father fight transition daughter Robert Hoogland
Vancouver court building, (inset) Robert Hoogland
A father who is fighting in the family courts for the right to speak publicly in opposition to the medical and social gender transition of his child was denied bail in a hearing at Vancouver Supreme Court on Friday.

The court found him in contempt of previous orders which sought to restrain his speech with regard to the medical and social gender transition of his child by medical and legal authorities. The father opposes this process on the grounds that it is causing irreversible physical and psychological harm to his child.

This process of seeking to defend his child from iatrogenic medical harm — ordinarily something we would associate with positive parenting — has been characterised as "family violence" and harassment by the court and by the child's trans rights activist legal advisers.

In Canada, protective parenting is a criminal offence.

On March 16, the father surrendered to the court to be arrested for a hearing on a criminal charge of contempt of court. He was found to be in contempt and remanded to North Fraser Remand prison.

The father's lawyer, Carey Linde, made representations that the father "is not a criminal." Linde said the father is "a working class postman. He is in a labor union." Linde said that, by making this a criminal matter, Attorney General David Eby "is persecuting [the father] plain and simple."

The father will be remanded on bail until what the court, and the Attorney General for British Columbia, call a "trial" listed for five days starting on April 12, 2021, even though those dates are family — not criminal — proceedings.

Ordinarily, in a family case, such a listing would be referred to as a hearing, and any contempt issues would be treated as a civil — not criminal — matter.

The judge admonished the father for not removing his name from his GoGetFunding page, where he raises money for legal fees. The court found that the GoGetFunding page breached a court order that said that no one must to know who he is.

The judge cautioned him that if the page was not corrected by the April 12, it would count against him. However, the judge then denied a request for the father to have two days release on bail to fix the page, and to alter other sites, from his home computer before he returned to jail.

This leaves the father in a lose-lose situation.

According to lawyer Carey Linde, the father is unhappy to be incarcerated, but knows that it was inevitable if he continued to protest the medical and social gender transition of his child.

The case has been rumbling on for two years. In January 2020, the British Columbia Court of Appeal upheld a ruling enabling a medic to continue to inject the biologically female child, now 16, with mega-doses of testosterone so that the child's body would develop some of the secondary sex characteristics associated with maleness.

The child's mother apparently caved to pressure to go along with the process, while the father attempted to halt the process, seeking mental health-based alternatives as opposed to drugs.

Although he was ordered by the court not to speak publicly about the medical and legal authorities allowing the gender transition of his child, the father — in desperation — told his story to anyone who would listen to him.

When admonished by the court in a hearing in February 2020, the father said "the reason I do it, or did it, is because I am taking the best interests of my child at heart."

The judge warned the father that further breaches of court orders would likely result in the child's lawyers citing him for contempt. The father made the decision to continue publicly to protest the drugging of his child, with the knowledge that he might lose his liberty, and become a prisoner of conscience, which has now come to pass.

Citizen journalists who helped the father to tell his story to the public were threatened by the child's legal representatives with contempt of court proceedings, and compelled to remove their interviews from online platforms.


Comment: At least one of the interviews from a year ago, has been successfully mirrored. It is heartbreaking viewing:



Brandon Showalter, reporting in March 2020, wrote that "in court proceedings last week, it emerged that attorneys for the trans-identified teenager were not acting under the direction of their client, according to LifeSite News. The biological female teen has been receiving testosterone injections for the past few months, against the wishes of her father."

The journalist in question, Laura Lynn Thompson, tweeted that it was "an honour to stand against the most insidious assault on our children's identity in the history of our nation."

In December 2020, the high court of England and Wales held — in the case of 24 year old Keira Bell against the state's national gender identity clinic — that it was unlikely that a child under the age of sixteen would be able to give informed consent to transexual medical experiments on their body.

The implications of this decision have yet to filter through to Canada and the USA, where the lucrative pediatric transitioning industry is privatized and well-established.