I regret to inform you that the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal (HRT) continues with its mission of punishing citizens who dare not to blindly and unquestioningly go along with gender ideology.
Last month, the tribunal awarded $10,000 to Terry Wiebe, a transgender-identified female who uses “they/them” pronouns, after Wiebe’s former friend and landlord, Kirstin Olsen, said she would be uncomfortable if Wiebe underwent a gender-affirming double mastectomy.
Wiebe, according to the ruling, “asked Ms. Olsen, more than once, if their tenancy would be affected if they got gender-affirming surgery. Ms. Olsen did not respond directly, but said she was uncomfortable with it.” Despite the HRT ruling that Wiebe’s transgender identity was not a factor in the eviction, it still found that Olsen had discriminated, causing “an adverse impact on Terry Wiebe’s tenancy.”
The three-member tribunal panel also ruled that Olsen’s “discrimination” led Wiebe to stop taking testosterone treatment while living on the property — despite the fact that Wiebe told Olsen it was due to medical complications, and despite telling Olsen and another tenant on the property that, according to the HRT, “they planned to stop hormone treatment because they did not like the facial hair that it caused them to grow, and they no longer planned to change their gender.”
The monetary award was ordered as “compensation for injury to (Wiebe’s) dignity, feelings and self-respect.” The HRT ruled that, “The nature of this discrimination was serious.” It also concluded that Olsen’s comments had both a “profound” and “devastating” impact on the complainant.
Wiebe also alleged that Olsen made other “transphobic” remarks, but the HRT ruled that those “were not sufficiently connected to Terry Wiebe’s tenancy to establish discrimination under the code.” Wiebe lived in a motor home on Olsen’s property starting in 2014, until being evicted in 2018.
The whole case is bizarre. According to the ruling, Olsen, who knew of Wiebe’s transgender identity beginning in 2017, described wanting to evict Wiebe not because of the transgender surgery, but because of Wiebe’s “increasingly volatile” behaviour, Wiebe’s “lack of appropriate boundaries,” Wiebe allegedly making the property “unsightly” and Wiebe’s “irate and distraught” behaviour following a romantic breakup. Olsen testified that her tenant frightened her when Wiebe “scream(ed) about how they would ‘get back at’ ” their ex-girlfriend. Olsen also said she wanted to move her mother onto the property.
In what can only be described as a disturbing incident, Olsen also testified that she distrusted Wiebe after leaving her tenant in charge of her property and business while she was away in December 2017. (Which, it should be noted, was after Olsen became aware of Wiebe’s transgender identity.) As the ruling states, Olsen testified that she believes Wiebe caused an error with a ventilation system that both damaged her products and “could have caused serious health problems” for one of her employees.
“The witnesses were uncertain about how the wrong tank was connected to the vent. Terry Wiebe claimed that a supplier had delivered the wrong tank, but in a sworn statement made before the hearing, Ms. Olsen said she suspected that Terry Wiebe had deliberately connected the wrong tank,” reads the HRT ruling.
“Ms. Olsen had installed security cameras on her property, and she says there should have been footage showing how the wrong tank was connected to the vent, and who connected it. But by the time she examined the footage, the relevant portion had been deleted. She suspected that Terry Wiebe was responsible for deleting it, but she did not know for sure.”
The tribunal made no finding on whether Wiebe was responsible for the potentially dangerous error, or for deleting video footage of the incident.
One of the supposedly discriminatory or “transphobic” comments Olsen was accused of making was telling Wiebe: “You’re fine as a lesbian.” Wiebe said the comment was meant to discourage a gender transition. Olsen, however, said the comment was offered as a condolence after Wiebe announced a halt to the testosterone treatment that had possibly caused kidney problems that put Wiebe in hospital. (Wiebe later received a medical opinion that this was not the case, but Olsen was never made aware.)
Wiebe insisted that Olsen referred to a double mastectomy as “mutilation.” Olsen denied saying that. The tribunal ruled that she did in fact say it, as “this term would be consistent with Ms. Olsen’s opinion about the divinity of femininity, and with her acknowledged discomfort with the idea of top surgery.” (“Top surgery” is a sanitized term for a double mastectomy.)
Not to be outdone by Wiebe’s claims about the profound and devastating harm of hearing words deemed offensive or hurtful, the HRT offered an unprompted apology to Wiebe for the “harm” inflicted by the hearing itself. Olsen and other witnesses apparently “misgendered” Wiebe repeatedly, but would apologize and correct themselves when it was pointed out. The panel, however, “did not point it out every time … because it happened so frequently that doing so would have undermined their ability to give evidence. This was understandably frustrating and upsetting for Terry Wiebe. We regret that the process harmed them.”
One of the three tribunal members overseeing this case was one Devyn Cousineau, whose name may be familiar as the woman who ruled on the testicle-waxing discrimination cases brought forward by trans activist Jessica Yaniv (now Jessica Simpson). Though Yaniv’s claims were tossed out in 2019, Cousineau — like Yaniv — will live on in infamy for her claim that transwomen getting their testicles waxed counts as “critical gender-affirming care.”
No doubt that future Canadians will look back at these HRT rulings with bemusement, wondering why the state would indulge the frivolous, solipsistic personal vendettas of the chronically offended; or get involved in the games played by the vexatious and pseudo-offended, who seek monetary rewards from such an unserious government body as a human rights tribunal. But living through it, well, that’s another thing entirely.
None of us are immune to having a Canadian human rights tribunal set its sights on us like some parodic Eye of Sauron and put our financial well-being and reputations at risk — unless, that is, we choose to live in a permanent state of self-censorship. Neither option is acceptable in a free and open society.
This is not to say that there cannot be good reasons to have human rights tribunals — ones that consider serious human rights violations (such as firing someone for political beliefs shared outside of work). But it is to say that I am tired of writing about the cases that make a mockery of what constitutes a human rights violation. Wiebe v. Olsen is one such case.
When human rights tribunals decide which offensive or hurtful comments are “discriminatory,” they are, in actuality, attempting to choose our social mores for us. They are attempting to exert an unacceptable level of social control on our lives.
National Post