Towards the erasure of the mention of sex
A very disturbing judgment was rendered on January 28 at the Superior Court of Quebec, which deals a blow to the legal notion of sex. Words like woman and man, mother and father, are deemed to discriminate against non-binary people.
Several articles of the Civil Code are invalidated due to the presence of the words "sex", "mother", "father". Even if the articles of the Civil Code already allow these words to be interpreted according to gender identity rather than biological sex, even if the Attorney General proposes to replace, on request, the words mother and father by "filiation" ( paragraph [177]), even if it undertook to issue birth certificates that do not include a designation of sex, the articles of the Civil Code would nevertheless be unconstitutional, because they would make invisible non-binary persons who do not identify neither as female nor as male, or both.
Thus, this judgment tends to remove the binarity of the sexes from the civil status register. However, if the categories men / women no longer exist, the very principle of gender equality becomes null and void. How can we continue, under these conditions, to defend women's rights based on sex? What happens to women's sports, toilets, locker rooms or single-sex shelters? What happens to women's prisons? How can we continue to promote employment equity or combat violence against women?
Transgender and non-binary people must benefit from all the protective measures to which they are entitled against discrimination. But that does not mean the legal negation of the concept of sex.
Several articles of the judgment (cf [37]) suggest that gender, and not sex, is the true identity of the person. However, different people have different definitions of gender, gender identity or non-binarity. Shouldn't a civil identity be based on a characteristic with a common linguistic acceptance? In the law, the definition given is circular (free translation from English of paragraph [2]): "Gender refers to the kind that a person feels internally and / or to the kind that a person expresses publicly in their daily life, including at work, while shopping or accessing other services, in their neighborhood or in the community at large. »Is it not astonishing that thus defined, the gender is considered, in the judgment,as an intrinsic characteristic of the person, along with “race”, sex or national origin?
Several articles of the Civil Code are invalidated due to the presence of the words "sex", "mother", "father". Even if the articles of the Civil Code already allow these words to be interpreted according to gender identity rather than biological sex, even if the Attorney General proposes to replace, on request, the words mother and father by "filiation" ( paragraph [177]), even if it undertook to issue birth certificates that do not include a designation of sex, the articles of the Civil Code would nevertheless be unconstitutional, because they would make invisible non-binary persons who do not identify neither as female nor as male, or both.
Thus, this judgment tends to remove the binarity of the sexes from the civil status register. However, if the categories men / women no longer exist, the very principle of gender equality becomes null and void. How can we continue, under these conditions, to defend women's rights based on sex? What happens to women's sports, toilets, locker rooms or single-sex shelters? What happens to women's prisons? How can we continue to promote employment equity or combat violence against women?
Transgender and non-binary people must benefit from all the protective measures to which they are entitled against discrimination. But that does not mean the legal negation of the concept of sex.
Several articles of the judgment (cf [37]) suggest that gender, and not sex, is the true identity of the person. However, different people have different definitions of gender, gender identity or non-binarity. Shouldn't a civil identity be based on a characteristic with a common linguistic acceptance? In the law, the definition given is circular (free translation from English of paragraph [2]): "Gender refers to the kind that a person feels internally and / or to the kind that a person expresses publicly in their daily life, including at work, while shopping or accessing other services, in their neighborhood or in the community at large. »Is it not astonishing that thus defined, the gender is considered, in the judgment,as an intrinsic characteristic of the person, along with “race”, sex or national origin?
The assertion (paragraph [106]) to the effect that gender identity is an immutable characteristic of the person from an early age contravenes what psychology explains concerning the development of young people and contradicts the fact that 61 to 98% (according to scientific papers) of children with gender dysphoria no longer identify as transgender at some point in adolescence or early adulthood .
Consequences on young people
The judge asks the government to consider abolishing the need for a young person aged 14 to 17 to consult a health professional before requesting a change of designation of sex. How can this demand be reconciled with the government's responsibility to protect young people? How to ensure that you understand the specific situation of each young person and avoid a hype, as happened in the UK which has seen a 1000% increase in children identifying themselves as transgender, in six years?
The UK Department of Health's gender clinic has had to change its practices following a lawsuit it lost last December against Keira Bell, a young "detransitioner" who said the clinic Should have further probed her decision to become a man when she was 16.
Despite this, an expert heard in the judgment of last Thursday in Montreal affirms (paragraph [270]) that a health professional can, in a few seconds, ask a child if he is transgender and obtain a satisfactory answer. . How not to be scandalized by such a declaration which not only contravenes the code of ethics of psychologists, but above all tends to ignore the myriad of reasons that can lead a young person to call himself the other sex , the co-factors. morbidity often associated with gender dysphoria such as autism or depression, childhood trauma, or unacknowledged homosexuality? A few seconds are enough to know? Really?
