Nurses punished for warning friend about transgender surgery, criticizing 'transgender activists'

Express the wrong view related to gender identity, even privately, in Canada's British Columbia and you may be fined $10,000 or lose your professional license and career. 

The silver lining: The creator of one of the most lucrative media franchises in history might help you fight back.

Human rights and professional misconduct tribunals sent a chill through the Pacific Province in recent weeks through rulings against a woman who questioned her transgender friend's medical plans to resemble the opposite sex and another who expressed her fondness on a billboard for Harry Potter creator and gender-critical activist J.K. Rowling.

Former registered nurse Kirsten Olsen is challenging the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal's $10,000 fine against her, based on her privately stated concern about her friend and tenant Terry Wiebe's planned mastectomy, at the BC Supreme Court, arguing that her comments weren't about Wiebe's gender identity even if Olsen's Charter right to freedom of expression took a backseat.

"A comment of concern for a friend is very different than evicting someone from their home on the basis of their … protected personal characteristic," her Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) lawyer Marty Moore said. The tribunal rejected gender identity as the basis of Wiebe's eviction but said Olsen's comments negatively affected Wiebe's tenancy.

Registered nurse Amy Hamm's inquisition by the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives, which started nearly four years ago, ended March 13 with a finding of professional misconduct and penalties to be determined for her Rowling billboard and expression of majority views on protecting women's spaces from males who identify as women.

This was despite BCCNM dropping one of the charges against Hamm in 2022 – sharing "medically inaccurate information" – while keeping the other, "discriminatory and derogatory statements regarding transgender people."

Vancouver Coastal Health fired Hamm two weeks later, "with no severance, because I know that men are not women," mother-of-two Hamm marveled on X, prompting sympathy from former Fox News host and independent podcaster Megyn Kelly.

"Don't let them gaslight you into thinking you're the mad one," Rowling responded to Hamm's recitation of a line from the tribunal ruling that claimed the fact of the sexual binary is at odds with "current medical or biological understanding."

"The New Endarkenment will not win if there are still people [who] are brave enough to stand up for objective, scientific truth and the rights of women and children," Rowling wrote. "This quasi-religious bullshit is just that: bullshit."

JCCF is paying for Hamm's defense by lead counsel Lisa Bildy, who told Just the News they "anticipate" appealing to the BC Supreme Court by April 14.

Uganda-born U.K. nurse Jennifer Melle could lose her job and her license for even less than Hamm did, the Daily Mail reported: referring to a male inmate who sexually groomed children and identifies as a woman but is housed in a men's prison as "mister" and "he."

The inmate, who was demanding to be released, overheard Melle's phone conversation with a doctor in the hallway about removing his catheter – a procedure dependent on the inmate's sex – and ordered her to call him a woman, Melle said. When she declined to use female pronouns because of her faith, he started allegely calling her racial slurs and "lunged at" her.

Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals Trust disciplined Melle by denying her overtime – but not a white colleague who "also referred to Patient X as a male" – on account of "not respecting the patient’s preferred identity," the Daily Mail said.

She's also under investigation by the Nursing and Midwifery Council for "fitness to practice" for not referring to a patient by their gender identity. The Christian Legal Centre is suing the National Health Service on Melle's behalf.

Words not 'particularly egregious' but 'had a serious and harmful impact'

Olsen's trouble with BC's human rights body is a result of letting Wiebe, who still uses her legal name Theresa, live on Olsen's property in a motorhome as a tenant from 2014 to 2018.

Wiebe's lesbian then-partner Lita Moth told Olsen, a mutual friend, in late 2016 or early 2017 that Wiebe was already on gender-affirming hormone therapy and planning to live as a man, according to the ruling, which said Wiebe mostly lived with Moth then. 

Wiebe told Olsen months later that she worried the hormones were causing kidney problems, and Olsen responded "You’re fine as a lesbian." She did not support Wiebe getting her breasts removed, telling the tribunal but not Wiebe that her mother had a mastectomy and Olsen feared she'd have to take care of Wiebe.

"I accept your decision but I will not celebrate it" because of Olsen's belief that "femininity is divine," her upbringing by "a lesbian feminist" and Olsen's view that the procedures are "dangerous" and will not cure her "deep seated unhappiness/insecurities," Olsen wrote to a friend in 2019, relaying what she told Wiebe.

Olsen did not "respond directly" when Wiebe asked "more than once" if the gender transition would affect her tenancy, the ruling said. Olsen evicted Wiebe in 2018, telling the tribunal that Wiebe 'became increasingly volatile," didn't observe "appropriate boundaries," let the property become "unsightly" and that Olsen wanted to use Wiebe's space for something else.

While Olsen's words were not "particularly egregious" when Wiebe asked about the future of her tenancy, the tribunal – which uses plural pronouns for Wiebe – concluded they "had a serious and harmful impact on Terry Wiebe, which was connected to their tenancy."

The tribunal said Olsen made a "transphobic statement" by calling breast removal "mutilation," a claim by Wiebe that Olsen flatly denied, without explaining why it believed Wiebe. But it accepted Olsen's litany of nondiscriminatory reasons to evict Wiebe.

In light of the "social context that created vulnerability for Terry Wiebe, and the profound impact of the discrimination on them, especially the fact that it contributed to their decision to stop hormone treatment," the tribunal ordered Olsen to pay Wiebe $10,000.

Criticizing 'transgender activists' is 'designed to lower the standing of transgender persons'

BCCNM's disciplinary panel said Hamm committed misconduct by calling herself a nurse "in the biography attached to three articles she had written, and in one podcast," in which she allegedly disparaged trans people, according to JCCF.

It left alone her "extensive off-duty Twitter posts," as JCCF called them, because punishing Hamm for "her frequent references to her status as a nursing professional" would functionally silence her "because they would automatically have a sufficient nexus to the profession of nursing," the 115-page verdict says.

The report includes 30 pages analyzing Hamm's "statements in extract," taken from online platforms including "podcasts, videos, published writings, and social media" in which she's identified as a nurse or nurse educator. 

It starts by rejecting Hamm's claim that she's only criticizing "transgender activists," concluding her comments are "designed to lower the standing of transgender persons in the community and elicit outrage and contempt."

Hamm writes for several publications, hosts the podcast Gender-Critical Story Hour and co-founded Canadian Women's Sex-Based Rights, an "all-volunteer, all-women led grassroots organization."

Her February 2024 National Post column is cited disapprovingly on a VCU "investigation report page marked "confidential" that Hamm posted. It claims she invokes "facts," in scare quotes, "that ignore trans people's existence or reality" and she "insinuate[s]" they either threaten children or "position themselves near children in an inappropriate way."

Hamm wrote on X she was referring to "LARPing predators who abused self-ID policies" – meaning live-action role playing – and the "actions of male predators and sex criminals."