(LifeSiteNews) — In Canada, there is one legal regime for LGBT activists, and another for everyone else.
There have been plenty of recent examples to illustrate this. There is the small-town Ontario mayor, who had his bank account garnished for declining to fly an LGBT banner from the city hall’s non-existent flagpole. There is the high school teacher who insisted on wearing giant fake breasts to class as part of his “gender identity.” Indeed, Canada has become known for the extraordinary and sinister flamboyance of our trans-identifying grifters, and how effectively they use a system rigged in their favor.
And there’s always another bizarro case coming down the pipe.
This time, the infamous B.C. Human Rights Tribunal awarded $10,000 to Terry Wiebe, a trans-identifying woman, after Wiebe’s landlord and “former friend” Kirstin Olsen told her she’d be uncomfortable if Wiebe got a double mastectomy – despite concluding that Olsen’s opinion had no bearing on Wiebe’s tenancy.
According to the ruling, first reported by Amy Hamm in the National Post, Wiebe asked Olsen a number of times whether her tenancy would be impacted if she got the surgery, and Olsen told her she was uncomfortable with it. Hamm writes: “Despite the HRT ruling that Wiebe’s transgender identity was not a factor in the eviction, it still found that Olsen had discriminated, causing ‘an adverse impact on Terry Wiebe’s tenancy.’” (Wiebe lived in a mobile home on Olsen’s property from 2014 until 2018.) In other words, Wiebe got her feelings hurt.
In fact, the tribunal ruled that Olsen’s “discrimination” resulted in Wiebe deciding not to take testosterone (to present as male) while living in the building, although Wiebe told her friend and another tenant that she had stopped taking it because of medical complications. The tribunal even noted this fact, writing that Wiebe told them she “planned to stop hormone treatment because they did not like the facial hair it caused them to grow, and they no longer planned to change their gender.”
READ: Worcester, Massachusetts, declares itself a transgender ‘sanctuary’ city
In short, Olsen is out ten grand because she couldn’t read Wiebe’s mind, should have assumed she was lying, and erred in being honest about the fact that her friend’s planned double mastectomy made her uncomfortable. The ruling stated that the “nature of this discrimination was serious” and that the de facto fine was “compensation for injury to [Wiebe’s] dignity, feelings, and self-respect.” Olsen, as it turns out, was financially liable in part for Wiebe’s “self-respect,” an interesting legal take to say the least. Olsen’s comments, said the HRT, were “devastating.”
As Hamm reported: “According to the ruling, Olsen, who knew of Wiebe’s transgender identity beginning in 2017, described wanting to evict Wiebe not because of the transgender surgery, but because of Wiebe’s ‘increasingly volatile’ behaviour, Wiebe’s ‘lack of appropriate boundaries,’ Wiebe allegedly making the property ‘unsightly’ and Wiebe’s ‘irate and distraught’” behaviour following a romantic breakup. Olsen testified that her tenant frightened her when Wiebe ‘scream[ed] about how they would ‘get back at’’ their ex-girlfriend.”
It gets weirder. Olsen allowed Wiebe to oversee both her property and business while she was away in December 2017, which Hamm emphasizes was after Olsen knew about Wiebe’s transgender identity. While she was gone, Olsen stated, an error by Wiebe resulted in a damaged ventilation system that “could have caused serious health problems” for an employee. Olsen told the tribunal in a sworn statement that she believed Wiebe had done this deliberately because the video surveillance footage that should have revealed how the error occurred was deleted. The tribunal, conveniently, chose not to rule on this incident.
At the tribunal, Olsen was subjected to a series of accusations by Wiebe that she strenuously objected to. For example, one “transphobic” comment she allegedly made was: “You’re fine as a lesbian.” Wiebe claimed that this was an attempt to discourage her “transition.” Olsen countered that she said it “a condolence after Wiebe announced a halt to the testosterone treatment that had possibly caused kidney problems that put Wiebe in hospital.” And then there’s this:
Wiebe insisted that Olsen referred to a double mastectomy as ‘mutilation.’ Olsen denied saying that. The tribunal ruled that she did in fact say it, as ‘this term would be consistent with Ms. Olsen’s opinion about the divinity of femininity, and with her acknowledged discomfort with the idea of top surgery.’ [‘Top surgery’ is a sanitized term for a double mastectomy.]
The tribunal went so far as to offer “an unprompted apology to Wiebe for the ‘harm’ inflicted by the hearing itself,” due to Olsen and others “misgendering” Wiebe by referring to her as female. Amy Hamm’s devastating editorial conclusion is worth reading:
No doubt that future Canadians will look back at these HRT rulings with bemusement, wondering why the state would indulge the frivolous, solipsistic personal vendettas of the chronically offended; or get involved in the games played by the vexatious and pseudo-offended, who seek monetary rewards from such an unserious government body as a human rights tribunal. But living through it, well, that’s another thing entirely. None of us are immune to having a Canadian human rights tribunal set its sights on us like some parodic Eye of Sauron and put our financial well-being and reputations at risk – unless, that is, we choose to live in a permanent state of self-censorship. Neither option is acceptable in a free and open society.
Terry Wiebe, incidentally, goes by the pronouns “they/them.” I suspect it is cases like this one that led to a recent national survey result finding that “most Canadians think that sharing gender pronouns on work calls and in video meetings has either no impact or actually ‘encourages stereotypes’ … The Leger poll found that 26 per cent of people agreed with the former and 29 per cent with the latter.” An increasing number of Canadians now recognize that a “request” to use someone’s “preferred pronouns” is followed by an unspoken threat: Or else.
