By Mia Hughes, November 4, 2025
In 2002, the Northwest Territories became the first jurisdiction in Canada to add gender identity to its Human Rights Act as a prohibited ground of discrimination. In the 15 years that followed, every Canadian province and territory followed suit, culminating in the federal Bill C-16, which added gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code in 2017.
These legislative landmarks were intended to be progressive – modernizing and strengthening human rights protections for an oppressed minority. Yet the new laws came with repercussions that were scarcely considered by the lawmakers who championed them, despite at least some being entirely predictable.
By the time C-16 reached Parliament, every Canadian province had added gender identity as a protected characteristic, so the federal amendment was widely viewed as an administrative step to ensure consistency across jurisdictions: a nothing-to-see-here bureaucratic move.
However, this obscured a critical oversight: that no provincial legislature had any clear definition of what gender identity actually is, nor did any examine what the impact would be of its collision with the existing protected ground of sex.
In short, governments across Canada wrote into law an activist-crafted concept that lacks any grounding in evidence – one that has profound implications for women’s rights, legal clarity, and the material basis of equality itself.
The undefined characteristic
Few Canadians realize that when Parliament passed Bill C-16, it added gender identity to federal law without ever defining the term. Neither the bill nor the subsequent amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act or the Criminal Code included a statutory definition, leaving policymakers, tribunals, and courts to rely on provincial codes and federal policy documents for guidance.
One such definition is from the federal Department of Justice, which defines gender identity as “each person’s internal and individual experience of gender…their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum,” which “may be the same as or different from the gender typically associated with their sex assigned at birth.”
This definition is conceptually incoherent – an unfalsifiable statement about an internal sense of self with no legal clarity. Gender identity is also unique in how it permits individuals to assert inner identities that contradict observable reality while framing it as “discrimination” when others refuse to treat that claim as objectively true.
This stands in stark contrast to other protected grounds that also rely on some degree of self-declaration, such as sexual orientation or religion, because in those cases, protection from discrimination does not involve compelling society to affirm claims inconsistent with what an observer perceives to be true.
An apt analogy would be a man in a happy heterosexual marriage, with no history of same-sex attraction or relationships, simply declaring himself gay and alleging discrimination when others decline to believe him.
The origins of gender identity
The term gender identity has evolved in meaning since it was first coined by psychiatrists Robert Stoller and Ralph Greenson in 1964. Then, it was a theoretical concept – an attempt by early researchers in the fledgling field of gender medicine to make sense of what motivated a tiny number of individuals to identify as members of the opposite sex and seek medical interventions. The theory was not based on biology, robust scientific research, or empirical evidence; it was an idea, better thought of as a philosophical framework rather than a scientific concept.
It was first introduced as a pseudo-legal concept in the International Bill of Gender Rights, drawn up by early trans activists in 1995 in Houston Texas. This non-legally binding document stated that individuals have the right to define their own gender identity and that “[a]ll human beings have the right to control their bodies, which includes the right to change their bodies cosmetically, chemically, or surgically, so as to express a self-defined gender identity.”
The concept next surfaced in the Northwest Territories Human Rights Act in 2002, marking its first appearance in law. It gained further traction with the 2006 Yogyakarta Principles – a non-binding document drafted by trans activists and human rights experts in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
The principles asserted a universal right to self-declare one’s gender identity and to obtain medical interventions on that basis. Though lacking legal force, the document was explicitly designed as a template for governments to embed “gender identity” within domestic and international legal frameworks. Of note, the various definitions of gender identity used by official government bodies in Canada are drawn almost verbatim from the Yogyakarta Principles.
The real world impact
The impact of adding this politically-crafted concept into Canadian law has been far-reaching. Most obvious is the impact on the sex-based right of women and girls to the privacy and safety of female-only spaces. These spaces fall into two broad categories: institutionally regulated environments – such as prisons, shelters, and hospital wards – and self-policing settings like bathrooms and changing rooms.
Following the passage of Bill C-16 in 2017, the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) introduced significant policy reforms, allowing inmates to be housed according to gender identity rather than biological sex. Placement decisions are currently made case-by-case, guided by the offender’s self-declared gender identity, with “health or safety concerns” taken into account.
Yet, despite such assurances, there are reports of assaults by trans-identified males who are housed in the female estate, and CSC data showing that a significant share of transferred male inmates have histories of violent or sexual offences.
Similarly, hospital wards, shelters, and rape-crisis centres are now largely segregated according to gender identity, allowing males to self-declare a female identity and be permitted to access facilities designated for women. These are services sought by women in a compromised state of either illness, trauma, or significant vulnerability, when the need for the privacy and dignity of single-sex spaces is at its highest.
The same logic extends to bathrooms and changing rooms, which operate as self-policing environments. Human rights commissions instruct service providers to prioritize gender identity over sex to mitigate discrimination risk. What this means in practical terms is that any man can walk into a female-only bathroom or changing room, and if challenged, can claim possession of a female gender identity.
