Father jailed in Canada for using incorrect pronouns

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Liberal professor Dr. Jordan Peterson rose to international acclaim for opposing Bill C-16 in Canada in 2016.

The law required Canadians to use an individual’s preferred pronouns. He didn’t object to the gender issue per see, just the compelled speech.

The bill passed into law on June 16, 2017.

On March 16, 2021, at 10 a.m., Robert Hoogland surrendered himself to the court after a warrant was issued for his arrest by the attorney general of British Columbia. His crime was to call his daughter, a biological female,  by female pronouns, and refusing to affirm her medical transition to become a trans male.

The Post Millennial first reported the story and it is tragic. An excerpt:

When he appeared in family court, the judge forced him to sit in the prisoners’ dock, said Hoogland’s lawyer. Carey Lind said, even though he was guilty of no crime. The judge referred to him as “the accused.” Lind made an application for the judge to recuse himself on the basis that all of this was prejudicial.

Hoogland told his story. The child had complex problems, but the court blamed them all on gender dysphoria. His marriage to the child’s mother had broken up. He said that, in grades 5 and 6, his daughter was “getting into trouble and hanging out with boys,” so they arranged for her to see the school counselor. In grade 7, he noticed she cut off her long hair and started wearing a toupé. He said that she developed intense crushes on two male teachers, and made a suicide attempt.

Hoogland discovered that the school had been showing his daughter SOGI 123, the going sexual and gender identity education materials in British Columbia which amounts to transgender ideology “propaganda videos.” In the grade 7 yearbook, the child was referred to by a different name. The school counselor changed the child’s name without telling her parents. The school “socially transitioned” the biologically female child on its own initiative, with the input of a gender ideologue psychologist, Dr. Wallace Wong.

[…]

Hoogland gave an interview to The Federalist saying that people cannot change sex, and that mega-doses of exogenous testosterone would damage his vulnerable, biological female child’s health.

Justice Mazari then summarily convicted Hoogland of family violence on the basis that he had declined to use his child’s preferred masculine pronouns. Mazari authorized a warrant for Hoogland’s arrest in the event that he ever used the correct sex pronouns to refer to his daughter again.

Dr. Peterson said it was “inevitable.”

Since the officials used contempt of court as a cover, some are trying to say that is why he is in jail. Dr. Peterson is having none of it. Obviously, Dr. Peterson is correct. The man would not have been imprisoned were it not for the pronoun law.


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