Last Wednesday, The Federalist reported that the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, declared a father guilty of family violence for his polite refusal to refer to his daughter as a boy in private, and his repeated choice to affirm in media interviews that she is a girl.
At about the same time that story was published, the Supreme Court issued an additional, more heavy-handed “protection order” from the same ruling. The three-page document declares that the father, Clark*, will henceforth be subject to arrest, immediately and “without warrant” if any police officer has “reasonable” grounds to believe that he has in any way referred to his daughter as a girl in public or in private.
The new order further stipulated not only that Clark must not discuss his daughter’s sex or gender identity in public, but also that he cannot share court documents describing his own gag order. On the one hand, this demand may seem ironic, since it covers a publicly available court ruling. On the other hand, the injunction is so broad that it naturally includes the very document upon which it is written and that document–with its threats of immediate arrest without warrant–has not, as of yet, been made available on the court’s website.
As previously reported, the BC Supreme Court ordered in February that 14-year-old Maxine* receive testosterone injections without parental consent. Accordingly, Maxine began regular injections at the BC Children’s Hospital over the last two months.
Her father, Clark, strongly objects to this treatment and immediately sought to reverse the decision in the BC Court of Appeal. “[These injections] will completely disrupt her puberty,” he lamented to The Federalist several weeks ago. “Her bones will stop growing, her brain will stop developing… and she’s not gonna be a boy. She won’t even have the bone-strength left to be a girl anymore.”
Hoping to raise awareness, Clark answered multiple requests for interviews in which he shared his opinion that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones were not right for his daughter. Like an increasing number of parents these days, Clark argued that his child had been misled and brainwashed by online activists and school administrators, who began to treat Maxine as a transgender boy at school, without informing her parents, when she was only 12 years old.
While Clark sought (and received) anonymity in these previous interviews in order to protect his daughter’s identity, the court appears to have been deeply disturbed by the negative publicity and politically incorrect commentary surrounding its decisions. In a ruling last week, Justice Francesca Marzari convicted Clark of “family violence” for his “public denial of [Maxine’s] gender identity.”
At the same time, Marzari also issued an order expunging from the court record the names of two doctors who had been actively involved in pushing a gender transition for Maxine. One of these doctors, Dr. Wallace Wong, has recently come under fire for potentially diagnosing as much as 20 percent of the children in his local orphanage system with some form of gender dysphoria.
While Marzari presented this tamping down of information as a matter of strict necessity, some argue that the BC Supreme Court is showing a lack of concern for freedom of speech and the open court principle. Kari Simpson, the president of Canadian pro-family organization Culture Guard, complained that the “BC Court has become a Star Chamber,” using raw power to rewrite reality.
“This is extreme and dangerous,” she said, arguing that the court was forcing Clark to embrace a “delusion” about his daughter’s gender and her “abuse” at the hands of doctors, or else be arrested.
Clark’s appeal of the court’s original ruling regarding testosterone injections into his daughter is set to be heard on May 14.
*Names are pseudonyms.
