mix of like, what's what, right? Like, so where does the responsibility lie? Who's actually got the money? Where does the federal government intervene? Where does the federal government say to the province, I need to sign a deal with you so we can partner.
And gender-based violence fell into the bucket of, “where do we sign a deal so we can partner.”
00:11:53 Katie Jensen: I think it's interesting to talk about where responsibility lies, because often responsibility may lie with a party who's not able to provide. Yeah. Compensation or care for the actions they've incurred on a population.
00:12:08 Barb Simmons: Right, exactly. Exactly right.
00:12:10 Katie Jensen: I'm curious about how the work that the Office of Women's Social and Economic Opportunity engaged with non-binary and trans women,
00:12:19 Barb Simmons: So we called it gender-based violence, which was intended to be the more universal terminology, right. It used to be the universal term was violence against women.
Right. Stats, I think right now are 95% of victims of assault are women or identify as women, but 90% of assailants are men or identify as men. So it's always still a double-edged sword because you do wanna be really clear that 2S folks, LGBTQ folks, right, particularly trans folks, are very disproportionately victims of assault.
So trying to make sure that all of the programs were universally welcoming. Was often a challenge and we would run up against cultural barriers where programs and initiatives were sponsored by particular community groups who were not comfortable with trans or non-binary initiatives as a focus area for their work.
So our programming stipulated that you've got to be welcoming to people of all genders and all presentations. Like we had to use sort of watered down language. But in the real world we know that, unless you stand up there and you have an executive director who says, “I'm trans and I'm proud,” you are unlikely to get trans youth, for example, the most marginalized, the most likely to be unhoused, the most likely to be victims of violence, to be turfed out of their homes, all the rest of it.
You are unlikely to get those kids coming to your programs. Right?
00:13:49 Katie Jensen: I mean, I think it's really important to acknowledge even amongst ourselves that an opportunity for one group doesn't take away. Opportunities for other groups. I think that's a universal truth.
00:14:02 Barb Simmons: Yeah.
00:14:02 Katie Jensen: Where it's like, just because this one group needs particular help doesn't mean that we care any less or that the troubles are any less for another group.
00:14:11 Barb Simmons: Yep. That's exactly it.
00:14:13 Katie Jensen: So how did you know it was time to retire? Was it just that you had hit like a certain year working in OPS?
00:14:20 Barb Simmons: I had been, I joined the OPS, actually, I had a summer job for my last two years of university with the OPS, and then when I graduated, they offered me a contract, and then I continued on for 33 years.
When I got this ADM job, the most senior job I had had in government, I really felt like this is my last job. So right from the get go, I was like, “What can I accomplish? What's the legacy? How do I hand off to my successors? How do I train up and send off to fabulous careers as policy professionals, as many incredibly bright, empowered young women, OPSers as I possibly can?
Who do I mentor? How do I change the culture of the OPS? How do I use my influence at those senior tables with deputies to make the place better?” But, pumping a lot of energy into that for three years was only possible. 'cause I knew at the end of it I was gonna retire and I began to look forward to retirement.
Not just because, you know, “Oh holy cow, I don't have to go to work every day.” But because I was looking forward to being able to be like louder and more effective than I was as a senior civil servant in terms of lobbying for the things that are important to me. When I retired, I took six months and I did almost nothing, and that is not unusual, right?
My son who does counseling and tutoring and peer mentoring through U of T and is becoming a teacher, I'm incredibly proud of him, can you tell, tells me that for as long as you've been burnt out, you need that amount of time to recover. Right. And I would say I was burned out for the last six years of my time in the OPS.
Like I'm doing the biggest, toughest job of my career as ADM of Women's and I'm completely burnt out.
00:16:04 Katie Jensen: So, we'll, I'll talk to you in four years.
00:16:07 Barb Simmons: Yeah. And we'll see. So I took the first six months after I stopped work to rest, took the summer off, looked at my backyard, said maybe I'll grow tomatoes. I didn't grow tomatoes.
Gonna go for a walk every day. Mm. A couple times a week maybe. You know, like whatever. I took 10 weeks and I did a solo trip to Paris and Italy and Switzerland.
00:16:29 Katie Jensen: My goodness.
