A Canadian man held in jail without bail for challenging his government’s position on transgender treatments for children is a “prisoner of conscience,” according to his attorney.
“What he’s doing is classic civil disobedience,” Carey Linde told the Washington Examiner. “He says he had to do what he did. He says that he’s kind of lost his child, so it’s too late for him, but he wants parents of young girls to be aware of how easy it is for the state to take control.”
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Per Canadian law, the identities of both the father and his son, now age 17, remain sealed. The circumstances of the case, however, have played out for over a year and a half in public, with wide-ranging implications for parental rights.
The issue started in 2019, when the parents of the unidentified teenager, who was born a biological girl, noticed a name change in the school yearbook. Linde says the parents were aware of the child’s experiments with his personal style, happily buying various clothes and letting him cut his hair short.
At his school in Vancouver, however, the child sat through what some consider radical courses on gender identity and sexuality. At one point, the child met with school counselors who facilitated a meeting with a pediatrician who specializes in gender reassignment treatments and recommended shots of testosterone.
“What my client is fighting for is when a child presents to a school teacher or counselor as dysphoric, for whatever reason, and if there’s a gender thing, what happens is these children, primarily girls, can be counseled, and they can do all this without telling the parents, which is the problem,” Linde said. “So in this particular case, when this child came home with their grade seven yearbook, there was a male name. That freaked out the parents.”
The parents realized authorities were guiding their child through potentially life-changing procedures without their consent, something the state argues is well within its power.
Under British Columbia law, physicians are allowed to perform medical procedures or prescribe drugs without parental knowledge should the child have a “mature understanding” of the situation. Linde and conservative activists say the Infants Act was initially passed to allow doctors to prescribe birth control to girls and that legislators in the 1990s had no expectation its provisions would be used for gender reassignment therapies.
The unnamed child’s father sued and challenged the government’s interpretation of the law. In his opinion, the judge ruled in favor of the child and the state and said if the father referred to his daughter’s birth pronouns on his birth certificate, it would constitute “family violence,” a charge more commonly used in cases of domestic violence.
“[The father’s] refusal to respect [the boy’s] decisions regarding his gender identity is troublesome,” Chief Justice Robert Bauman and Justice Barbara Fisher wrote in their January decision.
Despite that order, the father started a fundraising campaign and continued holding interviews about the case with Canadian media.
Earlier this month, he was arrested on charges of contempt after Canadian authorities alleged he repeatedly violated the court’s orders by referring to his child’s biological sex and discussing the case.
“When the bubble explodes and the delusion ends … She can never go back to being a girl in the healthy body she should have had … These kids don’t understand,” the father said in an interview earlier this year. “What kind of 13-year-old is thinking about having a family and kids?”
What happens to the father next depends on how a court rules in April, although his attorney doesn’t expect he will comply with any gag orders from the court. A prison sentence is worth a few years in prison, Linde said, if that means a message is sent.
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“His crusade is to let his parents know about these programs in the schools. Had the school come to him and said, ‘We think this about your daughter,’ instead of going ahead with medical treatment, who knows what would have happened?” he said. “This case isn’t just about whether kids should be transgendered, if both parents agree, or transgenderism as a whole, that’s part of it, and a lot of people see it as only that. My client’s specific concern is about how quickly this kind of thing spins out of control without the parents having any idea.”
