OTTAWA, March 4, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Senate has returned the controversial “transgender rights” bill, dubbed the “bathroom bill” by critics, to the House of Commons, significantly weakened. Observers now expect it will not become law before it dies on the order paper at this fall’s federal election.
“It does look like the death of the bill,” the bill’s sponsor, British Columbian New Democratic MP Randall Garrison, told the National Post. “I can’t understand why the Conservative leadership of the Senate would allow this small group of senators to derail the bill since the Senate twice voted, in principle, in favour.”
Bill C-279 was passed by the House of Commons in 2013 but spent most of the meantime doing nothing in the Senate, though six provinces managed to pass similar laws in the interval.
In the Commons version, it put “gender identity” into the Human Rights Act along with other prohibited grounds for discrimination such as religion, ethnicity, and gender, and into the Criminal Code’s anti-hate provisions, thus amplifying the seriousness of crimes when motivated by hatred of “trans” people.
The Senate zeroed in on the aspect most alarming to parents—that men dressed as women could now show up in women’s washrooms when their young daughters were inside. It added an amendment allowing discrimination against trans people with respect to “any service, facility, accommodation or premises that is restricted to one sex only — such as a correctional facility, crisis counselling facility, shelter for victims of abuse, washroom facility, shower facility or clothing changing room [provided] the practice is undertaken for the purpose of protecting individuals in a vulnerable situation.”
But this wouldn’t stop public or workplace displays of what is, according to Toronto psychiatrist Ray Blanshard, a sexual fetish. Blanshard has argued for several years that there is a strong erotic or sexual component to “trangenderism.” Deriving sexual pleasure from looking like women or from fantasizing about being women, he controversially labelled them “autogynephiles” and said that post-operative male-to-female transgendered were simply “men without penises,” though he still recommended surgery if it would make them feel better.
Dainna Cicotello, an American “trans” woman, counselor to other transgendered people and consultant to corporations on trans hiring, argues that autogynephiles always associate their fixation on being women with masturbating. And when they have completed the act, off come their female clothes. But only a minority of transgendered are autogynephiles, Cicotello told LifeSiteNews, and there is no connection between transgenderism and child sexual predation.
Still, autogynephilia exists. It is a sexual fetish and it is simply “not reasonable to expect or mandate that an employer allow a person to bring any other sexual fetish into the workplace; no diapers, no chains, no leather–drag, no pornography,” Cicotello said. “To mandate a workplace to allow it based on city, state or federal law is ludicrous.”
For autogynephiles, being a woman mostly means looking like a woman, with a very male focus on overly large (fake) breasts, “big” hair, and dangerously high heels. Cicotello notes that she has “watched in wonder at the number of [male-to-female trans people] who feel compelled to come to work dressed like a little girl or teenage slut, and then demand the professional rights women co-workers have. With this display of sexuality, it is not surprising that women object to TGs using women’s spaces.”
The Canada Family Action group identifies several dangers involved in Bill C-279 as drafted: it gives male sexual predators an excuse to frequent women’s washrooms, increases the confusion over gender being created by public school sex education programs, increases the costs of building public facilities (where a third class of washroom may have to be built), clogs the courts with gender discrimination lawsuits, and adds to health care costs for gender reassignment and reversal surgeries.