Action Evenings – Trans Rights in the Workplace with Morgane Oger

okay and it's being recorded um i'm uh happy to acknowledge that uh those of us who are in the lower mainland uh are enjoying the hospitality and of the uh coast salish people and uh with specific reference to musqueam uh suila tooth and um squamish people that uh and we are grateful to be on their traditional ancestral and unseated territory so i am tonight absolutely delighted um to introduce our speaker margain jay and i'm although there are many many things that i i could say about morgan i'm going to um limit my comments my introduction because i want to give as much time for the presentation but i will give you uh some um high points so morgan was uh born in france but raised in vancouver and is a uh uh has had many management positions in uh technical uh search rescue telecom industries in uh canadian technology management um she is an activist and she has been an activist back to the 1990s focusing on systemic injustice and she lives here in vancouver with her two school-aged children and is a change maker so one of the things that i wanted to point out is that morgan is the founder of the morgan o'jay foundation uh which is meant to help to narrow the gap between canada's laws and experience of people on the ground who face systemic discrimination because of who they are and um this includes this very much intrigued me uh includes developing free technological solutions to help people facing systemic discrimination address hate motivated violence and supporting the canadian human rights commission to advocate for transgender persons engaged in its human rights tribunal so um and a couple of the awards there are many more i only i'm going to mention a couple in 2019 morgan o'gear won a high-profile precedent-setting human rights case against an anti-lgbt activist that demonstrated it once and for all that personal beliefs or the right to free expression do not trump another person's right to live free of discrimination yay this case is now widely cited in other legal cases and also as i said there are more but i'm going to also mention this one in recognition for his service to canada in extending human rights for lgbtq plus person's morgan or jay was awarded the meritorious service medal on behalf of the queen and all canadians by governor general julia fayette in 2018 so i invite you to look at the bio and we had more biographical material on our web page but as you can see we are extremely grateful to have martine be with us tonight so i believe we are on uh time to start we are and i am going to uh just make sure that uh and you are unmuted i think i think i am you are indeed over to you you're wonderful well i'd like to express my thanks to you karen and to the vancouver unitarians for inviting me to uh give this talk it's uh it's a it's an honor and a privilege to to meet people of faith and of uh spirituality uh to talk about things that are important to all of us which is really how to make a more inclusive society that that is more fair to us all so my understanding is i have 20 minutes for this talk is that right you could have more than that i i had suggested that the 20 slides might take up 20 minutes and then we'd go from there okay great i i'm very flexible i can power through them or just go slowly no need no need to power through just relax right so so the magnolia foundation is interested in narrowing the gap between canada's human rights laws and actually our legal system and the reality experienced on the ground by people who who face inequality or marginalization most of our work has been done in transgender rights and in anti-violence and anti-hatred measures and that's included it was mentioned cape the canadian atlas of uh populist extremism which is a software tool we're building that to try to track hate events in canada and we're still in the development phase phases for this but one of the things the tool is going to do is it's going to enable people who live in jurisdictions that don't respect or protect their rights to uh to document abuses acts of violence that are hate motivated so that at least they have access to having someone else know about it which is in a different jurisdiction where the information can be used for example the united nations or or equivalent organizations we're mostly active in policy and in in legal challenges and the case against bill vodka and my complaint was uh was the test of our methodologies it was very long two-year case and we were i was very relieved to have it be over oh i'm trying to figure out how to get my thing to work there we go today i'm going to be talking about trance rights in the workplace so as we know transgender people are people whose gender identity their identity their sense of of gender and of self is not congruent with the gender that they thought they were earlier in their lives uh we tend to say uh not congruent with their uh sex assigned at birth some people call it the biological sex canada doesn't actually track biological sex it only tracks what we declare but anyways the idea i think we all understand we're born of a certain sex or perceived to be and then some people declare that or discover that they are different than that they can be uh binary different like a trans man or trans woman for example i am a transgender woman or they could be non-binary and somewhere in the middle and canada since last year recognizes uh three sex designations legally a male female and ex for everything else and that's the beginning of the recognition that uh there's all kinds of people out there i'm trying to minimize the images okay so ultimately what is this all about the things we do society has bias and some people in our society have bias and that bias actually turns into stigma we stigmatize people because of who they are or because of what they do and sometimes we do it because of for reasons that they just cannot help um and that stigma causes harm you can see that in disengagement people find that they have less of a stake in society because society doesn't respect them or doesn't support them uh and then that goes over to an alienation and the alienation uh is uh you know basically the loss of a sentiment that you have to fit into society or that you have to contribute to society and that often too often leads to a delinquency of some sort which uh is when you actually cause trouble and so yeah in reality the bias is the root cause of this vicious circle and the delinquency is the symptom but of course as we know the delinquency ends up reinforcing the bias and then you go around and around and around and this is how hatred and discrimination are shaped and today we're going to talk about uh experiences and rights in the uh in the workplace and therefore we're going to be talking about first is the framework the laws canada you know had a constitution and it repatriated a charter of rights and freedoms in 1992 1982 which defined the role of government and the things that government has to uphold that are dear to us all and that are common across all of our other laws um the provinces have human rights codes that are the the enactment of what the charter of rights and freedoms holds as a vision statement almost you could say the human rights code is the law itself and then in this context we also have the human rights act because in employment you can be federally employed or you can be provincially employed depending on situations i'm going to focus almost exclusively on provincial but it's important to know that some people in some employment contexts are regulated at a federal level for example airlines or banks and there they fall under different rules when it comes to employment we have the employment standards act in british columbia it's called the canada employments act in uh federally i believe and then we have the case law and the jurisprudence and that's the decisions done by the judges that uh that are based on the laws about how they should be interpreted so the jurisprudence is the interpretation of law as i was saying we have two contexts the charter of rights on the left my left yeah all of our left the charter of rights is the foundation stone uh for our rights it applies to governments only people don't actually know this as much as they could we you you cannot uh um file a complaint against someone for violating your charter rights only a government or a branch of government can violate your charter rights in canada provincially we have the human rights code or the federally we have the equivalent but here i'm going to