00:16:30 Barb Simmons: Which was awesome. It was about art. Like I went to, I kid you not 34 of the 42 museums that exist in Paris. We went to Florence, Bergamo, Milan, Baron, Zurich, Amsterdam, and then back to Paris for a final two weeks. It was like trip of a lifetime.
00:16:50 Barb Simmons: And it was such a good reset break between work. Home recovering from work, you know, learning how to retire and then getting to, I'm on my own, I'm figuring stuff out. I am going to do art, whatever art I want.
And November in Paris is kind of cold and rainy, so I didn't mind spending half days in my tiny, tiny, flat, you know, doing that work. And then I came home with a kind of a, right. So I am an independent person. I am not defined by my work. Or my family, though I love them dearly, right? I can make choices and tackle things and do new things that are hard.
I started to write a fiction novel. My undergraduate degree in York was a bachelor in fine Art Studies, and I minored in creative writing, but I had not intentionally written fiction literally since then. I don't even know how many years ago, 35, 40 years ago. Long time ago. Right. But I loved it, so I was just writing for enjoyment, you know?
And like most people who are trying to write, you know, I wrote scenes with my fictional characters and stuff, and then I started threading them together and then I realized that it's like very hard to write a novel. So I wrote some short stories. And then I would go back to the novel and kind of, you know, fix stuff and reached out on Substack and places and found other kind of writer communities and, and got some contacts and connections.
But the writing thing was a whole new thing.
00:18:26 Katie Jensen: Did you find, with your creative writing that getting into the habit of doing it, did you come up against any frustration that it wasn't coming as easily to you because you hadn't done it, the practice of it for like 35 years.
00:18:42 Barb Simmons: Yeah, and what was interesting was my writing had become policy writing.
So I used to joke that minoring in creative writing was excellent for the OPS because briefing notes should tell a story, right? Sometimes it's fiction, but sometimes it's not.
00:19:01 Katie Jensen: It's like an ideal world.
00:19:03 Barb Simmons: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you know, as a sort of junior policy analyst/economist, which was like in the early years of my OPS career, you know, I was writing briefing notes that summed up cabinet submissions, or I was writing analysis notes that were basically saying pros and cons and options. Like there was very structured stuff. And so I found when I tried to do creative writing, I would default to that very structured stuff. And then it was very bloodless writing like it was, he woke up, he did these things, he thought about these things.
She woke up, she thought about these things. They met. Four lines of dialogue. Like it was not good, right? But what the experience of doing that writing alone in my room in Paris had taught me was that even if it's lousy, just keep going. So just write and keep going. So you might write 15,000 words that are lousy, and then you come back to it in two days and you go, “Oh, there's like 200 words of this that's really good.” Right? Or, “I wrote the 15,000 words, and the structure is right. The plot is right. This is good, but. I have to completely rewrite the description, but I've got the plot now.” That part I found I was very good at because of course, for 30 years I have been editing other people's work. And I had been looking at the briefing note or the letter, the whatever, presentation decks, which are persuasive writing, and I had been saying, “oh, the plot doesn't hit,” you know, “your three pieces of evidence are not compelling.”
You know, “your options are not actually pointed to by this setup,” like it's actual editorial work, so I think that was sort of helpful to me. I am, in fact bringing skills and practice to the table. My creative juices are rusty, my ability to write a metaphor or hyperbole. I started writing straight up descriptions.
Like I'd go for a walk through the park near my house and I'd come home and I'd just write descriptions and I'd mutter to myself or put it on a post-it, “What did you see? What did you hear? What did you feel? What did you smell? What did you think?” And then as I wrote through the description, I'd keep looking at those things because all I was doing was describing what I saw.
So what's the other thing? The kids playing in the playground. You know, what do I smell right? I smell the grass underfoot, right? That actually really helped me get going again and. I realized other people are like, oh, you should start a Substack page. You know, you should post essays, you could do this. And I'm like, there are a million people out there doing that stuff.
I actually just wanna tell stories. Right. So that's sort of the focus of the creative side. It's fun.
00:21:51 Katie Jensen: And I think there's no reason that there has to be a pipeline to profit or a pipeline to exposure for every creative endeavor you have.
00:22:00 Barb Simmons: That's right. My other completely wacky thing that I do, I have a window well in my basement and it's got a heavy duty plastic dome over it so that the raccoons don't have babies in it, which is a thing, and it has sliding windows on the interior of the basement stairwell, and it's about 18 inches deep. So I make dioramas.
