Father sentenced to 6 months for violating gag order about child's medical gender transition

Canada's prisoner of conscience, the British Columbia father who tried to prevent his child from undergoing pediatric transitioning, has been sentenced for criminal contempt of court.

Legal commentators and child protection lawyers around the world expressed alarm at this result.

On April 16, the father, whose name has been suppressed in Canadian press due to a gag order, was sentenced to six months in prison for criminal contempt of court by violating publication and identification bans.

The postal worker was also fined $30,000, the bulk of the crowdfund he raised to defend himself.

Taking into account the time already served by the convict, and the possibility of early release, the father could end up serving three to four months in prison.

The reasoning of judge Mr. Justice Tammen in imposing the sentence should shortly become available to the public.

The convicted man's response was described by his lawyer, Carey Linde, as "stoic acceptance." Given that this was his first offense, and that he pleaded guilty, saving the court the expense of a full trial, Linde and his client consider it excessive.

The convicted man will be unavailable for interviews until he has served his sentence in full.

The father was jailed for breaching a publication ban preventing him from speaking publicly about the transitioning of this child. He admitted wilfully breaching the ban, and entered a guilty plea to charges of criminal contempt.

Thus did he become a Canadian prisoner of conscience.

The circumstances leading up to those events are set out in exhaustive detail here.

This writer is not critical of the judge in this case. Members of the judiciary and the legal and medical professions are in a bind: Canadian law and medicine have been captured by transgender ideology, which makes it an act of considerable courage and selflessness to resist from within the system.

Realistically, not everyone is going to be a hero. The majority of people caught up in a corrupt system will go along to get along. Either they will be stupid enough not to realize what they are engaged in or, if they are not so fortunate, they will exonerate themselves of personal responsibility by saying they were "just following orders." Just another cog in the machine. Mortgage to pay etc.

Nonetheless, one must still point to what is happening: the court seems to invite the public to consider the child a victim of the father's attempts to protect her. Arguably, that narrative is a reversal of reality: the child might instead be a victim of the medics' and courts' failure to safeguard the child's health and fertility.

The court seems to invite the public to scapegoat the father and run him out of town, so to speak, so that the community as a whole does not have to wrestle with this particularly invidious hydra.

In my opinion—which is, admittedly, a strong one—it seeks a ritual scapegoat for the systemic evils in which it is engaged. If the father can carry the sins of the polis on his own shoulders, the medics and judges might be able to sleep better at night.

Such an approach invites a counter-reaction: resisting the scapegoating of the father, and speaking out for him in solidarity.

The scapegoating approach will not fly with Canadian parents, who are becoming increasingly vocal in the streets and on social media, in growing numbers, about their rejection of the entire transgender ideology package.

One wonders who is enabling anarchy: parents standing up for their family members and child protection, or the court which places indefensible interpretations on child protection, at the behest of vested interests which have captured the legal system.

Should the court really be an arm of an uniformed child's wish-fulfilment, under the influence of a sinister lobby which pretends it is normal to brand a child transexual and perform medical experiments on them? Is that what idealistic law students dream of?

Some argue that the father was not convicted for calling his daughter his son, but for violating the court's ban on him speaking to the public about what was happening. This seems to be missing the point. The events were cumulative in nature. The father would not have needed to speak out had the court not moved to transition his child.

The father did not cast the first stone.

On the one hand, the rule of law remains the cornerstone of democracy. It is important to respect the processes set out by law. On the other hand, where legal systems become captured and corrupted by ideology—and become the means by which an in-group disciplines ideological opponents—we have a deeper systemic problem, which points towards political upheaval.

One might even suggest that dynamic bears uncomfortable echoes of the grudge trials in mid-century Germany.

How can one respect the courts, and due process, while also opposing the abuse of state power by bad actors such as Jennifer Pritzker, and corrupt agendas such as the Yogakarta Principles? It is to such questions that human rights advocacy has traditionally provided guidance, until even those principles were corrupted by sex denialism.

Unfortunately, Canada is now in the category of nation states which organizations like ACLU and Amnesty International would once have placed on a watchlist—that is, before they too were captured by sex denialism/transgender ideology, to become the propaganda arm of that "AstroTurf" movement.

In 2021, Canada really is sterilizing lesbian, gay, autistic and depressed children, and calling that "human rights." We are in the upside-down. The false consensus enforced by the courts cannot hold. It is at odds with nature, and human kinship bonds.

Faced with the court's decision to allow his child to undergo pediatric medical gender-affirmative procedures, the father had two choices: to quietly go along with it, and seem to collude in the destruction of his child's health; or to speak out against it, thus withdrawing any possibility of collusion.

In the father's situation, ask yourself what you would do? If you quietly colluded, what could you say to your adult child when they reached maturity, desisted, detransitioned, and asked you why you didn't prevent them from being sterilized by gender quacks?

Every parent would have to face that crossroads alone, as a moral being who loves their child, and sees an undeniable social evil being inflicted on them. They might find that there is wisdom in acquiescing to that which they are powerless to change. Or they might come out swinging against the system.

They might, like this father, accept that it is too late to save their own child, but work to help save others by raising awareness.

Of course, some parents aggrieved at their child's "transitioning"—but powerless to prevent it—thread the needle of maintaining their relationship with their troubled child—and maintaining their child's anonymity—while also seeking the support and solidarity of parents in a similar predicament, hoping that criticism will eventually cause a tipping point to be reached.

The court is, of course, right that children's anonymity is of paramount importance in family proceedings. Nobody should name the child, who—like all medically gender transitioned children—is vulnerable, and has been unethically treated as a political pawn by a gender identity lobby which seeks power at the expense of child safeguarding, parental authority and the family.

At the same time, the father—who still had parental responsibilities for, and rights in relation to, his child—was left in a Catch 22 situation.

In cases such as this, where a parent challenges the state's decision to "transition" a child, the parent would have to engage in public protest anonymously. How would that even work? How would they stand any chance of successfully challenging the decision in a cultural moment where speech against sex denialism is ruthlessly suppressed?

While the clock ticked for his child, the father remained publicly silent until a hearing in early 2020. Only at that point—when the probability of reversing the decision was rapidly diminishing—did he decide to go public in an act of civil disobedience for which he has been made a prisoner of conscience.

It is easy, as an outsider, to see how things might have played differently. But to walk in the father's shoes—desperately worried, isolated, under time pressure, aware that he was standing up against nothing less than the entire Canadian state—is to see why he chose to engage in civil disobedience, which is his right as a responsible and engaged citizen.

Bad law must be protested. It is our civil duty to protest in such circumstances.

All of this said, his array of supporters seem to have in common a genuine motivation to protest the medical malpractice scandal which is being inflicted, in real time, on a generation of children. To those who accuse them of resisting wrongly, what alternative would they suggest?

Must parents wait until the perfect establishment liberal-left saviour figure decides to stand up, when there are so many material reasons for that person to keep their head below the parapet indefinitely? When things have gone too far for them to halt this juggernaut? Canadians would be waiting a long time.

We cannot afford to lose sight of the fact that there is a genuine conflict, in this case, between what can reasonably be defined as child welfare: the court & medics insist that the child's welfare means sterilization, lifelong medicalization and multiple health problems; the parent strongly disagrees, and it is not hard to see why. 85 percent of such children detransition post-puberty.

It is a hard thing for the public to judge the father's actions harshly, as it is more accurately the actions of the court and the medical system which are harsh and extreme. It is the court and the medics who have used state power to enforce the sterilization of the child—something which would have been absolutely unthinkable a few years ago.

What we are seeing is a Canadian court system captured by gender identity laws which have corrupted both language and law.

What we are seeing is power-play: look what we will do to dissidents! We will make them prisoners! Make sure you shut up and go along with these new laws, lest we do the same to you!

This story shows that, in Canada at least, parents really are powerless to prevent their children's sterilization and loss of lifelong health at the hands of gender quacks.

That's a situation which can only be remedied by campaigning to repeal gender identity and speech laws which sustain the institutional abuse of children under the banner of transgenderism.

The public's reaction to the jailing of the father was swift and decisive: while respecting judicial office, and the rule of law, in general, they did not consider the ruling just. Their chosen path is civil disobedience.

One father of a child with Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria—the type of discomfort with the sexed body which is caused by social contagion, as described in Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage—declared that the Our Duty group would refuse to remove from public view documents, shared by the father, pertaining to the child's "transitioning."

A women's group called for parents to withdraw their children from public schooling, referring to the Canadian government's tolerance of other forms of criminal abuse of children.

Parents' outright rejection of the harmful cultural practice of pediatric transitioning is already, de facto, criminalized by way of contempt of court procedures.

Soon, the Canadian courts may not need family law and criminal contempt laws to suppress speech which counters the new gender orthodoxy. They will have bespoke hate speech laws to swiftly bring the hammer down on dissident individuals.

Perhaps Canadians should have paid more attention to Meghan Murphy and Jordan Peterson (interesting that one is now a wealthy superstar, whereas the other has been driven out of the country) when they began waving a red flag, when there was still time to halt gender identity laws.

For that slowness to respond, Canadians can rightly lay the blame at the door of CBC and other liberal media organizations whose role used to be holding power to account. Now that liberalism is hegemonic, they showed an interest only in crushing dissent and smearing gender dissidents who tried to raise the alarm.

Plucky free-thinking challenger publications—like The Post Millennial—can only do so much.

Now the nation faces a steep uphill battle to reverse these invidious laws and release its institutions from cognitive capture, so that no more children are harmed by the gender cult and its acolytes.

Those watching from around the world should take note to resist gender identity legal capture before it beds in. Scrutinize every new bill proposed in parliament, right down to secondary legislation.

Scan for telltale signs—the term "gender," omitting the term "sex," messing with ordinary terms like "mother" and "pregnant woman," introducing new terms like "pregnant person," "gestating individual," "uterus-haver."

When you spot anything like this, make the biggest noise you can: lobby politicians, get all the press, blog and social media coverage you can, organize with like-minded groups of people at local and national level. Stop the bill becoming law.

If you lose this battle, you might end up like Canada—once a beacon, now an object lesson.