focus on provincially and that lays out the discriminations that are not allowed essentially and it applies to every human in british columbia in the context of employment we have the employment standards act and that's where we define all of the greater frameworks for how we employ people and how we conduct ourselves towards them it applies to all of the workers and their employers we also have the workers compensation act and that's the that's a very important piece of legislation from the point of view of trans rights or from workers when it comes to mental health and mental health is a major factor for transgender people the workers compensation act uh lays out the uh you know how we deal with injuries basically at a provincial level and within the workers compensation act we have a section that talks about compensation for mental health disorder and i don't expect you to read this bit here but i do expect you to read this part i'm going to move my thing little icon's always in the way a worker is entitled to compensation for a mental disorder payable as if the mental disorder were a personal injury arising out of and in the course of a worker's employment and this is the foundational stone that protects all of us against harassment against bullying and against all of the mental health concerns that can lead to such negative outcomes for for people without being a physical injury at the work site this is the this is actually the section that that goes the furthest in protecting transgender people or all stigmatized persons in our um in our workplace today so in 2016 our province added gender identity or expression this is the family photo of all the lawmakers immediately after the the law was passed as lawmakers and activists i'm buried in there somewhere if you look very carefully you can see half of me um the the bc human rights uh code essentially stipulates a two-speed protection from discrimination and it's very important you have a list of explicitly protected grounds and um and all of those grounds are equivalent which means that they're equal the protection from discrimination on the basis of race or color is equal to the protection against discrimination based on your religion or based on your sexual orientation or now your gender identity or expression until trans rights were added into this by adding gender identity or expression you had to fight for your rights in this second tier which was case by case which would mean you you might win the right to use a certain pen or a washroom or to be addressed a certain way but each one of these wins had to be carried one at a time but there's an interesting equivalency in the human rights code which is that any win for any prohibited grounds equivalently applies to all of the other winds for example if you're not allowed to discriminate against someone in a in the allocation of work based on their race you're not allowed to discriminate against someone on the allocation of work on the basis of their sex or their gender identity or any of the other grounds if you're required to have physical building changes to to support for example uh people who use mobility devices then if there's any other specific needs of a person or of a group then you have to support their needs too because you have to make the same um the same um accommodations as long as you don't go into the realm of undue hardship which we'll get into later and uh the protection to the human rights laws protections in a fascinating way which it reads all the way back up to the charter so human rights code protection when it's explicitly added adds it to the charter and adds it to all of the laws underneath the charter and what that means is employment law housing law all of the other laws include in their jurisprudence automatically gender identity or expression starting the day that it's added to the explicit list of prohibitions so as we know we have a number of explicit prohibitions from discrimination in british columbia today it's not widely known that each province has a different list and we have some provinces that have some uh some explicit prohibitions that that are not included anywhere else for example and a um an unrealistic fear of contagion is an explicit protection from discrimination in one of the maritime provinces so the human rights code is very important but it's not the only thing that matters but it applies to all services all housing all employment and all publications but the publications in this case is only in the provincial context because this is the bc human rights codes and that's physical displays but not online communications and that's very important uh that there's a strange dichotomy in law which uh which means that if it's displayed physically like for example on your laptop screen it falls under bc jurisdiction but if it's displayed but but the content publication is being done online somewhere else and therefore the publication isn't included so a jumbotron tv could be a display but the publishing of hate material on a website doesn't fall under provincial laws and is actually exempt the implication of adding gender identity or expression to the bc human rights code was the that um the bc human rights tribunal affirmed that the trans the rights of transgender people to safely to safety and dignity are essential human rights what they actually ruled was that charter rights must be balanced against one another and that freedoms of expression belief or other charter protected freedoms that are enshrined in our laws must be balanced against the freedom to live free of discrimination based on prohibited grounds so that was actually a watershed when the the watch case was actually a very big win because there had never been a ruling that said this before and because of transference and because of equivalency we now have an equivalency that says that even if for example your beliefs are that one sex is inferior to another or that one gender is inferior to another or that races have a hierarchy of value even if that's a core belief or even if though you think that that's your free speech right to express such thoughts the og what cut case in british columbia which is being also used inside it around the country it ruled that actually you do not have the charter right to express that at the expense of the right of the people you target to live free of discrimination so it was actually a watershed case okay so as i mentioned employment standards are subject to whether the employer is federally or provincially regulated uh and there's a link here and i and i give the link to i gave a uh the link to uh to the audience in the chat and if people are watching this online or something you can you can search for it i'm going to put it on my twitter afterwards and it lists the different the jurisdictions for employment and it's very important generally speaking the industries that are involved in moving things transport or money or the military those industries are federally regulated as well as first nations tribal councils or or or governance or services are federally regulated as a matter of rule that's a good way to to to work with it okay so now we're going to talk about you know the details of this which is what does this mean for me in the workplace and as i give this talk i would like you to pause for a moment and consider that because the human rights code makes these rules transferable although i'm speaking about gender identity or expression in transgender people today the same applies to any other explicitly prohibited discrimination according to the list that i gave whether it's your sex or your age or or your race or your color or all of the grounds for all of these grounds these rules apply but here we're talking about transfer rights so a worker is bullied or harassed when someone takes an action that he or she knew or or reasonably should have known would cost the worker to be humiliated or intimidated that's under worksafebc when an employer or supervisor takes reasonable action to manage and direct workers it is not bullying so in other words it's not bullying to give you special instructions as long as they're correct instructions but if the instructions are targeting you because of who you are on prohibited grounds or causing humiliation that's a different story so examples of behavior or comments that might constitute bullying and harassment include verbal aggression or insults calling someone derogatory names harmful hazing or initiation practices vandalizing personal belongings and spreading malicious rumors so defamation or libel