00:22:22 Katie Jensen: Oh my God.
00:22:24 Barb Simmons: In my window well.
00:22:26 Katie Jensen: I love that.
00:22:27 Barb Simmons: I've done three.
00:22:28 Katie Jensen: Do you 3D print stuff. Do you source tiny stuff online? What are the dioramas made of?
00:22:34 Barb Simmons: All of the above. So like the first one I did. It was a really simple one because it was Star Wars. My family is all nerds, right? So we're Star Wars driven.
We love Lord of the Rings. You know, there's nothing like a good training montage and we have taglines and family memes that are sort of derived from all of our stuff. Our nerdoms and my 22 and 26-year-old kids get into stuff and bring it back to me and my wife, and it's like totally awesome. So I did a Star Wars setup.
I painted a backdrop and I made miniature set dressing stuff, like piles of junk and abandoned equipment and like tattered banners and stuff. And we made a standoff at the Mos Eisley spaceport, 'cause we happened to have a Lego Millennium Falcon. And then we started to play with it. All of us started to play with it.
So we added new characters and new miniatures that weren't in the original. We turned it into a Christmas scene at one point. We dusted snow on it and put like pop-up. Little Christmas trees in the background, just for fun. Then I did a spring one, so it had big, tall flowers and twinkle lights around the top tropical sort of painted backdrop and little miniature houses that my son built.
And then we put wild animals coming into. The space because there were no people. So we set dirt curated with little wild animals and stuff sort of showing up like mushrooms and everything. There's a little wild boar over here, you know, there's a little like fox silhouette. So that one is up and right now I'm working on one which is gonna use red rose tea, porcelain figurines.
00:24:13 Katie Jensen: The brown ones.
00:24:14 Barb Simmons: Exactly. So I've got that. My grandmother's teacups, tarot cards, and those are gonna be the elements of the next one. We're like working on 'em.
00:24:23 Katie Jensen: I love that. That's so fun.
00:24:25 Barb Simmons: It's totally fun. And then we light it up and we put music on it and like you walk down the stairs and like look at it every time we go by, it's very fun.
00:24:33 Katie Jensen: I think there's nothing wrong with playing with toys as an adult.
00:24:38 Barb Simmons: Yeah. My therapist said this brilliant thing to me 'cause I was talking about this and they said, “Play is really important. Play is part of healing.” And I'm like, "Okay, yeah, I accept that.” And they said, “Mammals play when they feel safe.”
So we bring play into our lives. When we're feeling safe with who we are, what our relationships are, where the trauma healing is at, what we're able to bring to the table. You've done the healing work, you play now, you get to feel safe. Right. It's really cool.
00:25:08 Katie Jensen: Your family sounds so wholesome.
00:25:10 Barb Simmons: I love my family.
I think we're such a great little unit. We're pretty self-contained and I think, you know, there's always a long backstory in my wife's family, when she transitioned, like 20 years ago. And 20 years ago, transitioning was not, people didn't know what it was.
Like trans rights was not as front and center and understood as I think it is, certainly largely in the lefty liberal world these days. Right. When she began her transition, there was no coverage for stuff. We were in a very privileged economic place so we could pay for stuff and we were just in at the ground floor of places like the Sherbourne Health Center, and that was really cool.
So my kids grew up with two parents, one of whom was a biological father, which confused the hell out of all of their teachers. Like we had to write little notes to school, you know, “They're gonna talk about their father, and they're gonna talk about their Ama, and they’re the same person.” And then my son transitioned about seven years ago, and it was a completely different thing.
Completely different thing. Like the school, he was in middle school, the school could not have been more supportive and wonderful. They made dumb mistakes because they didn't know how to do it properly, but they were like fabulous. All of my son's friends were right there and incredibly supportive and wonderful.
There are some interesting privileges that accrue to being a trans man as opposed to a trans woman.
00:26:34 Barb Simmons: But our family like talks about that stuff all the time, right? And access to services for him. Smooth sailing. Stuff was covered for him. Smooth sailing, transitioning as a youth, really different from a later in life adult transition. The coolest thing is that the destination is not so defined. Like 20 years ago, if you transitioned later in life, the goal was to go from one end of the binary to the other. Go stealth, leave your family and start a new life. That was literally what every trans person we met told us.
