Imagine a world where you can be jailed for attempting to protect your child from medical assault. A future where you can no longer object to your child being subjected to medicalized gay conversion ‘therapy.’ A country where the government can legally enforce a belief system and criminalize anyone who goes against that system of belief. No, I’m not talking about Iran… I’m talking about Canada.
On Friday, April 16, a father in Canada, Rob Hoogland, was sentenced to serve 6 months in jail for the crime of attempting to protect his child from medical assault, for speaking up, for refusing to abide by a legally enforced belief system — gender ideology. For parents in Canada, this is their new reality. And other countries, like the US, aren’t far behind.
The ordeal began several years ago, when Hoogland discovered that his 12-year-old daughter’s name had been changed in the 7th grade yearbook. From there, the truth unraveled — His child had been shown SOGI 123 ‘education’ videos (gender ideology indoctrination propaganda) at her school. She then decided she was a boy, the school ‘affirmed’ the child as a transexual and ‘socially transitioned’ her without informing her parents. The school kept this all a secret from the parents in accordance with the B.C. Ministry of Education’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policy, which dictates that parents have no right to know what their child’s “preferred sex, gender, or name” is at school.
The school sent the child to see a psychologist, Wallace Wong, who treats “transgender” children as young as 2, and who, at an event hosted by Vancouver Public Library, admitted that he advises kids to fake being suicidal. Wong sent the family to the endocrinology unit at the B.C. Children’s Hospital.
“So what you need is, you know what? Pull a stunt. Suicide, every time, [then] they will give you what you need…” — Wallace Wong
On their first visit to the endocrinology unit, the doctor laid out a plan to medically ‘change’ Hoogland’s, then 13-year-old, child’s sex (to male), including injections of testosterone. Hoogland wouldn’t sign off. He noted his child said she was a lesbian, prior to deciding she was a boy, and thought she might be going through a phase. He also noted his child had obsessive tendencies and mental issues — His daughter had been infatuated with 2 male teachers, to the extent the school had to intervene, and in the 8th grade, while being ‘affirmed’ as a boy, his daughter had attempted suicide.
When his daughter was 14, the hospital informed Hoogland that they would be medicalizing his child in accordance with the B.C. Infants Act, and that according to the B.C. Infants Act, they didn’t need parental consent to do so.
Young people do not reach full cognitive brain development till around the age of 25, yet the B.C. Infants Act says a minor can consent to medical treatments. While this makes sense in the context of life-saving surgery (where, for example, a Jehovah’s Witness can otherwise prevent a hospital from saving their child’s life), when it comes to something as serious as chemical castration or the surgical removal of a minor’s sex organs, a young person can not possibly give “informed consent.” The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that determines our ability to understand repercussions, consequences, and develops our sense of identity, among other things, simply isn’t fully developed until the mid-twenties.
Furthermore, most youth who are diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” would otherwise grow up to be LGB, if they are allowed to grow up — Statistically speaking, 75% would grow up to be LGB, and 85% would grow up to be LGB or straight. What’s being legally enforced is a massive human rights violation of gay and lesbian youth, and a human rights violation of youth in general. Not to mention a violation of every single adult forced, legally, to lie and go along with it.
In 2019, Judge Francesca Marzari convicted Hoogland of “family violence” for using female pronouns when speaking about his daughter, and signed an order authorizing the police to arrest him if he was caught using language in a way that acknowledged his child as biologically female.
In March, Hoogland was arrested and held behind bars without bail. Hoogland’s lawyer, Carey Linde, commented, “He’s been sitting out in a government-supplied bed cot, in a small cement cubicle with iron bars, for speaking his mind, and he will stay there until the trial starts at 2 p.m. on the 12th of April.”
On Friday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Michael Tammen, said Hoogland had “blatantly, willfully and repeatedly” broken the rules, speaking out, and that a “strong denunciatory sentence” was necessary.
Hoogland has been ordered to serve six-months in jail. Additionally, the judge — noting the father’s crowdfunding website, which raised $56,000 to help him in this case — was ordered to donate $30,000 to Ronald McDonald House of B.C. and the Yukon, after he is released from jail.
Youtube: Rob Hoogland
On April 16, Chris Elston, a father and activist who sat in on the hearings, tweeted that Hoogland “pleaded guilty to violating the gag order by speaking out, naming the doctors involved, and publishing documents like this consent form that his daughter signed when she was only 13 years old,” commenting, “many young women get prophylactic hysterectomies after about 5 years on testosterone because the risk of cancer is so high. Prolonged testosterone use also causes abdominal pain, and vaginal and uterine atrophy, requiring hysterectomies. Can a 13-year-old girl consent to her own sterilization? The doctor at B.C. Children’s Hospital thought so after meeting with the child for just one hour.”
On April 14, Elton tweeted “Linde gets back to the Tavistock decision. The issue at the heart of this is whether a child can give informed consent. Seeing as we know very little about the long-term effects of these drugs, obviously they cannot.” However, it seems as though the judge wasn’t all too interested in whether or not a young person can give “informed consent.”
While it may be clear, to anyone logical, that this father was speaking out in an attempt to protect his child from medical malpractice, the judge said he didn’t accept that the father’s “intention was otherwise than to attempt to undermine the authority of the courts and overall administration of justice.”
After the judge implied that he planned to inflict a longer jail term than the Crown recommended, the father took another turn on the stand and explained that during his time held in jail, he thought about his actions and realized he might’ve been used as a “pawn” and “played,” and influenced by new friends.
On Friday, the judge said he went with less jail time than he initially considered, due to the father’s last minute expression of remorse, his agreement to make efforts to remove information on his case from the internet, and the “eloquent” plea made on his behalf by Jenn Smith (a trans-identified advocate who publicly challenges gender ideology).
In recent years, a number of clinicians have come forward to say they left their jobs because their gender clinic was knowingly performing gay conversion therapy. A modest number of independent doctors have stepped up and spoken up as well.
In October, the Keira Bell (Tavistock) case demonstrated that young people have been subjected to medical malpractice. We have been seeing, and will be seeing a lot more, young people come out of this system feeling deeply violated. And rightly so… They’re being sexually and medically assaulted by the medical field.
Parents who send their kids to school, and let their kids access the internet, where gender ideologists run rampant, now run the risk of being forced to watch (or worse still, be jailed) as their children are ripped away, drugged, sterilized, and assaulted by the medical field — a field that’s forever been obsessed with pathologizing and medicalizing those who don’t conform.
جوليا ديانا — JD Robertson is an award-winning author, and journalist. You can follow her on Twitter:
