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New
Democrat MP Bill Siksay is attempting to garner support
for new human rights legislation that would ban discrimination
against “gender identity” and “gender
expression,” Canadian Catholic News reported last
week.
Siksay’s
proposal is contained in a private member’s bill
(C-392) which he introduced last May. It would make
it a crime to act in a prejudicial manner toward “transsexuals,
transgendered people, intersexed people, and all those
who do not identify within the confines of traditional
gender.”
For
example, if this bill were to become law, an employer
could not refuse to hire a male solely on the basis
of what Siksay calls his “inward sense” that
he was really a female (“gender identity”)
and dressed and acted accordingly (“gender expression”).
“Trans
people are subject to discrimination, harassment and
violence on a daily basis,” Siksay reportedly wrote
in a letter to fellow members of Parliament in early
October. “They are regularly denied things we all
take for granted, such as access to health care, housing,
the ability to obtain identification documents, access
to gendered spaces such as bathrooms, and the ability
to acquire and maintain gainful employment.”
As
well, he states, they “are all too often victims
of violent acts such as assault and murder.”
Douglas
Farrow, associate professor of Christian thought at
McGill University, views C-392 as part of the inevitable
fallout from Parliament’s decision earlier this
year to allow homosexuals to legally marry.
Farrow
predicts there will be other, similar proposed changes
to Canada’s laws that, as he told Canadian Catholic
News, will “get sillier and sillier until people
get fed up or we begin to understand how much of a mistake
it [same-sex marriage] has been.”
“It
would appear that to some there are no longer any sexual
aberrations or abnormalities,” said Roman Catholic
Calgary Bishop Fred Henry, commenting on C-392. He also
suggested that all parliamentarians be required to take
introductory courses in philosophy and ethics as one
way to address “a real poverty of moral and critical
thought in some circles.”
Three
years ago, the Northwest Territories became the first
– and so far the only – jurisdiction in Canada
to prohibit discrimination against on the basis of “gender
identity” as part of the territory’s new Human
Rights Act.
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