When reporting on the dystopian, authoritarian Canadian law C16, passed in 2017 and mandating that government employees and businesses regulated by the Canadian government use all pronouns that visitors demand, this writer had not considered the implications for free speech in Canadian courts.
Now, we have the shocking answer - and in the form of speech martyr and lexicon leper, Robert Hoogland, who hails from Surrey, British Columbia, and who was jailed Tuesday and now awaits an April 13 trial for contempt of court.
All because, in continued defiance of 2019 court commands during a hearing on whether his now 16-year-old daughter should be given dangerous puberty-blockers against his wishes, divorced father Hoogland once more used gender-appropriate pronouns in court.
And he kept using the “evil” word “daughter” to describe…well, his own daughter.
Writes Erin Perse, for The Post Millennial:
Hoogland opposes his child's undergoing ‘gender affirmative’ medical procedures, and has stated this opposition again and again, in the hope of saving his child from irreversible harm. The Canadian medical system, the legal system, and the child's mother press ahead with social and medical transition of the child.
It’s a horror story that goes back years, as Perse explains:
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 counsellor. 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.
And then, in 2019, Hoogland discovered that the school had been propagandizing his daughter beyond the typical political propaganda. The government-backed narrative had expanded to “gender” choice.
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 (sic) to transgender ideology ‘propaganda videos.’ In the grade 7 yearbook, the child was referred to by a different name. The school counsellor changed the child's (school) 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 and his daughter met with Wong, and Wong recommended visits with a local hospital, where the endocrine unit would administer testosterone injections to inhibit her female development.
On the child's first visits to the hospital, a treatment plan was put into action. Both the child, and her mother—Hoogland's ex-wife—signed a consent form which explicitly stated that the ‘treatment’ was experimental, meaning that the endocrinologists recommending the treatment didn't know the long-term health impact.
And yet, after Hoogland tried to stop the action, in late February of 2019, the BC Supreme Court ruled in favor of administering the hormone.
(British Columbia Supreme Court) Justice Boden decided that the child's best interests lay in destroying her long-term health to make her body appear more like that of a male.
Hoogland, in contrast, thinks his daughter's best interests lie in preserving his child's health, in case his child ends up among the estimated 85 percent of children who desist in their belief that they are the opposite sex once puberty ends.
That was the first phase, in 2019.
Boden's court held that the father's consent was irrelevant. The judge went a step further, declaring that the girl's parents must affirm their child's ‘gender identity,’ and refer to the child as though the fact of her being a gender non-conforming biological female who identifies as transgender means that the child is a boy. If he did not, the parents would be implicated of the criminal offense of family violence.
Which presents a question, among the infinite number that could be posed: might one ask the Canadian public schools and courts if Hoogland’s daughter had said she wanted to be called an astronaut, or an alien, or a bumble bee, would they have done so?
All of those would be as logical or biologically correct as calling her a male.
Hoogland opposed the child abuse, and on the night of the ruling, engaged in a pseudonymous interview with the Federalist, which saw him convicted by the court of “family violence” for using the wrong pronouns, and saw BC Supreme Court Justice Francesca Marzari command that police arrest Hoogland without warrant should he use female pronouns or refer to his daughter as his daughter again.
In January, Hoogland saw his appeal of the testosterone ruling heard in the BC Supreme Court, and, again, he saw the court rule in favor of the child abuse, with the added twist that Hoogland continue to acknowledge and refer to his daughter as male.
But Hoogland would not back down, and said in a Feb 2020 interview:
They’ve now created a delusion, and are forcing parents to live in this delusion. And then what happens when the bubble explodes and this delusion ends?
That interview was deemed verboten by the Canadian government and removed from the web. Hoogland proceeded to sit for two other interviews, in which he explained the situation, called his daughter just that, and used the pronouns forbidden by the court.
This did not sit well with the government, which, as the Federalist notes,promptly insisted that those interviews be removed from the web, as well.
So much for his freedom of speech, and that of the people running the websites.
According to the Post Millennial:
On December 14, 2020, Hoogland was compelled by (BC Supreme Court) Justice (Francesca) Marzari's court to collude in the gender ‘transitioning’ of his fourteen year old daughter and told not to call his biological female child his daughter.
In fact, Marzari commanded that police arrest Hoogland if he should ever refer to his daughter as his daughter again.
In response, Hoogland made a Charter (the Canadian Charter of 1867) challenge engaging his right to freedom of speech.
And, instead of being treated fairly in civil court, Hoogland was treated like a criminal.
When he appeared in family court, the judge forced him to sit in the prisoners' dock, 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.
And now, Hoogland, who insisted on using the language correctly and is standing valiantly for his daughter, faces five years in prison for violating a court order that runs contrary to reality.
As a result, the Attorney General of British Columbia issued an arrest warrant for contempt, following which Hoogland surrendered himself to the court on Tuesday at 10 am. He was arrested and taken to jail.
His trial is scheduled from April 13-16, and he could be sentenced to five years in prison, by which time his daughter will be 21.
Said Hooglandof what is being done to her:
She can never go back to being a girl in the healthy body she should have had… These kids don't understand. What kind of 13 year old is thinking about having a family and kids?
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