Last May, Bill Siksay, the NDP MP for Burnaby-Douglas, introduced Bill C-389, a private member’s bill that would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to include vague concepts such as “gender identity” and “gender expression” in the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination so that supposed offenses against “gender variant individuals” could be punished under Canadian Law.
The bill, in other words, would place gender identity on the same legal footing as racial identity: a restaurant without a “transgenderd washroom”—- or one, say, that prohibited transgendered men from using the women’s washroom— would, in the eyes of the law, be the equivalent of the “Coloured Only” water fountains of American segregation. During that dark and painful chapter of American history, a legal fiction created an inequality between the races in the United States; Bill C-389, however, would elevate the private beliefs of certain individuals to the level of a legal identity.
Transgendered persons are those who do not fully identify with their biological sex; transsexual persons are those who self-identify with the opposite sex in spite of their biological sex. Both groups have strong convictions about their personal identities, as do Canadians who profess certain religious beliefs. Christians, for example, believe that the soul is untied to the body; transsexual persons, on the other hand, believe that their souls are united to the wrong body. In both examples, however, it is inappropriate to use the law to force others to accept these tenets. But Bill C-389 would do just that: it would entrench the deep, but ultimately, private beliefs of transgendered and transsexual people in the law.
Thus, for all of the supposed importance of the separation of Church and State in Canada, Bill C-389 would clearly violate this much-vaunted principle by using the law to impose the personal convictions of a small, fervent minority on the rest of the country. It is unclear why the same legal climate which prevents the imposition of explicitly religious dogmas on others should enable these transgendered convictions to be reflected in law. In effect, Bill C-389 is a kind of forced baptism, a gender reassignment surgery imposed, not on the body, but on the legal code.
That the recognition of “gender identity” and “gender expression” will dilute the categories of male and female into non-existence is reason enough to oppose this wrong-headed bill. But another, more urgent reason, should spur our campaign against it: while Bill C-389 is touted as a means of ending discrimination, the great irony in all of this is that it will be a tool, not for increased tolerance, but for persecution and prosecution.
If “gender identity” is a kind of private dogma, Bill C-389 is a mandate for an Inquisition to enforce this particular creed. Supporters of the bill claim that it is a means for a discriminated minority to seek redress for the offenses committed against them by bigoted individuals. But, in fact, the bill will only result in the harassment of recognized religious groups by an unrecognized “faith-based” group with the help of the state.
In his study of Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton observed that “when you break the great laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.” What is true of laws is true of religions. When you persecute traditional religions, you do not get a superstition-free secular state: you get new, unacknowledged superstitions and cults. Bill C-389 represents an outbreak of political piety towards the religion of sexual identity: the bill masquerades as a measure granting belated equality to a minority, but really ensures that the rights of Christians to practice their religion will conflict with the rights of transgendered and transsexual people to have their beliefs about themselves universally recognized.
The Charter protects both “freedom of conscience and religion” and the “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression.” Bill C-389 would diminish these fundamental rights by bringing them into direct conflict with those more “sacred” forms of expression: “gender identity” and “gender expression.”
Bill C-389 will likely come for final vote in the House of Commons in late February or early March before proceeding to the Senate. We urge you to call or write to your MP, letting them know that that a vote for C-389 is a vote against religious freedom.