It is also not very serious that no specialist in gender dysphoria, nor any psychotherapist favoring an exploratory psychology approach, has been auditioned. No nuance, either, is made in the judgment on the notion of a young person's consent to change sex, thus ignoring the fact that social transition is part of a gender affirmative approach that generally continues through gender reassignment. taking puberty blockers, then cross-sex hormones with serious lifelong medical implications. The London ruling says it is unlikely that a child under the age of 16 could give informed consent to treatment with puberty blockers.
Because of these serious deficiencies which undermine the possibility of a truly enlightened consensus in the face of this judgment with serious consequences, we, the collective of parents, urge the government to appeal to it in order to better protect the well-being of our young people. , and defend women's rights and gender equality.
Nadia El-Mabrouk
School Service Center (CSS) of Montreal
Mélanie Audet
CSS des Samares
Stéphanie Baron
CSS from Montreal
Philippe Blackburn
CSS from Montreal
Cochise Brunet-Trait
CSS des Trois Lacs
Dominique Caron
CSS for Energy
Shirley Christensen CSS side
of the Discoverers
François Dugré
CSS des Patriotes
Philippe Dujardin
CSS of Montreal
Daniel Gagnon
CSS of the Premieres-Seigneuries
Milène Girard
CSS Lac-Saint-Jean
Ruth Lamontagne
CSS de Montreal
Christine Lauzon
CSS Vallée-des-Tisserands
Denis LeBlanc
CSS de Rouyn-Noranda
Caroline Morgan
CSS Marie Victorin
Guillaume Paradis
CSS des Patriotes
Olivia Pelka
CSS des Samares
Ginette Pelletier
CSS de la Pointe-de-l'Île
Bertrand Plante
CSS des Premieres-Seigneuries
Sylvain Plourde
CSS de la Pointe-de-l'Île
Christian Sabourin
CSS from Montreal
Stéphane Tremblay
CSS des Hautes-Rivières
Consequences on young people
The judge asks the government to consider abolishing the need for a young person aged 14 to 17 to consult a health professional before requesting a change of designation of sex. How can this demand be reconciled with the government's responsibility to protect young people? How to ensure that you understand the specific situation of each young person and avoid a hype, as happened in the UK which has seen a 1000% increase in children identifying themselves as transgender, in six years?
The UK Department of Health's gender clinic has had to change its practices following a lawsuit it lost last December against Keira Bell, a young "detransitioner" who said the clinic Should have further probed her decision to become a man when she was 16.
Despite this, an expert heard in the judgment of last Thursday in Montreal affirms (paragraph [270]) that a health professional can, in a few seconds, ask a child if he is transgender and obtain a satisfactory answer. . How not to be scandalized by such a declaration which not only contravenes the code of ethics of psychologists, but above all tends to ignore the myriad of reasons that can lead a young person to call himself the other sex , the co-factors. morbidity often associated with gender dysphoria such as autism or depression, childhood trauma, or unacknowledged homosexuality? A few seconds are enough to know? Really?
It is also not very serious that no specialist in gender dysphoria, nor any psychotherapist favoring an exploratory psychology approach, has been auditioned. No nuance, either, is made in the judgment on the notion of a young person's consent to change sex, thus ignoring the fact that social transition is part of a gender affirmative approach that generally continues through gender reassignment. taking puberty blockers, then cross-sex hormones with serious lifelong medical implications. The London ruling says it is unlikely that a child under the age of 16 could give informed consent to treatment with puberty blockers.
Because of these serious deficiencies which undermine the possibility of a truly enlightened consensus in the face of this judgment with serious consequences, we, the collective of parents, urge the government to appeal to it in order to better protect the well-being of our young people. , and defend women's rights and gender equality.
Nadia El-Mabrouk
School Service Center (CSS) of Montreal
Mélanie Audet
CSS des Samares
Stéphanie Baron
CSS from Montreal
Philippe Blackburn
CSS from Montreal
Cochise Brunet-Trait
CSS des Trois Lacs
Dominique Caron
CSS for Energy
Shirley Christensen CSS side
of the Discoverers
François Dugré
CSS des Patriotes
Philippe Dujardin
CSS of Montreal
Daniel Gagnon
CSS of the Premieres-Seigneuries
Milène Girard
CSS Lac-Saint-Jean
Ruth Lamontagne
CSS de Montreal
Christine Lauzon
CSS Vallée-des-Tisserands
Denis LeBlanc
CSS de Rouyn-Noranda
Caroline Morgan
CSS Marie Victorin
Guillaume Paradis
CSS des Patriotes
Olivia Pelka
CSS des Samares
Ginette Pelletier
CSS de la Pointe-de-l'Île
Bertrand Plante
CSS des Premieres-Seigneuries
Sylvain Plourde
CSS de la Pointe-de-l'Île
Christian Sabourin
CSS from Montreal
Stéphane Tremblay
CSS des Hautes-Rivières
Journal de Montréal
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