On June 27, the Alberta Court of King’s Bench suspended Alberta’s law to protect vulnerable minors from puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones. Granting a temporary injunction to the LGBT etc. advocacy group Egale Canada, the court has put the law on hold for the next year or two until there is a full hearing on the merits of Egale Canada’s constitutional challenge.
At issue is Bill 26, which prevents Alberta doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones to minors under 16. Egale Canada argues that minors essentially have a constitutional right to receive these drugs, and that government should not “impose” choices on youth or interfere in the doctor-patient relationship.
In granting the temporary injunction against Bill 26, the Alberta Court of King’s Bench extended no deference to the Alberta government’s choice to follow the policies that have been adopted in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Italy, and other countries. Alberta’s 183-page brief summarized hundreds of pages of evidence from research in numerous countries, with particular emphasis on the independent Cass Review conducted in the United Kingdom by Dr. Hillary Cass.
According to the Cass Review, the rationale for early puberty suppression remains unclear, and for most young people these drugs are not the best way to manage gender-related distress. Apart from physical impacts on the body, the effect of puberty blockers on cognitive and psychosexual development remains unknown. Despite the longstanding use of opposite-sex hormones by adults identifying as transgender, there is no reliable information about their long-term impact on minors. Around the world, a growing body of evidence points to harms—and an absence of benefits—resulting from giving puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones to children and teens.
According to transgender ideology, if a boy feels like a girl, then he is a girl! Therefore, his body must be altered accordingly, so that reality is changed to match his feelings. Puberty blockers and estrogen together will ensure that the boy does not mature sexually: he likely will never become a father. While puberty blockers and estrogen may help the boy to grow breasts, he will never produce an ovum, conceive a child, or become a mother. He could undergo penile inversion vaginoplasty surgery to construct an artificial vagina, but his body will treat it as a wound in need of healing. Ironically, the estrogen that he took during his teenage years will have inhibited penile growth, thereby reducing the chance of vaginoplasty surgery being successful.
In like manner, girls and women who embrace transgender ideology risk permanent infertility. Puberty blockers combined with testosterone, taken during the teenage years, will provide girls with a permanent deep voice and facial hair, and render them unable to conceive and bear children. A phalloplasty, the surgical creation of an artificial penis, will not enable these women to become fathers.
Removing healthy body parts and destroying fertility are already sad choices when made by adults. But how much worse when minors, many of them isolated from their own parents and manipulated by ideological actors, make life-altering decisions that cause permanent infertility.
In their 123-page brief, Egale and the other applicants assert with strident confidence that minors are constitutionally entitled to access puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones, and that these treatments are both beneficial and medically necessary. Their brief raises the spectre of suicide, suggesting that gender-confused teens will kill themselves if they go through puberty, but provides no hard data to support this claim. Some of the brief’s language is Orwellian, describing breast removal as “chest masculinization” surgery, and at one point describing children as “genetically related offspring.”
The court’s 39-page ruling provides little explanation as to why the judge preferred the evidence of Egale Canada over the evidence of Alberta.
In her ruling, the judge adopts the ideological language used by Egale Canada, asserting that gender is somehow “assigned” at birth, as opposed to being an obvious and observable reality. She describes giving estrogen to boys, and giving testosterone to girls, as “gender-affirming” hormone treatment. She declares that “gender identity is an immutable characteristic” in spite of abundant evidence showing that many people experience changes in their feelings and identities over time.
The judge asserts that going through normal puberty constitutes “irreparable harm” for children whose gender identity does not match their physical bodies. She expresses full confidence in doctors who prescribe puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones, trusting these ideologues to “do so with a careful eye to the needs of the patient and the risks of the treatment.” She gives scant attention and very little weight to the irreparable harm done to vulnerable children and teenagers who were (and are) encouraged to embark on the futile quest to become a member of the opposite sex.
What is striking about this June 27 court ruling is the judge’s lack of deference to government decision-making. This departs radically from the very high deference that courts in recent years have given to governments when their lockdowns and COVID vaccine mandates violated Charter rights and freedoms.
In 2020 and the years that followed, many Canadians challenged lockdowns in court. Governments admitted in court that lockdowns did violate the Charter freedoms of association, expression, peaceful assembly, religion, conscience, mobility, travel, etc. The governments argued that these violations of Charter freedoms were justified because lockdowns, even without a strong scientific basis, were a reasonable choice for dealing with the virus. Many Canadian judges, terrified of COVID by having embraced the media narrative, were quick to approve of lockdowns as a reasonable choice by government.
One Ontario judge declared herself to be neither equipped nor inclined to resolve scientific controversies concerning COVID, and then approved the government’s violations of Charter freedoms. In other words, Canadian courts have ruled that when the science is disputed or unclear, governments have a very wide latitude to violate Charter rights and freedoms, and courts should be reluctant to object.
In defending Bill 26 in court, Alberta argues that giving puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones to teenagers is not supported by a strong scientific consensus. There are no credible long-term studies to show that the benefits (if any) outweigh the harms. Many countries are no longer allowing puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones to be given to minors.
If the court had applied the “lockdowns” legal standard from recent years to Bill 26, the court would have deferred to government, and would have upheld Alberta’s policy as a reasonable choice in the context of disputed and unsettled science.
However, the challenge to Bill 26 is not driven by ordinary citizens who assert their constitutional freedoms to associate, assemble, move, travel, speak, and worship. Rather, the challenge to Bill 26 is driven by a woke, progressive transgender ideology that still enjoys considerable prestige in academia, media, and the legal profession. When regular, every-day, politically incorrect Canadians seek to defend their Charter freedoms against lockdowns, courts gladly defer to governments. When LGBT etc. advocates challenge a law or government policy because it departs from transgender ideology, judges will not show the same deference to government.