are fall under bullying and harassment on the work safe bc if you want an example of what that looks like in the daily life of a trans person i invite you to visit my twitter or maybe my facebook pages and read the comments of the angry people that don't like the the things i i propose should should be there are quite liberal with the uh harassing behavior so you know what i'm gonna pass this on because it's just a copy all right federally improper conduct by an individual directed at it or offensive to another individual in the workplace including at any event or location related to work and that the individual knew or should have known would cause offense of harm that's what the government of canada uses as the as the rule of thumb so objectionable acts comments displays that demean belittle or cause personal humiliation or embarrassment and any act of intimidation or threats for example you know i i started my career working in engineering and in the back rooms we had in the workshops we often had these calendars for tooling which had ex quite demeaning pictures always of women and um and that this would fall under harassment for example and uh the existence of these posters and i'm sure there's still some around is an example of how it's not always that simple to get harassment handled so and this is important it also includes harassment within the meaning of the canadian human rights act so based on race origin ethnicity and so forth gender identity or expression there the government of canada has a handy tool to identify if it's harassment that's why i put this here so it's a uh you can go through a checklist to determine whether the thing or your experiencing or looking at is harassment now the question often comes up is like what is can a customer harass a worker can a worker harass a customer how does that work and so i wanted to touch on that briefly as we go through this so customers are protected by the human rights code they are not under a contract to be there they can come to a to a work site or to place a business and and and do custom as we call it which is they can buy exchange they can exchange funds for goods and services they are protected by the human rights code or the human rights act federally generally speaking they can't be denied a service from a they can't be denied a service normally available to the public is the test and they um they however they might ask for a service that's inappropriate to be given to them and we can get into that later and they're not guaranteed to get the service there is the concept of undo hardship which also protects the the employer from customers who who want the impossible for example you know you can't force your employ you can't force your your your vendor or your a store to sell you bicycles if they're a bakery and uh you know you can then and in that context you can't decide to have you can't ask to have things that could be construed to be discrimination but in fact what you're asking for is not what that's that business delivers nonetheless no refusal of services on prohibited grounds is allowed now from the worker perspective workers have to be protected against customers that misbehave they also have to be protected from their employers and that's very important and so we have occupational health and safety regulations and those give workers the right to refuse work a worker can refuse to do unsafe work however an employer might still be required to deliver the service if the worker considers that it's unsafe for them but the employer advertises that that work gets done there here i'll give you an example let's say you have let's say you have a swimming course and a one of the and a worker is a trans person and someone says i don't want that trans person to serve me they're actually legally allowed to do that but if it's a trans person who comes for the service the employer sorry the the employer is required to deliver the service even if the employee doesn't like the look of trans people for example so whereas a customer can bulk at who does the work and can choose not to participate in commerce an employee even though they have the right to refuse service if it's work they consider dangerous the employee does not take away the responsibility of the employer to deliver the services that they promised they would deliver through advertising and so forth so a you know using a different analog using an analogy i'm if i'm a french person if there's a worker who refuses to serve francophones because francophones are gross um the worker could be allowed to do that and it could be a reason to have an accommodation for that for example if another worker can do the work but if it's a cake shop and if the um if a customer who's francophone goes to the cake shop to ask for the work for for a cake to be made for them and there's a refusal by the worker the employer is still responsible to the customer for delivering the work now another scenario when it comes to protecting people against bias is vendors and clients and a relationship between businesses so often in a business environment other businesses come and deliver something for example you're a worker at a bakery a new do baking and then the delivery worker comes from a delivery company to deliver the flower and in such a situation the responsibilities are on each employer towards its workers to keep the workers safe under worksafebc and also to to not cause trouble for the customer the customer in this case is not the worker but the employer so in other words you have um you know i'm a baker i get my flower order the delivery driver is really terrible towards me because he doesn't like trans people and he says all kinds of awful things well i have the right not to suffer mental health injury i have the right to not suffer outrage just because that worker has feelings it turns out that that worker doesn't have unlimited right to say whatever they want and i have the right to be protected and so for example if my employer were to cancel the contract they could cancel the contract on the grounds of abusive conduct by their workers for example i would not be able to easily file a complaint against said worker because it's a business to business relationship but i could file a complaint against my employer for having vendors whose workers do terrible things so the the responsibility is from my employer but the protection is a business to business protection from the consequences to the third party now with my employer that's finally the other one what are the employers rights and responsibilities well like i mentioned before the employer has the right to expect that a person who signs up to do work will do the work and that their bias will be separated out from their health and safety and if they have health and safety concerns they'll put out health and safety concerns but if they're actually expressing bias then that's an all altogether different story and the employer has the right to expect that a worker will adhere to the work site uh terms of terms of conduct you know the code of conduct and the terms of employment which can easily mean which can easily include for example stipulations for creating a toxic environment and they would have that in there because the employer needs to protect themselves against being found negligent in causing a work safe bc claim for toxic environment for mental health injury as discussed earlier so the law the way the law works it protects employees by for by by forcing employers to put in the policies to protect the employees and it protects the employers by having policies to lean on to deal with misbehaving employees but they still do have the right to expect their work gets done so i touched on the right to refuse unsafe work and there's a there's a case that came up in trance rights which was uh made the news and everybody and didn't like it or most of us found it difficult to deal with which was the the jessica yanif case against the waxing salons where the workers refused to do unsafe work because the work was unsafe for their customer actually in reality which was because they couldn't do the waxing work that the customer asked for but actually there was a ruling in that which said that in one of the cases there was a refusal to do work because of who the person was because the work was done in an arm and this person didn't want to do the work on an arm and that if the person hadn't if the conduct of the complainant hadn't been so horrible that the complainant was thrown out on conduct alone and on predatory behavior which is a very good thing