Here is Mia Hughes' opening statement:
start
Mia Hughes: So the topic of this evening's event is gender identity, the evidence and the impact. In 2002, the Northwest Territories became the first jurisdiction in Canada to add gender identity to its Human Rights Act. Unbeknownst to Canadians, that was the moment our nation began its descent into chaos, when the most basic facts about human existence began to be dismantled. and the sex-based protections of women and girls started to crumble.
Over the next 15 years, every province and territory added gender identity to human rights codes despite having no clear definition of what the term means. In 2017, the federal government brought the era to a close with Bill C16, adding gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. Along the way, no law maker paused to ask what would happen if a self-declared identity with no objective measures became a protected characteristic in Canadian law. No one considered how it
might affect the rights of women and girls.
When objections were raised, they were ignored or dismissed as hate and bigotry. It's astounding to me that gender identity was enshrined in federal law without ever being defined. Neither Bill C16 nor the amen the amendments that followed supplied a definition, leaving policy makers and courts tribunals to rely on provincial codes or federal departments for a definition.
One such definition is that of the Department of Justice, which I'll read to you now in full. Brace yourselves.
The Department of Justice Canada defines gender identity as each 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. For some persons, their gender identity is different from the gender typically associated with their sex assigned at birth. This is often described as transgender or simply trans.
This is incoherent activist gibberish, an unscientific, unfalsifiable concept with no objective criteria or legal clarity. By contrast, every other protected characteristic in Canada, such as sex, race, age, sexual orientation is objective, objectively verifiable and clearly defined.
So what happens when you structure society around subjective feelings rather than material reality? You erode the vital safeguards that depend on reality, namely the sex-based protections essential to the privacy, safety, and protection of women and girls. Because in truth, gender identity as a protected characteristic permits any male to self-declare a female gender identity and access female only spaces.
This is astonishing when you consider that male people commit most sex offences and female people make up most of their victims. In Canadian prisons, inmates now have the option to be housed based on self-declared gender identity. And this policy has allowed violent male criminals, including those convicted of murder and sexual assault, to transfer into the female estate.
In women's shelters, rape crisis centers, and hospital wards, women in states of extreme vulnerability find themselves forced to share intimate spaces with males. And in everyday self-p policing spaces such as bathrooms and changing rooms, women must accept the presence of men. Knowing that questioning or challenging a man's self-declared female identity could be considered discrimination or hate. The fact of the matter is the two protected characteristics, sex and gender identity, cannot coexist.
It's not logically possible to protect both. Instead, it's a zero sum situation. Protecting one inevitably nullifies the other.
But tonight, I'll also argue that the concept of a gender identity is a dangerous oversimplification. One that ultimately does more harm than good even to those who identify as transgender because it it condenses a complex array of psychological, developmental, and social phenomena into one single label.
Within this category, there are adult males with an erotic fixation on being female, homosexuals with internalized homophobia, adolescence with neurodeiversity, psychiatric comorbidities, or developmental confusion. All adopting a one-size-fits-all label that comes with a drastic medical pathway as a remedy. Which brings me to another downstream effect of giving gender identity legitimacy in law that rarely gets mentioned.
Once cemented into our human rights code, the concept was then able to migrate into our schools. Children as young as kindergarten… children as young as kindergarten…. in kindergarten who still believe in Father Christmas are told that they have gender identities that they can choose whether they're boys or girls. There are posters adorning classrooms that declare there can be male women, female men, humans of both sexes or no sex at all. And this is not presented to children as a belief or a political ideology but a scientific fact. And no one responsible for safeguarding stopped to question what would be the consequences of untethering an entire generation of children from reality.
From our vantage point in 2025, the catastrophic effects are undeniable. We now have legions of confused young people thinking they have a mismatched gender identity and therefore need body parts chopped off who find themselves in the hands of a field of medicine also affected by gender identity being enshrined into our law. Because in 2021, our government further entrenched the concept with the passage of Bill C4, the so-called conversion therapy ban that forbids efforts to help distressed youth reconcile with their sex and avert the need for medical intervention.
So, I've often asked myself, you know, how could no one foresee the absolute chaos on the horizon? But Sheri Denovo, the NDP MPP, who introduced gender identity into Ontario's human rights code in 2012, actually provides the answer in 2021 in her 2021 memoir, noting how her private members bill impacted the way our entire province did business. She had this to say.
I don't believe for an instant that the government realized the scope of that one change. I'm glad they didn't look too closely.
That candid 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, what it how it would interact with sex-based rights, or what downstream effects the it might have on policy coherence or child safeguarding. So, here we are more than a decade later, finally having the conversation that should have happened before gender identity was written into law. And because we're doing it backwards, there are those who frame even asking questions or raising concerns as discrimination or hate.
Which brings me to my final point. Adding gender identity as a protected characteristic in law hasn't just conflicted with the rights of women and girls and and the right of children to a childhood grounded in truth. It also conflicts with the fundamental rights enshrined in our charter of rights and freedoms because everyone is expected to believe or pretend to believe in a person's self-declared gender identity or risk being accused of hate and discrimination.
Now, don't get me wrong, everyone in a free democratic society is entitled to hold any belief that they choose. If someone wishes to believe that they possess a gender identity that doesn't match their sexed body, that's their right.
But what many people seem to have forgotten is that with freedom of belief comes the freedom not to believe.
So I'm going to lay my cards on the table and say that I do not believe in the existence of gender identities and I won't pretend that I do. And I also make no apologies for that because non-belief is not discrimination and non-belief is not hate. The right to question, to disagree, even to offend is the bedrock of democracy. And so for the sake of women's rights, child protection, and medical safeguarding, it's essential that we now have this gender identity debate openly, honestly, and without fear.