There's this whole spectrum. Even [Alfred] Kinsey knew there was a spectrum, anyway, gender and orientation and sexual identity.
And my kid just grew up knowing that. So when he came out as trans, it was stressful for him, but he had no real doubt that we would support him, and he didn't feel that he needed to go from one end of the spectrum to the other. And he's taken steps when he wants to take steps, and he's done stuff when he wants to do stuff and like the wholesomeness of being able to say, “I'm somewhere on the spectrum, or I'm just gonna be non-binary for now. Or I'm actually gonna go back a step and do this part because I am attracted to something about this point in the journey. Maybe I'll stay here for a while.” So healthy again, it makes me so happy.
And then my older daughter is bi, but she's the one who is. Really into tattoos and piercings. So she was kind of punk goth in high school. She has beautiful tattoos, can't even tell you. The most beautiful art representative of all her loves, all of her passions. She's an artist. She graduated from Ontario College of Art and Design.
She does fiber and textile art, in our attic. Fortunately we have an attic space we can just give her to do that stuff.
00:28:26 Katie Jensen: Wow.
00:28:26 Barb Simmons: You know, makes her way and keeps body and soul together. Mostly working terrible retail jobs, which, you know, fuels her drive to like do art. So I feel like the four of us have managed to transition to four adults in the house together in a way that kind of astonishes me 'cause it seems to be rare, and we're fortunate. We're lucky that we have all this privilege. We have space. We've got socioeconomic stuff, we've got education. We had RRSPs for the kids. They could go to university. They graduated debt free. So we all. Pay that back in our various ways in the communities to which we belong and care most about.
It's important, right? You have to be a giver and a doer and a maker for balance, right?
00:29:12 Katie Jensen: Yeah. I love that. Did you get flack from people when you were like, “Why would I divorce my wife? They're the same person.”
00:29:20 Barb Simmons: Oh yeah. Like they could not understand it. So they would stare at me and be, so, are you like a lesbian now? And I'm like, well, I'm queer. I'm gonna say queer. You know? 'Cause I could be bisexual and I could be queer. And also it might change. And nobody was satisfied with the lack of definite answers, which was key.
The most stressful part was when Alison and I talked and she decided to transition and her therapist was supporting a transition and she got on the waitlist and then she had three months of being on the waitlist and having 38 years’ worth of like pent-up transition momentum sitting there on the wait list for three months.
That was the worst mental health crisis of the whole thing. Because it's right there. Right? It's right there. The thing that you need and want and understand that you need and want and you can't get there yet.
00:30:16 Katie Jensen: Did you meet at York?
00:30:17 Barb Simmons: No. We met because she was my little brother's best friend in high school.
00:30:22 Katie Jensen: Are you kidding me?
00:30:23 Barb Simmons: No, I'm not.
00:30:24 Katie Jensen: Oh my God. And we, this is such, this is such like a, like a young adult novel, isn't it? Oh my God.
00:30:31 Barb Simmons: And I was the, we’ll say cute. I was the cute, like two years older sister all through high school.
00:30:37 Katie Jensen: When did you tell your brother?
00:30:40 Barb Simmons: Well, that was very funny because she talked to my brother before she approached me, 'cause a friendship was really important.
00:30:48 Katie Jensen: Of course.
00:30:50 Barb Simmons: Yeah. And at our wedding, my brother's speech said, “Well, my best friend is marrying my sister, and I'm actually really happy about it,” which was also sweet.
00:30:59 Katie Jensen: Because some brothers might be like, "No way you're gonna ruin things.”
00:31:03 Barb Simmons: “This is just strange.” No, no. But my brother and I were close.
We lived with my mom after my mom and dad broke up their 23-year marriage. So the two of us were living with my mom and sort of supporting her through that fairly rough patch, and so he and I were kind of. United in that we were sort of the adults in the house for a while there together, so we've always been pretty straight with each other.
00:31:25 Katie Jensen: That's a crazy story.
00:31:28 Barb Simmons: Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's pretty funny. And then we got together and we got married and had two kids, and then she came out to me and then we did some work, and then she came out to the rest of the world.