the the complaint would have come through so the bc human rights tribunal has ruled or has it in the record which can be used as a as a precedent that uh if if i ask to have work done and somebody like let's say um a haircut something near the body and then the person claims that they should be allowed to refuse unsafe work because they don't like people like me they do not have actually a legal basis because that was ruled on already so to refuse unsafe work you have to have a reasonable cause and that's uh that's an important threshold and the reasonable cause is a real reason to believe you're going to be harmed the idea of the right to refuse work is based on the fear of violence or the fear of um the fear of an industrial accident for example the fear of mental health harm so as a worker you have the right to refuse to perform a specific job or task you believe is unsafe without being disciplined by your employer the thing though is that the employer does have the right to expect that if it's found that this work wasn't unsafe for you that you will do the work okay just for non-profit societies and this is important so there's a difference in the rules of the human rights code between when you're an employer that is a commercial employer and when you're an employer who's a non-profit when you're a charitable or philanthropic or educational fraternal religious or social organization or corporation that's not operated for profit and you promote the interest and welfare of an identifiable group or class of persons characterized by a physical or mental disability or by any of the list of attributes that are explicitly prohibited from discrimination you do actually have the right to grant a preference to members of that group or class [Music] the intent of this is to allow for example religious based organizations to have summer camps for their for their community for example you could say or to have possibly um the preference for people who have a specific need even though that discriminates against other people because you're trying to focus your efforts on a certain group and as long as you're doing fraternal charitable work and so forth there's a case there that you can make there's also special programs now those are programs for um for the purpose of of improving the condition or the dis of disadvantaged individuals or groups who are disadvantaged because of uh explicitly prohibited grounds of discrimination and is reasonably likely to achieve that objective with the exclusion and the the way this is read in is that generally speaking you can have a program to help the more marginalized or the more vulnerable persons but you cannot have a program to help only the less vulnerable people so you the bc human rights code doesn't allow you to have a wealthy white men's social program where we make lunches for them and send them lunches for free but we could have for example single parents that are unemployed with a a child with a disabilities specific program to provide lunches for that group the second example meets the test of more marginalized or more vulnerable whereas the first test would the first case would have a very difficult time meeting that test some examples of where this has been applied or misapplied sometimes you could say missouri christian schools um in that's a that's a school in surrey bc that has uh gotten away with firing a teacher because she got a divorce and then she fell in love and she moved in with her new partner and uh and the allegations that she was having on married sex was sufficient to have her fired on the basis that she wasn't living up to christian standards according to that organization's definition of christian standards i i would consider that an aberration a profound aberration vancouver rape relief um has successfully defended to the supreme court of canada its right to prioritize a certain kind of women their definition of women in their membership and a prerequisite to employment another organization is being a member and specifically they they didn't want a transpo transsexual or transgender women to be to be allowed to provide services and they were supported in that they however apply that to the delivery of services as well and that's not so clear it's a service normally available to the public it's paid for by the public uh it's a charitable organization they might have a hard time justifying that if someone were to challenge them trinity western university i lost the ability to have a law a law school on the basis of delivery of services that was that was discriminatory so they didn't get away with it they had a no gaze covenant that was famously upheld only when they wanted to get rid of you but they were not able to uphold their rights to do this under the guise that they may be allowed to be an organization that does this but they're not allowed to be a law school that's an organization that does this so there are limits to the to uh to the human rights code exemptions all right so uh wrapping up here um i'm going to talk about specific accommodations that that that matter for transgender people transgender people have passed lives often you know they've they've had a life transition between the before when we were living in another identity sometimes some of us or and the today we also have cases where people transition very young but you know their medical information is private and their dignity it has value like everyone's dignity so at work it's important to remember that privacy and dignity are very important and one can't make assumptions that that the response of trans people to questions and to probing will be the same so it's important to review processes for for privacy and dignity considerations for non-cisgender people another factor is gender spaces so typically in a lot of in a lot of offices today we have men's washrooms women's washrooms and one universally accessible washroom and um and that the capacity set up is such that you don't you don't tend to have analysis done on the population needs for non-binary or single-use washrooms the same for changing spaces and there are actually a significant number of people who who have a hard time using gendered commons common occupancy spaces and the specific accommodations for non-binary persons is that they they need to have the ability to use uh non-gendered spaces for bodily functions and maybe for changing if it's changed spaces so that's an accommodation that's very valuable and increasingly important for businesses because they're required actually to accommodate people and to look after their their needs which includes the needs of people who are not men or not women or do not work cannot be in the same spaces as them medically specific needs it's always possible uh that that you know employees have medically specific needs and transgender people certainly are at risk of this especially if they access transsexual surgery they can go through quite a period where they have medically specific needs that can be a bit of a barrier and this is quite important um and it's this has come up as a factor in uh work policies for example but uh working that in with privacy and dignity is is a is complex because these are delicate conversations that employees don't necessarily want to have with their hr team addressing people now in the workplace we have a typical workplace in british columbia is diverse and we have quite a few different people with different backgrounds which may or may not have feelings about the validity of another person's name or their pronouns for example and it's very important to recognize upfront that refusing to address someone's pronouns with dignity in a workspace falls under um the work safe bc definition of causing mental health issues and so employers are vulnerable to the misbehavior of their workers when it comes to refusing the existence of trans people or not understanding the importance of uh the courtesy that we expect in the workplace of being addressed correctly by our name and by our pronouns um this is uh this is uh increasingly an er a discussion point for organizations large enterprises have already rolled out their programs to address this but small businesses struggle with this phenomenon and this is something that can be quite a vulnerability because you know um if people are under a lot of stress they fi they might find themselves having that just be that little bit more and they might find themselves in a in a mental health crisis or difficulties that is the liability of the employer because of the works safe bc rules all right and now i just wanted to wrap this up and to talk about resilience and power dynamics and a few other points of resilience it's important to remember those of us on this call who are employers or who are working for employers in an hr capacity or in a leadership role not everybody in a conversation is at the same level of power and when we're dealing with trans workers just like when we're dealing with other workers it's quite important to remember that they're at quite a disadvantage on the power dynamics the unemployment rate is very high for transgender people the uh poverty rates are high there are lots of vulnerabilities that they feel that they can that that can exacerbate their sense of not being safe at work and therefore not feeling like they can stand up for themselves the way anyone else could because they're more afraid to lose their work uh losing your job when you're trans is quite scary because unemployment is so high and because of that it always reminds me of this message in the airplanes in the in the unlikely event or the loss of cabin pressure put a mask on yourself first it's important to give you know to recognize that our trans worker sometimes might be under societal pressure and to have uh to have a strategy for helping them deal with the pressures of their daily lives hopefully it never happens but in my experience i've seen that this is actually quite a you know quite a thing and and if the worker knows up front that they're going to be supported in a time of crisis it goes a long way and for our for the things that society assumes exists you don't have to say that up front because um the question isn't there like if i get pregnant i'm you're going to support my needs of course there are we all know what happens for pregnant people you know if i get a physical injury to my hand are you going to accommodate me of course but when you're transgender you you're more worried about the possibly the mental health injuries that's quite a concern and not knowing if your employer will back you up is a factor that's been expressed quite a bit and of course small misunderstandings can turn into large problems if they're not talked about which is why it's good to have a plan for addressing this the same goes with assumptions like i said um everybody assumes that the person across from them is living a similar experience to theirs but uh in the trans community you often find yourselves the only person like you at your workplace or or a very few very small number of people like you there all right finally those of us who are in corporations you know yes but who are you really it's not a question you ask trans people okay it's a good idea to take everything they say about themselves at work literally um and not bring in the difficult conversations about how you change identity documents how you uh change how you're treated at work um with with humor or with um with any assumptions but instead what you do is you simply ask them what would you like done right gender markers and mis systems is a big problem for workers there's this concept of biological sex and des and sex designations and sex markers i really hope that uh you don't give your your team members difficulties when they come to you and they tell you that they want a change of their sex designation it's their right it's a big mistake to cause trouble and the european wrong side of the law and finally someone's biological or medical information isn't there to be passed around and to be talked about and this is a big issue for trans people you know they're unique often compared to everybody else around them and they you know we can be sensitive and i think we we just like everybody else we deserve the right and we have the right to have our private medical information kept private and the employers owe it to us to enforce that they can do it softly but it's a requirement finally badges photo badges for employees if there's an easy win you can have is to let your trans employees know that whenever they want to update their photo they can the trans people present presentation changes pretty fast over time a year or two they look quite different and it's a nice message to put out there so they know that actually it's easy just come to us and give us a new photo and we'll do a new badge it's five bucks or 20 bucks but it's well worth it and again finally using the wrong pronouns on someone over and over again deliberately is an act of bullying and is covered under our um our uh human rights law through the worksafebc rules so please manage that at the workplace that's important okay the last thing is the final message update your systems update your policies and update your attitudes to be even more accommodating and then everybody is going to be happy at work and that's everything from the presentation side okay slightly longer than 20 minutes thanks very much morgan um we do have a couple questions here and there's also been some activity in the chat uh while you've been speaking and um one of the so i'll give you a little bit of the context of what that is along with the question one question here is in canada can x be assigned at birth if it is being legally worked on and so there is some uh information here provided it looks like it has been done before for baby born outside of the medical system parents can request it but it may replace an assigned sex that was filled out by a doctor who did a visual inspection could you perhaps just give us uh some information on the assignment of x at birth and how that legally stands right now um so there there was one person who had uh who who had a child outside of the medical system and certified their child as uh x my understanding is that uh more doctors are allowing it but ultimately here what happens is the healthcare caregivers apply their um their their bias and they they want to uh to define it now it's an interesting debate because there's the question of what about statistics and the concern about the statistical value now registering a birth registering a life birth as a physiological sex versus registering a live birth as uh as a biological sex and the problem is that uh is the the there are exceptions there will always be exceptions and there will always be mistakes and so if we use that information for more than statistical data gathering then we have to be careful because what's happening today is that data follows you around as if it was the truth right sex and gender sex designation is an administrative data point but at the same time live birth with a vagina is that administ is a is a scientific data point that's needed and so uh sex characteristics might be a new way to do this but today what's happening is it is the right it is a person's right to register their child under sex designation f m or x everywhere in canada however not every jurisdiction has every caregiver enforcing that and so it's a question of the court still unfortunately okay thank you and another question here how can an employer determine what is safe or unsafe for an employee regarding mental health so that so that's interesting right that's a very good um that's a very good question i'm not i do not know if a um i do not know if there has been a ruling about the validity of saying i'm afraid of black people and therefore i can't serve black people but if there has been such a ruling in the favor of a person who has anti-black stigmatic bias that has been upheld at work then there's then the same bias would be upheld for someone who says i can't serve a cis person or i can't serve a cis man or a cis woman because cis men and cis women have been the source of all the violence against me or the opposite situation where i you know it causes me mental health concern to serve this person because this person triggers so many fears in me for example that's an interesting question and i recognize that that's not entirely been uh addressed in in in the ruling so there will be interesting but ultimately the reality is um an in a mental health injury is a valid mental health injury and in the in the in the work safe environment the validity of an injury is uh is quantified and if an injury has happened then then it would be and it's considered valid by work safe then it would stand yeah yeah and actually there was a comment here that just was noticing um somebody had added in if a worker views work as unsafe they can refuse the work and ask their employer to investigate if the employer doesn't agree that it is unsafe worksafebc can be called in to do their own investigation and make a decision exactly so so uh you