Panel hears pangender’s grievances over identity

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This article was published 01/04/2019 (2523 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEING harassed in public washrooms, accused of fraudulently using someone else’s identification, and facing suspicious looks at medical clinics. Even applying for a passport is out of reach.

Being forced to identify as male or female when you’re not either is discriminatory in Canada, and goes well beyond feeling “misunderstood, invisible or unwelcome,” a pangender individual testified at a Manitoba Human Rights Adjudication Panel hearing Monday.

What T.A. — under a publication ban, the individual can only be identified by their initials or by the pronouns they, them or their — wants is the right to not use an “M” or an “F” on their birth certificate.

T.A.’s lawyer argues the province’s human rights code allows for the flexibility, but no one has ever challenged the practice of designating babies at birth as male or female in Manitoba.

“This is about identity documents and how identity documents that include sex designations affect the transgender community,” said T.A.’s lawyer, Susan Ursel, with Toronto-based Ursel Phillips Fellows and Hopkinson LLP.

“We’re talking about the birth certificate in this case, and the birth certificate contains a sex designation of M or F. It’s a binary identification. Our client doesn’t identify in binary categories. Our client identifies as pangender and we say that’s… their personal gender expression, which is protected under (the province’s human rights) code.”

The hearing was ordered by the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, following a complaint filed in 2015.

T.A. testified to a lifetime of struggles with depression, anxiety and related mental health issues dating to childhood; all of it rooted in a gender identity assigned at birth that didn’t fit.

“I was aware growing up about the binary assignment and for the most part I complied, but I felt uncomfortable with it,” they said. “Whenever I would stray from that designation, I was frequently met with scorn, disdain and ridicule.

“When I’m required to produce a form of identification, if (it’s) perceived there is an incongruity, I have frequently been subject to invasive questioning. There have even been cases whether it is my rightful documentation, whether I have the right to possess my own documents.”

Others who identify as transgendered or pangendered in Canada lead lives of exclusion from social norms and often end up underemployed, unemployed, in poverty or homeless, the tribunal heard.

T.A. has since left the province and obtained a driver’s licence and a health card that recognizes neither the male or female sex designation.

Across Canada, provincial jurisdictions which issue health cards, driver’s licences and basic fundamental identification papers such as birth certificates are finding gender designations under challenge.

In Saskatchewan, a court in Regina last year ordered the province to allow for the removal of gender markers from birth certificates.

After two human rights complaints in recent years, Ontario began adding X as a gender marker in addition to M or F on birth certificates in 2018. Alberta amended its legislation to allow for the non-binary markers, and both the Northwest Territories and Newfoundland-Labrador also allow for the non-binary designations on birth certificates.

This case brings the issue to Manitoba.

The hearing is scheduled to continue through Thursday.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca