By Clare Marie Merkowsky
‘I think the court was in error,’ Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has said. ‘There will be irreparable harm to children who get sterilized.’
LGBT activists have won an injunction that prevents the Alberta government from restricting “gender transitions” for children.
On June 27, Alberta King’s Court Justice Allison Kuntz granted a temporary injunction against legislation that prohibited minors under the age of 16 from undergoing irreversible sex-change surgeries or taking puberty blockers.
“The evidence shows that singling out health care for gender diverse youth and making it subject to government control will cause irreparable harm to gender diverse youth by reinforcing the discrimination and prejudice that they are already subjected to,” Kuntz claimed in her judgment.
Kuntz further said that the legislation poses serious Charter issues which need to be worked through in court before the legislation could be enforced. Court dates for the arguments have yet to be set.
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Alberta’s new legislation, which was passed in December, amends the Health Act to “prohibit regulated health professionals from performing sex reassignment surgeries on minors.”
The legislation would also ban the “use of puberty blockers and hormone therapies for the treatment of gender dysphoria or gender incongruence” to kids 15 years of age and under “except for those who have already commenced treatment and would allow for minors aged 16 and 17 to choose to commence puberty blockers and hormone therapies for gender reassignment and affirmation purposes with parental, physician and psychologist approval.”
Just days after the legislation was passed, an LGBT activist group called Egale Canada, along with many other LGBT organizations, filed an injunction to block the bill.
In her ruling, Kuntz argued that Alberta’s legislation “will signal that there is something wrong with or suspect about having a gender identity that is different than the sex you were assigned at birth.”
She further claimed that preventing minors from making life-altering decisions could inflict emotional damage.
However, the province of Alberta argued that these damages are speculative and the process of gender-transitioning children is not supported by scientific evidence.
“I think the court was in error,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said on her Saturday radio show. “That’s part of the reason why we’re taking it to court. The court had said there will be irreparable harm if the law goes ahead. I feel the reverse. I feel there will be irreparable harm to children who get sterilized at the age of 10 years old – and so we want those kids to have their day in court.”
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Overwhelming evidence shows that persons who undergo so-called “gender transitioning” procedures are more likely to commit suicide than those who are not given such irreversible surgeries. In addition to catering to a false reality that one’s sex can be changed, trans surgeries and drugs have been linked to permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, loss of bone density, cancer, strokes and blood clots, and infertility.
Meanwhile, a recent study on the side effects of “sex change” surgeries discovered that 81 percent of those who have undergone them in the past five years reported experiencing pain simply from normal movements in the weeks and months that followed, among many other negative side effects.