know all of these processes have access to arbitration of some kind right there's a there's an escalation for these processes i think uh the sometimes we we we forget that a lot of us are working in uh well too many of us i'll say are working in irregular situations and in these irregular situations we we are doing unsafe things and that's i think that's a valid point right the question of you know um am i unsafe when i'm alone in the business of another person does that make put me at risk and it's the truth is actually yes you know um if a worker if i if i can't be certain that the worker is keeping me safe and if the worker is not certain that their employers are keeping them safe for example with working alone rules then they should address this because this is a risk right we do have the right to be and feel safe right i let me if i can finish but safety is complex because you have the the question can come up for example and this came up in uh in one of the legal cases that has been through one of these early ones which was the safety wasn't from the consequence of the person doing the work on another person the safety question was on the context of the basis of the refusal was was cultural and the cultural refusal and so that gets more complex because the the issue is do you do you take a job that puts you in a situation where you can't deliver on the services that the law that our society expects you to deliver but then again people who are doing work alone in places where there's no option to have multiple workers switch out to accommodate one worker they're already marginalized right they're doing work that's not necessarily the safest way to do the work so clearly there's an issue there as well i think as a society we we have some work left to do guess that's not surprising there's a question here about pronoun misuse or disrespect does this apply between between students at school ah students are not at a workplace they're service consumers they're not service providers so they're not in a but however there are terms of participation in all businesses and all service providers and it can be grounds for termination of service to violate those terms just like it can be grounds for termination of a contract to violate the contract so but then if you're asking me you know um is it worse to use a racial epitaph than to misgender a child on purpose you know is racism worse or less bad than transphobia i would say they're the same fundamentally they're the same the the protections of our laws even though even though these discriminations have different facets and different faces the protections of our laws and the way our protections are argued for example if you go to a court there are equivalent and transferable and interchangeable so a raised motivated a a race motivated act of hate violence or of discrimination is legally equivalent to a homophobic or transphobic related act of violence or discrimination there's no differentiation under our uh cultural uh system of control which is our laws okay um here's another one could you give an example of an optimal way of introducing a trans person into a work environment for example a teacher or an engineer i think it's very subjective and i would recommend i would recommend asking the person for advice or asking the which and the first advice is would you like to give you a propo would you like us to give you a proposal or would you like to work together or would you like to tell us how you would like to see this done to really let that person gauge their um like let that person decide the pathway that it's done if that person opts to have you know the organization handle this then go up to your hr team or the vendor or the help i have an hr problem website and see what the advice is there a recommendation for how to roll out a trans person's identity i i was too much of a coward to transition at work for me it was just too terrifying what i did is i i left i left my employment in one employment and i hibernated for almost two years working remotely and then i came back under my new identity this that's how i did my transition and i was very fortunate i had the ability to do that i ran a marina up the coast i could run away to my marina and do that most of us we have to who transition at work as adults there is definitely the before day and the after day somewhere in there and it's but generally speaking you do it gently you put a simple letter out and say hey here's something a very minor explanation and then you do it some workers they prefer to do it all themselves with the big explanation letter okay you know i am aware that it's approaching eight o'clock here and um the usual format has been to have an hour long and then if people have to leave after the first hour they are certainly welcome to do so but there's also the invitation to stay longer for another half hour and we do have other questions here and mary did you want to provide some input here yeah morgan if you're available i see lots of questions coming through so my suggestion would be to just continue with the questions related to this topic i am at your service until you get bored i think there seems to be a lot of interest so we appreciate it and if anybody is has would like to leave at this point um you're certainly welcome to do so and everybody and anybody that would like to stay please do so um okay another question and the recording will be available afterwards okay great um is there a statute of limitations on how long you can put in a complaint for bullying after it has occurred well the human rights code statute of limitation is one year [Music] so it has to be one year for human rights complaint for work site complaints you you know you have to do these things as quickly as possible in in the workplace you're expected to it's um it's strangely it's grounds for it can be grounds for discipline to uh bring up something afterwards i think it's important to remember that corporations and business places are not democracies right so always good to remember that that uh you know when you're going you're like empty your heart to your manager's manager there's risk involved when you do that right and um and if you wait a long time and then you express a concern the question will be why did you wait so long so i think i i would look it up i have to be honest i don't i haven't come across what the the time frame is i'm going to guess it's six months or a year while we're talking i'm going to look for it okay um and another question here we go is regarding jordan peters peterson would the unfortunate jordan peters fiasco have the same result today jordan peterson are we talking about jordan peters it says uh maybe the men jordan peterson yes okay let's see here what the and i so jordan peterson um is uh is a person who's taken on a public position that he could not possibly use they or them he could not possibly be respectful to people and use the gender uh sorry the pronoun or the the form of addressing them that he um that he would be asked to to do he was at the university of toronto and uh he has it's i believe he's never taught again since saying that so you know maybe he got away with it but i don't think he's back in the in the classroom um ultimately is ultimately people are who they say they are if you ask someone who are you and they say you know you ask me who are you and i say i'm mock ganoje i'm an immigrant from france i grew up in chicago i moved to vancouver when i was 15. i have two children they call me morgan i'm their mom and i'm a trans adult human female and that makes some people's heads explode anyways and then people go out of their way to deny who i say i am and the truth is i don't care who they think i am in reality i am who i say i am right and now at you know in a contractual situation if jordan peterson doesn't believe who i am let's say he cannot he can not believe who i am but he has to live up to the terms of employment of his employer which clearly talk about toxic environments bullying and things like this if it's in bc i showed you the workers comp components for it it's also there's a contractual expectation of of uh safe and inclusive spaces and if a vendor or a staff member or an employee or a ta fails to live up to the contract terms of employment that and if the university decides to do it that person will just be fired they have no no leg to stand on if they refuse to deal to treat their students with courtesy basic courtesy right and basic courtesy doesn't include telling people they are not who they say they are as a matter of fact