News
Featured Image
 Wikipedia

OTTAWA, August 19, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Expect full-blown government-sponsored transgendered rights legislation if either the Liberals or the New Democrats form government after the October general election.

A private member’s bill, C-279, passed both houses of Parliament this year but was amended in the Senate to protect the rights of non-trans people, and the House of Commons rose for the summer without ratifying the changes.

Asked at the Toronto Gay Pride Parade if he would revive C-279, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau told a reporter, “I’m committed to defending trans rights fully and completely but it won’t have to be private members bill, it will be part of a government bill.”

As for New Democratic Party Leader Thomas Mulcair, whose party is leading in the polls, his website states, “Tom Mulcair pledged the NDP would: introduce legislation to guarantee equal rights for transgender and gender variant Canadians.” It goes on to promise to “reverse service records” of people discharged from the Armed Forces because of their homo- or transsexuality.

Bill C-279 passed in the House of Commons thanks to 18 Conservatives backing it, but made it through the Senate this Spring only with the addition of amendments introduced by Senator Don Plett, which critics said “gutted” it.

Originally the bill would have added transgenderism and gender-fluity to the Criminal Code anti-hate provisions and to federal human rights legislation.

But Plett considered the bill too broad, in that it left up to the self-called trans person the question of which gender he or she belonged to. His amendments protected from prosecution under human rights violation operators of public washrooms or change rooms who barred a trans person to protect other, non-trans people.

“The bill provided no means to test or question a trans person’s claim,” said Andre Schutten, legal counsel for the Association for Reformed Political Action. “It was so overwhelmingly subjective.” And as such, said Schutten, it provided no protection for girls or women from men claiming to be women themselves, which, under the terms of the bill, they automatically were.

Senator Plett cited the case of Christopher Hambrook, a serial rapist who upon release from jail gained entry to a Toronto women’s shelter in 2012 claiming to be a trans woman, and raped two women. An LGBTQ commentator, Chris Milloy, mocked Plett’s linkage of the crime to an Ontario law accommodating trans people: “The policy of accommodating Trans* people is not to blame—a serial raping criminal who lied through his teeth was the problem here,” thundered Milloy.

But Milloy was ignoring the question of whether Hambrook was indeed lying “through his teeth” or sincerely considered himself a woman—albeit one violently attracted to other women.

According to Schutten, there are other problems with Bill C-279. “It is ideologically based,” he told LifeSiteNews, “and part of the ideology is that you can cross to a different gender but you can’t change back.” He cites laws recently passed in California and Ontario banning any kind of psychotherapy for youth beset by gender dysphoria—the belief they are males trapped in female bodies or females trapped in male ones. “There is no science behind gender fluidity and transgenderism. It is purely ideological,” Schutten said.

Ray Blanshard, a psychiatry professor at the University of Toronto and specialist in gender dysphoria, faulted the Ontario legislation banning “conversion therapy” for youth in an April 5 Toronto Star column. The Ontario bill, now law, confuses sexual orientation, which he termed “almost certainly congenital and immutable, at least in biological males with gender identity (which is demonstrably mutable, at least in children).” In fact, “the vast majority” of pre-puberty trans children “spontaneously desist from this pattern by puberty.”

Schutten said Bill C-279 not only ignored the real possibility of men or post-pubescent teenage males self-declaring as trans to gain entry to girls’ washrooms and change rooms for voyeuristic pleasure, or male sex offenders gaining admission to women’s prisons, it also seemed oblivious to the existence of male cross dressers, who dress as women for sexual pleasure. For cross dressers, who do not believe themselves to be female nor desire genital surgery, dressing in female clothes in classrooms or change rooms would carry an erotic thrill, which their innocent audiences of young females would contribute to “against their will,” said Schutten. Yet cross dressers too fall under the transgendered label.