In February, the tribunal ordered former public-school trustee Barry Neufeld to pay a staggering $750,000 for his public statements on transgenderism. In September, they ordered a doctor to pay $28,000 after he refused to administer puberty blockers. And this month, the tribunal ordered LifeLabs to pay over $32,000 for “misgendering” three people.
The complaints against LifeLabs were brought by “Noa Moses,” who identifies as “non-binary” and objected to being required to select male or female to get lab services; “Devan Snow,” who identifies as transgender, objected to the lab using biological sex to interpret blood-test results; and “Vincent Viezzer,” who identifies as transgender and was angry that the lab reports frequently changed the sex marker to “female” or “unspecified.”
For these ideological crimes, BC’s Human Rights Tribunal ordered LifeLabs and a subsidiarity to pay Moses, Snow, and Viezzer a collective $32,000 for “injury to dignity,” an additional $2,965.07 between the three of them for “lost wages” for the time they spent attending the tribunal, and $11,000 for the “expert witnesses” who were called to testify in the case.
The “injury to dignity” came from the apparent confusion of staff members when confronted with someone who identified as neither male nor female. As the CBC reported:
[A] staff member said they were going to call Moses’ doctor to “find out which gender marker to use.” When LifeLabs staff couldn’t reach Moses’ doctor over the phone, staff “informed Noa that if they did not choose a male or female gender marker, staff would not draw their blood.”
After responding “10 to 15 times” that neither binary marker was appropriate, the decision says a staff member approached Moses with a piece of paper with “M” and “F” written on it. They asked Moses to point to one.
“Noa says they were so exhausted and upset by that point that they just pointed to a letter on the paper.” LifeLabs staff wrote a binary gender marker on Moses’ requisition form. Moses testified that their experience was demeaning and made them feel like a child being chastised, according to Etmanski’s decision.
I’d be willing to bet decent money that some of those staff members simply didn’t know what “non-binary” means. Plenty of Canadians, for the record, are unaware of this very recent concept, and that scenario reads to me like the staff were attempting to communicate, not hurt somebody’s feelings. Not that that mattered to the tribunal, of course. Similarly, Snow’s primary complaint is that he was “forced to discuss” the issue of gender at the counter in public, which caused embarrassment.
The third complainant, Viezzer, objected to the phrase “FTM” – an acronym meaning “female-to-male” – being included on a form next to the gender marker, because, as the CBC reported, Viezzer “had an emotional, physiological reaction to seeing the letters and scribbled them out with a black marker” before leaving the lab without getting a blood test.
According to the tribunal decision, the acronym “may not appear to be particularly egregious or virulent” and is even technically accurate, but it is an “oversimplified and inaccurate way to describe some peoples’ lived transgender experience,” and it noted that “there is no requirement that something be understood as universally offensive for it to have a discriminatory impact.”
Thus, the staff were guilty of “discrimination” even when using terminology that is not recognized as inherently offensive, and LifeLabs paid dearly for it. That will make the tribunal’s demand that LifeLabs “develop training on trans and non-binary patients’ privacy considerations and give it to all staff and management in B.C. within a year” somewhat tricky. If the specific terms that cause “injury to dignity” are purely circumstantial, how are staff supposed to get trained on what they are?
The BC Human Rights Tribunal has positioned itself as the enforcer of transgender ideology, a parallel court that cannot imprison people but can damage their business, reputation, and financial bottom line – or in the case of Barry Neufeld, bankrupt them.