00:31:41 Katie Jensen: How young were the kids when she came out? Like under five kind of thing?
00:31:44 Barb Simmons: Yeah, so I'm trying to remember.
They are three and a half years apart. So, our younger child was about, I wanna say about 12 months at that point. My older child was four and a half. Yeah.
00:32:00 Katie Jensen: So did Alison ever tell you why then was the time, like was it something that was about having another young baby? Was it just like she felt comfortable?
00:32:14 Barb Simmons: Yeah, there were, there were a number of things. She was doing heavy duty therapy. And she had had some bad, like she went to CAMH at one point and was told that transitioning was impossible for her. Long story. Look up the CAMH trans youth clinic scandal and it's pretty frickin' awful. But that was a common practice.
There was a kind of a gatekeeping thing that said [to] socially transition for a year. You know, [to] live as a man/woman for a year and then come back. It was like you had to prove you were serious, which is horrible. Just horrible. And so they treated you really, roughly when you showed up as part of that It was, it was complete garbage.
It should never have happened, but for a long time, CAMH was the only route to get OHIP to cover your transition.
00:33:03 Katie Jensen: Would they diagnose as, uh, medical dysphoria kind of thing?
00:33:06 Barb Simmons: Yeah, they would do the, you are medically dysphoric, you have gender dysphoria, and then they would support some interventions.
Although at the time no surgical interventions, just hormone therapy, which is why when the Sherbourne Health Clinic came along. Trans people everywhere basically wept with relief, right, because you didn't have to deal with KH anymore.
00:33:27 Katie Jensen: Yeah. And also, you know, that's conflating dysphoria as a mental health condition.
00:33:32 Barb Simmons: Yes, exactly. Just even saying dysphoria is sort of, is like, yeah, no, it's not dysphoric. Right?
00:33:39 Katie Jensen: It's not, no.
00:33:39 Barb Simmons: It's not, right, it's literally like my kids got really good at explaining it when they were really little, so I still remember writing the letter to the school when my kids started, probably grade two, I think my older child started grade two, when Alison was really transitioned, was beginning to live socially as who she was.
We were out to the whole family, the extended family and the community of friends. And we'd lost some friends alone, whatever, but we were sort of in the, now it's about living, moving forward and continuing. Right? And we had to explain it to the school. I am not even sure why we felt so compelled. I think we had some questions because we had two parents on the form and they were both down as like biological parents.
Like there was a lot of, you know, “And last year, wait a minute, the names are the same. Wait a minute.” Like the school, I think was just asking if we had screwed up the paperwork somehow. We were like, “No, here's what happened.” And so my daughter Annie explained it to her teacher, as you know, "My ama was born in the wrong body, and when your spirit is in the wrong body, it makes you very, very sad. And she didn't wanna be sad anymore, and we didn't want her to be sad anymore, and so she decided to get her body to match her spirit. So that's what she's doing.”
00:35:01 Katie Jensen: And it also primes the teachers to be more open to kids who are two-spirited, kids who are trans.
00:35:08 Barb Simmons: The little guy who just wants to wear a dress at school and who knows? It doesn't have to mean anything. But also you shouldn't tell 'em not to. Right. Deep breath, everybody.
00:35:19 Katie Jensen: That was Part One of my conversation with Barb Simmons. In Part Two, we'll talk about adventures in early computing at the OPS.
00:35:28 Barb Simmons: I was the computer support person for my office for a brief amount of time with a little reel to reel tape that I stuck in the machine and like backed up everything for the day 'cause we had this little sneaker net of like eight computers.
00:35:42 Katie Jensen: Working during times of crisis.
00:35:44 Barb Simmons: There were moments when big ethical issues, in my work, were just staring me in the face.
00:35:51 Katie Jensen: And why career mobility within the public sector is unparalleled.
00:35:55 Barb Simmons: The OPS is fantastic for that. Like no other workplace anywhere.You can do so many different things.
00:36:05 Katie Jensen: Thanks for listening. Applaud is proud to showcase the dedication of those who make decisions for the greater good and strive to leave the world a better place for all Canadians. All personal views expressed by guests and our host are their own.
Applaud will continue to recognize those in public service, offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives, and operate in good faith to build trust with Applaud members and all public citizens. You can share feedback on this episode by visiting applaudpublicservice.ca