For the past 11 months, Robert Hoogland, a father in Surrey, British Columbia, has been forced to watch as his 14 year-old daughter was “destroyed and sterilized” by court-ordered testosterone injections. After losing his legal appeal to stop the process in January, Rob (previously anonymized as “Clark” or “CD”) is making a desperate attempt to bring his case into the courts of public opinion, even though it breaks a court order demanding his silence about the case.
“I had a perfectly healthy child a year ago, and that perfectly healthy child has been altered and destroyed for absolutely no good reason,” Rob said in an exclusive interview. “She can never go back to being a girl in the healthy body that she should have had. She’s going to forever have a lower voice. She’ll forever have to shave because of facial hair. She won’t be able to have children…”
Rob felt that at the age of 14—when the courts judged his daughter competent to take testosterone without parental consent—she simply did not have the foresight necessary to understand such consequences. Over the course of the past year, Rob has heard his daughter’s voice deepen and crack and watched her begin to grow facial hair.
“Sometimes I just want to scream so that other parents and people will… jump in, understand what’s going on,” Rob said. “There’s a child—and not only mine, but in my case, my child out there having her life ruined,” and yet, Rob felt, “people don’t [even] know.”
Rob’s efforts to raise awareness of his daughter’s plight have come at a high cost. The last time he granted an interview to The Federalist, he was convicted of “family violence” by the BC Supreme Court for his “expressions of rejection of [his daughter’s] gender identity.” He was also placed under threat of immediate arrest if he was caught referring to his daughter as a girl again.
While a January ruling in the BC Court of Appeal vacated that threat, Rob remains under a strict gag order forbidding him from speaking about his daughter’s case in public and requiring that he “acknowledge and refer to [his daughter] as male” in private.
But Rob says he feels a moral responsibility to try to fight the laws and the court rulings which have “destroyed” his daughter. “People need to stand up and realize that [the courts are] sterilizing children, essentially, and mutilating them,” Rob said. “It’s… state-sponsored child abuse.”
Feeling that if he lacked the courage to speak out, he could scarcely expect others to stand up and help him, Rob granted two video interviews to Canadian YouTube commentators about his case. While the interviews garnered a sharp initial interest, the commentators who granted them quickly found themselves under threats of litigation. Rob’s first interview was immediately taken down. Rob’s second interviewer, Laura-Lynn Thompson, faced similar threats, but initially refused to take her video (not currently available in Canada) down.
Last Thursday, Justice Michael Tammen of the British Columbia Supreme Court ordered that Thompson’s interview and various social media posts be taken down. When Thompson stalled, trying to keep a rapidly sharing copy of her interview available to Canadians on Bitchute, the police were sent to her house to demand she take the video down.
Tammen also harshly reprimanded Rob for speaking about his case to the media, warning him that if he broke his silence again, he would likely be cited for contempt of court.
Nevertheless, Rob says he is unwilling to back down. “Whatever happens to me pales in comparison to what’s already happened to my daughter.” Rob feels there is no way for him to fight “this child abuse” of his daughter except to force his story out into the open.
The path forward is not likely to be easy, but Rob said he feels a responsibility to tell his story that goes much deeper than anything court costs or even jail time could deflect. “Let’s say in 5, 10 years my daughter is detransitioning, and she turns to me and says, you know, ‘Dad or Mom, why did none of you do anything to stop this?’…. When my daughter asks me that question, I’ll say, ‘I did everything that I possibly could. There was nothing more I could do, and then when there was nothing more I could do, I continued on because I didn’t want other parents to go through what I went through.”
(Rob has set up a crowdfunding page for those who may wish to help.)
