The Alberta government has invoked the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to prevent court challenges to a trio of laws impacting transgender youth and adults.
The clause is part of a bill now before the house, and Premier Danielle Smith says the move is necessary to protect children’s health and well-being.
She says their health could be jeopardized if challenges to the laws are tied up in court for a long time.
The notwithstanding clause allows governments to override Charter rights if deemed necessary as a way to balance the authority of both politicians and the courts.
The clause relates to laws that put restrictions on student pronoun changes at school, on girls’ and women’s sports, and on medical therapies for young people looking to transition.
Two of those bills are facing court challenges on the grounds they are harmful and unconstitutional.
Imagine choosing to spend your free time complaining about other people’s private lives. What a hobby.
The focus of much of the legal debate surrounds the law on health care. It prohibits doctors from providing treatment such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy to those under 16 for purposes of gender reassignment.
This is so cruel. They even banned fucking puberty blockers, which are essentially harmless and completely reversible. “For the purposes of gender reassignment”, of course, only cis people deserve gender affirming healthcare.
A second law makes changes in schools. It requires parents to be notified if a child under 16 wants to change their name or pronoun at school for reasons related to their gender identity. LGBTQ+ advocacy groups are also challenging that on constitutional grounds, but for now it remains in force.
This will put children with unsupportive parents in danger. These pieces of shit are putting kids in danger under the pretense that they’re “keeping them safe”.
“We cannot and will not take the risk of a child undergoing medical, hormonal or surgical interventions that could permanently limit or eliminate choices they may want to make as an adult to have children of their own one day,” Smith said.
Of course, all they care about is that people can keep having children. Classic.
She needs to be removed from the board permanently
Ah yes, now the government is deciding health care (not doctors) BY FUCKING VIOLATING YOUR CHARTER RIGHTS.
FFS
I am livid. I can not put my anger into words right now.
The “strong, Conservative woman” claims that her party doesn’t use the notwithstanding clause “unless the stakes warrant it.”
Right, because clearly the biggest threat in Alberta is trans people. Not lobby money from the oil and gas industry, not the rising cost of living, not the mental health and addictions crisis, it’s clearly a group that makes up 1% at max of the population of the province.
Calling herself a “strong woman” is so unbelievably rich when all she seems able to do is effortlessly punch down on the everyday person. Like awww, how cute, she’s fighting fucking Big Teacher and Big Hormones, fuck off. “Strength” in defending the status quo requires zero effort whatsoever as it simply means doing fuck all, and I will be unapologetic in saying that she is doing nothing but continuing women’s status as objects by acting as a mere chess piece for the male CEOs in oil and gas and other profitable industries that direct her and the UCP’s decisions through political donations.
Un-fucking-believable.
identity politics is the easiest way to give populous something they didn’t ask for but feel like they always needed it
We need to remove that clause from the Charter. The only thing it’s ever used for, is to violate people’s rights. The Charter means absolutely nothing, as long as that clause is included.
If the government has a free way to say “nah” when it comes to your rights then you don’t actually have rights.
I could not agree more. I understand the original intent, but nowadays it’s literally a “get out of fucking over your civil rights - free card”.
Unerpaid essential employee? No strikes! Your usefulness defines you as a slave, you know, unless you want to quit the industry that you have trained for and worked in.
NWC is specifically used to violate your charter rights. Where are the conservatives who scream about governments taking away personal freedoms?
Really? You used the NWC for kids wanting gender reassignment medical help, kids asking to be called different pronouns, and kids figuring out which sports team they want to play on?
The stakes could not be higher
Oh fuck off. How about homeless people dying because of hunger, or people getting shot up during armed robberies. Literally life and death shit. How is perverting what the fuck is going on in Lisa’s pants more important than dealing with crime and income inequality?
Danielle - you’ve got more important shit to deal with than focusing all your attention on kids’ genitalia
Not even the first time. IIRC this was used against (not gay marriage) Eugenics Act victims in 1998.
I misremembered.
Was it?
