A Canadian “human rights” tribunal just exposed the Orwellian strategy of the transgender movement—it seeks to weaponize “empathy” to demand allegiance to the absurd and dangerous idea that men can become women and vice versa.
Barry Neufeld, a brave school board member in the city of Chilliwack, British Columbia, dared to speak out against a school program encouraging sexual orientation and gender identity called SOGI 1 2 3.
Two teachers unions, the British Columbia Teachers Federation and the Chilliwack Teachers Association, sued Neufeld on behalf of members who identify as two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer for statements he made from 2017 to 2022.
The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal found Neufeld liable for “hate speech” and discrimination in a ruling Wednesday. The tribunal ordered him to pay 750,000 Canadian dollars for violating the Human Rights Code, and it ordered him to pay another CA$10,000 in damages for violating the tribunal’s rules during the proceeding against him.
Neufeld, who did not oversee any of the 2SLGBTQ+ employees represented by the teachers unions, argued that he could not be held liable for discrimination against them, but the tribunal found that “his conduct permeated, and adversely impacted, [the teachers’] work environment.”
The Most Revealing Statement
The ruling is 112 pages, but one particular statement most reveals the threat of transgender orthodoxy.
“The denial of trans identities is the theme underlying all of Mr. Neufeld’s impugned publications,” the tribunal writes. “Mr. Neufeld believes that gender is static, binary, and determined by a person’s genitals at birth. He calls modern understandings of gender—including that it is socially constructed, may be fluid, and may be different from sex assigned at birth—an ideology that must be resisted.”
The tribunal includes a long quote from Neufeld defining gender ideology as “the belief system that everybody has a gender identity; that this gender identity is not determined by the biological sex of a person; that this gender identity therefore may be one of any number of gender identities … that anyone may assume any gender identity simply by self-identifying; and that a person actually is whatever gender identity that person thinks, regardless of biological sex.”
Astutely, Neufeld notes that “believers of this ideology do not regard it as a belief system at all, but rather as an accurate and true account of the world.”
“We can think of no better example for how transpeople are denied than this passage,” the tribunal writes. “Transpeople are, by definition, people ‘whose gender identity does not align with the sex assigned to them at birth.’ If a person elects not to ‘believe’ that gender identity is separate from sex assigned at birth, then they do not ‘believe’ in transpeople.”
“This is a form of existential denial,” the tribunal added. “It is not, as Mr. Neufeld argues, akin to religious beliefs. A person does not need to believe in Christianity to accept that another person is Christian. However, to accept that a person is transgender, one must accept that their gender identity is different than their sex assigned at birth.”
Smuggling in a Belief Requirement
The tribunal cited one of its previous rulings finding that “the question of whether transgender people exist and are entitled to dignity in this province is as valuable to ongoing public debate as whether one race is superior to another.”
Then it gave this remarkable statement: “People can and do live beyond the binary. People can and do decide that they were assigned the incorrect gender at birth. Trans people are here, existing in schools and homes and workplaces.”
This isn’t just a piece of flashy rhetoric—it’s a truth claim, and it subtly twists Neufeld’s disagreement with transgender ideology into a desire for violence.
Neufeld was never denying that people exist who claim to identify as the gender opposite their sex—he merely contested the claim that this gender identity is definitional for them, and that it overrides their biological sex. He expressed concern that enforcing the idea that it is healthy for someone to identify as the gender opposite their sex leads to confusion and self-harm. He rejects this ideology, not the existence of the people who believe it.
But the tribunal’s interpretation of his statements smuggles in the idea that he is denying these people’s existence, that he is wishing harm upon them.
The tribunal goes on to state that “calling transness ‘gender ideology’ allows anti-trans activists to hide behind a veneer of reasonableness. It allows them to say … that they are not attacking human beings.”
“But behind this insidious veneer is the proposition that transness is not real,” the tribunal adds. “Such phrasing can make it easier to ignore that trans people are human beings. Referring to ‘gender ideology’ or ‘transgenderism’ … pushes the idea that trans people have an agenda rather than being just another demographic group. As this decision illustrates, such terms can create the conditions for discrimination and hatred to flourish.”
This isn’t an argument claiming that transgender ideology is true so much as an insinuation that disagreeing with transgender ideology is dangerous.
The tribunal doesn’t bother to prove that a man can become a woman or vice versa—it simply states the ideology as a matter of fact and then tries to make dissent unthinkable.
By postulating that transgender ideology is not up for debate, and penalizing its mere definition as a form of discrimination, the tribunal has carried out a verbal jiu jitsu worthy of George Orwell.
A Cross-Border Threat
Unfortunately, this isn’t new or unique to Canada—it’s just the most obvious articulation of the transgender movement’s longtime attempt to dominate the conversation.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, for instance, puts conservatives and Christians who disagree with transgender ideology on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The Human Rights Campaign, The Trevor Project, and other LGBTQ+ activist groups have repeatedly suggested that mere disagreement with the ideology is a form of violence.
This ruling in Canada is merely the logical extension of the rhetoric we see in the U.S., and it should serve as a wakeup call that we must firmly reject this ideology.
