If you don’t know who Devyn Cousineau is, her newest job is to punish people who don’t want to turn teenage boys into teenage girls.

As vice-chair of the BC Human Rights Tribunal, Ms. Cousineau recently ruled that an immigrant doctor from Nigeria named Dr. Henry Ajaero should pay $20,000 to “Child Q”. Why? Because he refused to inject this boy with a puberty blocker.

What’s more, Dr. Ajaero must pay a further $8,100 for “expert” evidence that was used against him.

Dr. Ajaero practices family medicine in Delta, BC. He is a Christian. He is opposed to turning men into women and vice versa as a result. Child Q was a young teenage boy who wanted to “transition” to a “female” body and avoid becoming a man.

In 2021, when Child Q was 14, the BC Gender Clinic prescribed puberty blockers to stop Child Q from developing into a man. An injection such as this is supposed to be given about once a month. Due to his beliefs, Dr. Ajaero refused to administer the injection. Child Q received the injection from a different doctor later that same day and immediately filed a human rights complaint against Dr. Ajaero.

The “evidence” used against Dr. Ajaero was provided by professor Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc. This “expert” is on the record as saying that “the debate about appropriate gender-affirming care for adolescents” is closed. Meanwhile, Ms. Cousineau argued that the “question of the standard of medical care when a doctor is exercising her or his best medical judgment is not an issue for the Tribunal to decide”. This didn’t stopped Ms. Cousineau from concluding that Dr. Ajaero could have injected the teenager and still practiced medicine “consistently with his religious beliefs,” because the injection by itself “is not medication for gender reassignment.”

A ruling like this would make most pedants blush, because puberty blockers are an integral part of the journey of trying to become a member of the opposite sex. Prescribing puberty blockers is often a prelude to cutting off genitalia further down the road. It seems a doctor’s judgment is worth little in a “human rights” hearing chaired by someone who ideologically confirms to transgenderism.

Many of us may disagree about the best way to help someone in Child Q’s situation. Some would argue for the course taken by the second doctor that Child Q went to after Dr. Ajaero refused to inject him. Others would encourage Child Q to get appropriate therapy to accept the reality of his biological sex.

But remember that Dr. Ajaero didn’t prevent Child Q from receiving the prescribed treatment. Another doctor gave the injection later that same day. What the Tribunal effectively decided was that a physician’s conscientious objection can extend even when the patient can obtain the treatment elsewhere. This concerns me as a precedent beyond this case. A doctor could be unwilling to violate his or her conscience on very many matters, such as abortion or euthanasia. If freedom of conscience means anything, then a doctor must be as free to say no to administering puberty blockers as Child Q was to request them.

For “experts” like Dr. Saewyc and ideologues like Devin Cousineau, there is no need to think this deeply. Instead, Ms. Cousineau and Dr. Saewyc are happy to see a “human rights” Tribunal punish anyone who dissents from transgender “orthodoxy.”

In the end, I don’t really blame them. The real villain is BC’s Human Rights Code, which empowers dangerous and misguided lawyers to use taxpayer-funded machinery to harm people like Barry Neufeld and Dr. Ajaero.

Only a change in legislation will prevent such institutional malice from punishing doctors, and anyone else who will not easily abandon their conscience, in future.

John Carpay, BA, LLB, is President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.

Read this column in the New Westminster Times