My memory is that gay marriage was declared unconstitutional by the Ontario Court of Appeal in July 2003. The Chrétien government of the time chose not to appeal it and instead referred a draft bill to the Supreme Court of Canada to ask them to issue a binding ruling. The government (now the Paul Martin government?) did slow things down by adding a fourth question to the referral, which even the Supreme Court called out as political bullshit. Once they came back (in late 2004) affirming that same-sex marriage needed to be legal, there was a lot of talk about using the notwithstanding clause as the only possible option to ignore their ruling. Ultimately, though, the bill legalizing gay marriage federally passed in February of 2005.
I remember in the debates during the subsequent election that Paul Martin accused Stephen Harper of planning to reverse it. Harper rolled his eyes and said that he considered the matter settled (since I think even a lot of Conservative voters were fine with it by then). Martin then promised to remove the NWC from the charter if reelected. He was not.
You’re right I misremembered. In Alberta it was briefly used against Eugenics Act victims in 1998 but was reversed pretty quickly due to public outrage.
Fuck her so much. God damn marlaina fucking fascist piece of shit
Protect them from what, Danielle?
Diverse viewpoints, I’m thinking.
Get the rocks.
Alberta? Makes sense
(I really dont think i should post this. I think im being polite enough, but I know all yall social justice warriors love to lecture people.)
Ya know. Ok, im cool enough on trans stuff. I let people live and everything. Mostly, dont bother me and ill pay you the some respects. Its the children thing… kids dont know shit. I dont think some kids should drive till 18. Some kids mature faster than other, but that also implies some lag behind. And these days… for some reason it feels like most kids are lagging right now, thats what I hear from teachers in grade school anyway. I see kids struggling. Like cant read a clock, or cant read/write in cursive. It seems like foreign language studies have decreased too. But I digress…
Lord… some of yall are gonna try to rip me open for this… im trying to be polite enough, but I hope to get my point across.
So, I watch plenty of internet video, like most. Ive watched some detransitioning videos with folks that changed their mind. These are the kids I feel real bad for, because they were asked to make a decision, but there is no way they soberly understood all the ramifications of those decisions. And that is exactly what they say. (I just watched one with a male that had full bottom surgery, but then detransitioned back) Its boils down to “informed consent” right? And im just gonna stop there… dont come down hard on me, if youre concerned about the mental/physical health of kids like me, we have common ground.
I too feel bad for the kids that are having to detransition.
But then what? What does that have to do with these laws?
You keep dancing around the issue instead of just saying it out loud: you think that, because some kids suffer with detransition, we should make it harder to get access to gender affirming care. Yes or no? If no, then cool. If yes, then you need to inform yourself on the already enormous hardship that is getting gender affirming care and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes it generates.
The vast majority of trans kids actually are trans.
Why is it more concerning that a small percentage of kids would be misdiagnosed and receive the wrong treatment, than for the majority to get established healthcare that themselves, both parents, doctors and therapists all agree on?
Why not continue to optimize medical guidelines to minimize misdiagnosis, instead of a ban for everyone who needs the medical care?
The life of someone misdiagnosed into transitioning, is effectively the same life that trans people live before treatment. It does less harm to allow transition since most trans are diagnosed correctly, and any that were wrong could still be legally allowed to transition back.
These bills are also banning puberty blockers which safely allows them to delay the decision for several years.
Anyone tired of hearing about trans people should know that going through the wrong puberty will make trans people a bigger part of your life. Not only does that make their lives permanently more difficult to have mixed gender features, but it forces them to live with unwanted gender nonconformity that will be „in your face“ throughout society.
Its a very tough call, because there is a window where you want to slow or halt puberty by your current hormones to transition, and unfortunately its the same time as developing the brain.
There are legit people who are just born and know there brain doesn’t match their assigned gender.
You will have those that may have a disphoria disorder, where the brain tricks them, like people who have alien hand syndrome. And so do you try to treat that via mental health, or do you give them relief by having a path to changing.
There will be just some kids who don’t know their belonging in the world, and feel the gender change is the answer. (We were all confused teens at some point.) These kids I feel really bad for because they may think the transition is going to solve how they feel inside, but it might not, or they might grow out of those feelings.
But back to the problem, if you ask them to wait and see if they grow out of it, you’ve lost valuable hormone time, and had them suffer unnecessarily if their outlook didn’t change.
Man Fuck MAGAlberta