In short, the collision between these two protected characteristics is inherently zero-sum: advancing one inevitably nullifies the other. Segregating spaces by gender identity eliminates the very foundation of single-sex protection, because the moment a male is granted entry to a female-only space, that space is, by definition, no longer female-only. Yet, statistics from all over the world show that the overwhelming majority of violent crime and sex offences are committed by males, making female-only spaces not a privilege but an essential safety measure to protect women and girls.
The inclusion of gender identity as a protected ground also spilled over into sport, with national sporting organizations adopting policies allowing males who self-declare female gender identities to compete in women’s categories to avoid discrimination claims. This shift ignored the well-established physical advantages of male athletes, producing both absurd and unsafe outcomes – such as males competing in women’s powerlifting and full-contact rugby against female players.
That none of the lawmakers who enshrined gender identity in Canadian law foresaw its collision with sex-based rights is striking. Yet in 2021, one of the original signatories of the Yogyakarta Principles – Robert Wintemute, a Canadian and professor of human rights law at King’s College London – offered an explanation of how this oversight occurred.
Reflecting on the 2006 drafting meeting in Indonesia, Wintemute admitted that neither he nor his co-signatories considered the implications for women’s rights. “If I had thought through the implications,” he said, “I would have had to consider the potential for conflict with women’s rights, but I didn’t.” To his recollection, “women’s rights weren’t raised” at all.
Nor did lawmakers consider the chaos that would follow from allowing self-declared gender identity to replace biological sex on official documents – including the introduction of an “X” category for “non-binary” identities. This policy effectively permits the falsification of legal records and has compromised the reliability of vital datasets. As a result, biological males who self-identify as female may now appear as women in correctional and crime statistics, obscuring patterns of male violence and undermining evidence-based policymaking.
Gender identity in the classroom: A safeguarding failure
There is another downstream effect of giving the activist-crafted concept of gender identity legitimacy in Canadian law that is often overlooked. As gender identity was added to provincial human rights codes, it began appearing in school board policies and educational materials. This newly minted concept was then taught to children as if it were a scientific fact rather than a political construct, and schools were instructed to organize facilities and programs according to gender identity instead of biological sex.
The result was that it became a widely accepted “fact” that children and adolescents possess gender identities and that some youth could therefore be “transgender.” Yet no biological basis for gender identity has ever been demonstrated. The concept lacks scientific validity or empirical grounding.
By contrast, there are well-established psychological and social explanations for why individuals adopt transgender identities: erotic fixation on the self as female in some adult males; internalized homophobia or discomfort with gender non-conformity among same-sex-attracted individuals; psychiatric comorbidities or neurodiversity interpreted through a cultural script of gender identity ideology; and, in many adolescents, the ordinary turbulence of puberty being misread as evidence of a transgender identity.
The recent surge of adolescents identifying as transgender is far more plausibly explained by these psychosocial mechanisms than by any oversimplified identity concept. This is further reinforced by the patterns of peer clustering, elevated comorbidity, and growing evidence of desistance that have been observed over the past decade in trans-identified adolescents that align with recognized processes of social contagion and identity formation.
These evidence-based explanations are especially relevant to school-aged youth, whose identities are still developing and highly susceptible to social influence. The oversimplified “gender identity” narrative obscures these realities and introduces significant risk – particularly when ideological teachings have the potential to lead confused or distressed young people towards irreversible medical interventions.
Child safeguarding requires that educational and health institutions protect minors from political ideologies lacking an evidence-based foundation. In this context, the failure to distinguish scientific understanding from activist belief has placed an entire generation at risk of lifelong medical harm.
This was compounded by the passage of Bill C-4 in 2021, which criminalized “conversion therapy.” Though intended to prevent coercion, its sweeping language effectively banned any therapeutic exploration of gender distress if it intended to help a young person to reconcile with their sex – further entrenching gender identity in criminal law and closing the door to ethical psychotherapeutic care.
At its core, this safeguarding failure stems from the same original policy error: elevating a politically manufactured idea to the status of a protected human characteristic through its inclusion in Canadian law.
Revisiting what was overlooked
Toby’s Law, the private member’s bill that enshrined gender identity in the Ontario Human Rights Code in 2012 was the work of then-NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo. In her 2021 book, DiNovo spoke about the far-reaching consequences of that law, and while her statement echoes that of Wintemute, it shows no hint of regret.
“The rights won by Toby’s Law represented a major victory,” said DiNovo. “The law impacted the way our entire province did business, everything from identity cards to prison practice. I don’t believe for an instant that the government realized the scope of that one change to the Human Rights Code. I’m glad they didn’t look too closely.”
That frank admission captures the very essence of the problem. Gender identity entered Canadian law not through rigorous analysis or scientific validation, but through political momentum and moral enthusiasm. Lawmakers did not ask what the concept meant, how it would interact with sex-based rights, or what its downstream effects might be for policy coherence, data collection, or child safeguarding.
Now, more than a decade later, it falls to today’s policymakers to do what their predecessors neglected to do: examine the validity of the concept, assess its real-world impact on women’s rights and child protection, and act to restore clarity, coherence, and reason to Canada’s legal framework.
Mia Hughes specializes in researching pediatric gender medicine, psychiatric epidemics, social contagion and the intersection of trans rights and women’s rights. She is the author of “The WPATH Files,” a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and director of Genspect Canada.
