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UCP members push to adopt more dangerous anti-trans policies

Alberta’s right wants Danielle Smith to turn the screws on an already vulnerable population

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Premier Danielle Smith answers reporters’ questions during a news conference in Calgary, January 10, 2023. Photo by Chris Schwarz/Government of Alberta/Flickr.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has launched the most far-reaching assault on transgender rights in Canada, yet the membership of her United Conservative Party (UCP) wants her to go even further still.

Last year, right-wing provincial governments in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan introduced policies requiring kids to get parental consent for changing their names and pronouns.

Both governments faced the electorate this year. In New Brunswick, that policy is likely on the chopping block after Blaine Higgs’ PCs lost to Premier Susan Holt’s Liberals. Saskacthewan Premier Scott Moe, who held on to a diminished majority after his provincial vote, has provided no indication of reversing course on outing trans kids, and in fact has said his new government’s number one priority is to ban trans girls from female change rooms.

In Alberta, Smith, who goes by her middle name Danielle, rather than her given name Marlaina, also wants to police which names children use in school, but has opted to go even further than Higgs’ or Moe’s pronoun policies.

Alberta’s premier announced her intention to introduce legislation targeting trans children soon after hanging out with far-right shock jock Tucker Carlson during his appearances in Calgary and Edmonton earlier this year.

At his January 25 Edmonton appearance, Carlson insisted he feels “very sorry” for trans people, whom he described as being pawns in a “humiliation ritual designed to put Christians in an untenable position.”

This appeared to have rubbed off on Smith, whose announcement the following week of anti-trans policies that go further than any introduced elsewhere in the country was oozing with faux compassion.

“As premier of this province, I want every Albertan that identifies as transgender to know that I care deeply about you and that I accept you as you are,” Smith said at the beginning of a seven-minute video posted on Twitter on January 31, which outlined her plans to ban hormone therapy and puberty blockers for kids under the age of 16.

In the same video, Smith, who’s previously noted that she has a “non-binary family member” to deflect from charges of transphobia, announced additional plans to force teachers to out trans students to their parents, require parents to opt-in for any classroom discussion on sexuality or gender, and ban trans women from female sports.

When the Alberta Legislative Assembly returned from its summer recess in October, Smith followed through on these plans, introducing three bills that will increase the province’s power over physicians, educators and sports leagues to ensure they uphold a rigid gender binary.

Once the Health Statutes Amendment Act is passed, Minister of Health Adriana LaGrange, an anti-abortion advocate with no medical expertise, will have the authority to determine which procedures are considered gender re-assignment surgery and which medications trans youth can use.

With the Education Amendment Act’s passage, Minister of Education Demetrios Nicolaides, who never worked as a teacher, will have to approve all education resources earmarked for sex ed.

And the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act will make Minister of Tourism and Sport Joseph Schow, who admitted he doesn’t know how many trans women athletes there are in Alberta, the ultimate arbiter of who can participate in women’s sports.

UCP membership turns screws on already vulnerable population

Not satisfied with Smith’s legislative assault on transgender youth, on November 2 the UCP membership voted overwhelmingly in favour of three policy resolutions at their annual general meeting that together would represent the effective erasure of trans people from Alberta society.

Sheila Cunningham, a UCP member in Red Deer who is trans, argued against all three anti-trans resolutions, attempting to use arguments that would resonate with conservatives.

The first resolution, introduced by the Calgary-Lougheed constituency association, called for trans women, or “biological males” in the resolution text, to be exiled from “exclusively female spaces and categories.”

This includes not just washrooms, changerooms, shelters, dormitories and sports, but also awards.

“For those who are transgender, I care about your safety immensely,” the Calgary delegate who introduced the resolution said, echoing the premier’s feigned empathy. “However, I trust that private washrooms will continue to be available for your peace of mind and safety.”

Cunningham argued that passing this motion would be a gift to the “raging leftist man-hating feminists” in the NDP, who she said will somehow weaponize this policy against “biological men.”

The second anti-trans policy, and by far the most cruel, was brought forward by the suburban Edmonton Leduc-Beaumont riding association, seeks to defund gender affirming care, which the resolution text portrayed as a form of cosmetic surgery.

“If a person is unhappy with the shape of their fully functioning nose, they have to pay for surgery,” explained a supportive delegate. “Taxpayers should not be paying the exorbitant costs of cosmetic surgery and medications because a few people are preoccupied in an unhealthy way with their bodies.”

Hundreds march in support of transgender rights in Ottawa during a visit to the capital by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, February 5, 2024. Photo by Spring Magazine/X.

Cunningham noted that some trans people will attempt to conduct gender affirming procedures on themselves, or attempt suicide, if they cannot obtain these procedures through the public health care system.

“Repairing them back to health from those attempts is paid for by your public tax dollars,” she said. “For some of those people, the only solution is surgery to change their genitals, so how do you want to spend your dollars?”

Finally, a resolution introduced by the southern Alberta based Cardston-Siksika riding association, which is represented by Tourism and Sport Minister Schow, seeks to reverse a 2018 NDP policy allowing Albertans who are intersex, non-binary or just don’t want to disclose their gender to put X, rather than M or F, as their sex on government documents.

The resolution text claims that enforcing a strict gender binary on government documents would allow the government to base its decisions on “scientific understanding rather than shifting social trends… ensuring that our policies are rooted in factual accuracy.”

Acknowledging the existence of biologically intersex people, a supporter said that “often [when] they’re born, either male or female features are more prominent, so either way we believe [my emphasis added] that male or female will be sufficient.”

So much for scientific understanding.

Cunningham questioned why government documents need to state a person’s gender at all, framing this practice as an instance of “government overreach” and “red tape” that conservatives ought to oppose.

None of Cunningham’s arguments were persuasive to the vast majority of delegates.

Why policies that don’t become law can still be dangerous

The premier is under no formal obligation to adopt party policy as government policy.

At a press conference before voting on policy commenced, Smith noted that the resolutions are intended to give the party leadership “guidance and direction.”

“We have to make sure that we put it through a lens of whether or not it will have support from the majority of Albertans,” she told reporters.

While more than 6,000 UCP members attended the AGM—record-high attendance for a political convention in Canada—this figure still represents about 0.1 percent of Alberta’s growing population.

Contrary to popular perceptions and the province’s “veneer of religiosity,” Albertans are no more socially conservative than Canadians in other provinces, so it’s unlikely the anti-trans policies passed at the AGM will fly with the broader population.

Smith, who received 91.5 percent support in her leadership review at the AGM, doesn’t have to worry about a revolt from the party membership before the next provincial election, which is scheduled for May 2027.

What’s so dangerous about the anti-trans policy resolutions the party endorsed isn’t that they will become legislation any time soon, but their effect of bolstering Smith’s claim that she’s pursuing a sensible middleground with the anti-trans legislation she’s already introduced.

But when it comes to basic human rights, there is no middle ground. Either you support the rights of trans people, whatever their age, and their physicians to make decisions about their gender, or you don’t.

Premier Smith, evidently, does not, and the fact that she leads a party whose membership is even more anti-trans than she is won’t change that.

Jeremy Appel is an Edmonton-based journalist and author of Kennyism: Jason Kenney’s Pursuit of Power (Dundurn, 2024). He also co-hosts the Big Shiny Takes podcast.

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