that's the basis of being thrown off twitter if you tell people they're not who they say they are on twitter oh like you'll get blocked and later on you'll be kicked out because it's the terms of the contract to participate in the society in that community and employers are the same and jordan peterson pushed the idea that it was academic freedom but actually it wasn't academic freedom academic freedom applies to research it applies to thought when you're teaching you know when you're working with your customer the student or actually your employer's customer in reality you uh you owe it to the you owe it to the student to engage with them with courtesy and if the student decides to be very discourteous and ask for the like something ludicrous you can find a workaround you know so if jordan peterson doesn't want to call me ms o'jay jordan peterson can call me morgan over and over again right that's fine when you go away from the reasonable you get in trouble and that's because it's a contract of employment try being unreasonable in any workspace you're gonna get fired okay thanks um is a company required to have readily available trans resources regarding name change and gender change no there's no such requirement but it's a good idea because they can avoid problems you know companies are basically required to to maintain safe and inclusive spaces and if an other employee misbehaves you know if another employee engages in in conduct that isn't uh that that that is harmful right to the point that let's say i don't know let's let's go for the worst case to the point that there's a suicide right the question will arise what was the employer's liability or contribution to the liability for this situation arising not you know not so long ago um an employee in an organization i was involved with uh committed suicide and it wasn't over trance rights and the question is well what was the employer's contribution right well the employer looked long and hard to make sure that it wasn't you know that they didn't contribute that's a i mean that's a horrifying situation right to know that you allowed harm to be caused to your friends and your colleagues or your workers because you didn't pay attention to prevention is is a terrible thing to live with even for soulless faceless incorporated traded company they have something to lose and in the worst case it's bad marketing okay and maybe this is an interesting one just from what you just said how would one best balance acknowledging possible needs a trans person may have and minding their personal boundaries well i think people that's a very good question you know i i'm mindful that in a society that in a society that's oppressive and in our society is oppressive to trans people uh and it's gonna be for a while yet i think it's gonna be you know a good solid decade it's um people who face oppression are more likely to not act for their betterment or for the resolving of the situation because they don't trust the other side to do the right thing and in those situations you can end up with people who let a situation get out of hand before anything is addressed and then it's gotten out of hand right i would say that ultimately you still have to you cannot force a an employee to seek help right and people are responsible for their part of seeking support you can encourage them you can um you can support them you can look to how other stigmatized situations get handled you know we have people with disabilities that don't want their disabilities talked about and maybe they you know though you see that they needed they could benefit from some help but they don't want the help for example so you can't force someone to seek help and support they have people have the right to do to pick the path that you don't think is the best path for them okay and um a question about bathroom signs how about all genders welcome what are your thoughts about uh how about exclusive signs and signs that work for bathrooms now you know i think i think i think we all agree that going into a multi-person bathroom in the bowels of a big building late at night when you're all by yourself is is is uns unnerving right it is for me and it is for lots of people i know particularly women right um group gender spaces probably are going to be very difficult to convert into shared all genders universal access spaces because of the mechanics and the logistics and the reticence of the customer base to use them if they're they don't feel safe but when we move into also having single stall spaces that are universal then why don't we just put on the door what the thing contains you know like if it contains a water fountain you put a drawing of a water fountain and if it contains a sit-down toilet a sit-down toilet and if it's a urinal it's a urinal or or you know like this or you could just put a sign that says one bathroom unit right and then there's six of these stalls and they're individual in the state this is the approach in uh in a lot of european countries but we still have to think about the worries that people have about their personal safety that's still a very important question but when it comes to describing what's inside the bathroom what we don't write as trans people this is a bathroom for trans people when the city of vancouver decided to do science that was inclusive they put underneath all trans people welcome trans people welcome that was the beginning and i i i didn't like that i um i felt that it was uh not sending the right message the message i wanted to have sent was that everybody's welcome right all women or all people who feel they need the sp that facility are welcome and that the fact is you know there's lots of people out there who don't want to be around the men in the bathrooms lots of them lots of men have had lots of men suffered violent sexual assault at the hands of men and it's cruel to put them into spaces with other men that they're afraid of and uh it would be it's it's kind of nice to say look here's like here are your choices but if you go to one or another it doesn't matter and the fact of the matter is that's actually the law right fact of the matter is gender spaces in canada are not legally enforceable because that would be against the law they're cultural not not legally provided there are no in-group dynamics services allowed in canada you're not allowed to have you know um a bus for people of a certain height only you're not allowed to have that you're allowed to have buses to accommodate a certain group of people but you're not allowed to say we're going to define who you are and that only those people are allowed to be in there this is a big fight that happens in on twitter for me i offend a lot of uh a lot of people especially a lot of women who have a strong sense that the idea of a woman is an in-group it might be a tribal in-group as a from from the group dynamics point of view but from the legal point of view that would be against the line for a really good reason because if we allowed women only by law here men only by law there black people only by law there would have to be allowed too right and we would end up with right back to the gilded cage problem that you know you are or are not allowed to fully participate in our society because you are or not one of those people we can't have that that would be against the greater good like in many many we you know our four four mothers and fathers our four parents fought tooth and nail against this for 200 300 years and it's important to not roll it back okay and a question about uh bias the bias that you're referring to assuming to do with trans to uh seems to be analogous to the subconscious racism that develops through socialization of an individual from very early years is there an analogous movement to encourage explicit examination of this bias oh well yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of study of unconscious bias uh look the americans just had a giant election basically centered on who's gonna eat you right you know completely polarized themselves 50 50 down on based on you know identifying a monster and monster was everybody but the people who believe exactly what we believe unconscious bias is a known problem so you know i'm not an academic i uh i i i i work in the applied world i look to academia i think that's that would be the appropriate place to study that i encourage anybody on this call to go do a doctorate on an unconscious bias and in all of its facets okay can you clarify whether kimberly nixon won her case with vancouver rape relief kimberly nixon won the initial case lost that appeal and the supreme court refused to hear it and so it was upheld so the appeal was upheld the original case was found that there was a prohibited discrimination that it's important to recognize that this predates uh gender identity or expression being being explicitly prohibited discrimination i do not believe a similar case would win now this is you know the vancouver rape relief uh situation is complex because what nobody wants is one less shelter that's like the opposite of what anybody wants but the brinksmanship is so profound that the the only way to resolve this situation there is to convince them to change or to give it up and grandfather them in and just stop funding them and you know organizations make their own decisions and i don't think that an organization that does what that organization does ideologically we will will continue to get charitable status for decades there will be a point at which charitable status will be taken away from organizations that discriminate on ideological grounds uh it's it's uh it's it's it's ironic it's a it's an interesting awful situation because of the nature of the the conversation but ultimately it's an organization that does have the right to select its membership but it's providing a state funded service to which the rest of british columbia has to tiptoe around and to not accidentally send a person there because of the trauma it causes every time it happens and that's just not okay you know like um the the situation is shocking to hear this is happening in canada in 2020 is is beyond me ideological puritanism puritanism is uh is out of control in that situation and i regret it it's it's it's i am i'm pretty sure that there would have been a way to find a workaround but right now i think uh society's at an impasse right um another question here um if if it is unclear is it appropriate to ask someone what their pronouns are always it's always appropriate to ask people to pronounce it's a good idea to not only ask the trans people and uh yeah and then it's important to listen and it's okay to make mistakes you know gee i misgender my children all the time um i think i've got most of the questions here in the chat i was just wanting to add in um something about could you give us some feedback about what's involved if a person does want to put forward a complaint and any financial barriers or concerns that come up by taking something through a court system or a legal system court systems are ruinous adventures that nobody should ever participate in um and they are uh especially if they're ideological the if i had had to pay for the watch case out of pocket i mean i would have bankrupted my greater family probably probably the the the the approach of ideologically driven socially conservative folks is to put the force ruling after ruling after ruling after ruling and just to exhaust you into to to burn through your your money the that's a case where it's within you know like a if it's under control you're still talking about i mean i cannot imagine a lock case costing less than twenty thousand dollars and a solid law case i mean anybody who's gone through a divorce will that went to the courts will know i mean it's commonly 30 to 60 000 to to go through a family court divorce case on each side so it's very expensive now that said the human rights tribunal and the um and the employment uh tribunals that are available are designed to be lower barrier so the the tribunal members are trained to work in a less formal environment than for example the bc supreme court where you know i mean if if you supply your documents with the wrong font in the bc supreme court you'll probably get thrown out and um it's i wonder how many lawyers are on the call but uh it's uh it's you know arbitrary formalism for its own sake in the court systems a human rights tribunal can be done by yourself you can't actually pull it off by yourself they're very patient but you are in reality dealing with points of law still even though it's just a tribunal and if you don't have someone who knows points of loss you have to go to volunteers or or legal analysts rather than lawyers because in the end a lawyer will cost you thousands of dollars per day that they're sitting at your side arguing a case if they charge you um you know uh a simple matter of me putting a petition for a i put up to give you an idea you know a letter it was a letter for petitioning for judicial review a few phone calls and then a um and then waiting for a ruling and it was done you know with a nice discount for me and it was 2500 just for sending a letter a couple of phone calls and then reading the letter afterwards so it can be very expensive and this is really very very unfortunate it's a it hampers justice the complexity and the formality of the supreme court system so for the people who don't know the bc supreme court is the basic court it's the everyday court there's family court which is a less formal version of things and then there's the appeals court which is where you appeal and then you have the tribunals you have the you know you have a work or or arbitration sometimes rather than the process itself so so i've walked people through the human rights tribunal without lawyers just as an advocate and uh in the prisons i do this so i i visit prisons that's not the right term i i assist transgender offenders dealing with the human rights tribunal process at the federal level which means long sentences and there it's still um many many hours of work to get to a ruling and if you hire a lawyer to do this it's it's well actually it's so expensive that the the offenders can never afford a lawyer so we have we've set up non-profit societies and charities to do the lawyering and their caseload is way over the top so they only do the the special ones that could change the status of things you know peop the non-profits like the same with the morganergy foundation our interest really is to move the dial rather than to help that one person we help people to move the dial so that we don't have to add you know so that that situation doesn't come up again but uh it's very expensive it's very intimidating to go to court very expensive and it's very high stakes so maybe just one day if there's a just recovery for all in these pandemic days it gets talked about what would you recommend anything in particular what you're saying is it almost insurmountable legal costs i think a just recovery is working its way in in british columbia through the bc human rights commission i wish the federal human rights commission was set up the way let's say that the bc the bc government learned from the mistakes of all the other commissions to try to put in a modern commission and that commission includes uh you know ways to take the burden off of the individual so an individual can be going through the process and the commission can say this is important we are going to prosecute this you don't have to do it you're going to be a witness not the complainant i think that's a very very good thing and you know just um recovery that'll come sooner than later no in family law in employment law you we have clack right our class class uh we have a better representation i don't i don't agree with the problem that we have today that if you don't have an enormous amount of money to spend to burn you can't get justice this is wrong we we do ourselves harm as a society by having this okay thank you so much morgan i'm going to turn it over to mary who can tell us about the next um action evening i want to do two things to join in and thank morgan and i'll be asking everyone to unmute so if there's a flurry of thank yous that you want to express you'll be able to or send a thumbs up or applause through your icons next week again continuing with trans awareness one of our members glenn defaults published a book in a memoir last summer called gender fluid and he'll be reading from that book there's prose and poetry he's written poetry for many years so i hope some of you will join us then and i'll just allow you to unmute yourself if you want to say anything to morgan thanks a lot for answering the questions thank you thank you thank you thank you awesome thank you very much and if you want to follow up on twitter morgano.jbc on twitter i'm using you know morgan oj twitter on google you can find this is fantastic yeah thank you so much

Channel: Unitarian Church of Vancouver

Views: 38

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: D9e-D3P43Lg

Length: 88min 4sec (5284 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020