Canada’s 2025 in Review

McMaster’s Cowardice, Legal Chaos, and Transgender Toddlers

The blight affecting Canada

“Transgenderism is effectively over. We destroyed it,” declared Conservative commentator Matt Walsh in October, in response to newly released data purporting to show transgender identification sharply declining among university students in the US. While that verdict may be premature, it does highlight a growing divide: as the US begins to reckon with the damage done by modern trans activism, Canada is marching in the opposite direction, somehow still oblivious to the harm.

With the exception of the province of Alberta, there is no indication that the stranglehold of gender identity ideology is weakening here. Our gender clinics continue to follow WPATH; our medical associations continue to endorse the puberty suppression experiment; our mainstream media continues to ignore the most appalling medical scandal in history, and our federal government is gearing up to release census data on transgender toddlers.

A Year of Legal Chaos

2025 began on a positive note, with one Canadian province set to protect its youth from a medical world that has catastrophically lost its way. However, thanks to legal challenges brought by trans activist groups and, astonishingly, the Canadian Medical Association, Alberta’s puberty blocker ban, that received royal assent in December 2024, didn’t actually come into effect until earlier this month.

Those who have followed the legal battles surrounding puberty blocker bans worldwide will recognize familiar themes in this story—though Canada, seemingly determined to outdo the rest of the world in gender madness, has pushed the reality inversion and linguistic contortions to an absurd extreme.

No sooner had Alberta’s Health Statutes Amendment Act (Bill 26) received royal assent than trans advocacy groups Egale and Skipping Stone launched a constitutional challenge, arguing that the law would deny “medically necessary” care to “gender diverse youth” in the province. Their litigation claimed that Bill 26 violated three rights guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: the right to security of the person; the right to be free from cruel and unusual treatment; and the right to equality.

Yet, with everything now known about the scandal of “gender-affirming care,” all of those rights violations could just as easily, even far more plausibly, be applied to the interventions being dished out in paediatric gender clinics.

After all, doesn’t performing an unregulated experiment on healthy adolescents threaten their right to security of the person?

Isn’t it cruel and unusual treatment to disrupt normal development, induce endocrine disorders and remove healthy organs in the absence of a diagnosis and without scientific justification?

Don’t trans-identified youth have the equal right to safe evidence-based healthcare that the rest of the Canadian population enjoys?

Next to enter the legal fray was the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), which launched a creatively framed constitutional challenge claiming that the puberty blocker ban violated physicians’ Charter right to freedom of conscience by forcing doctors to follow government directives rather than clinical guidelines, patient needs, and professional judgment—an argument that lays bare the CMA’s apparent ignorance of the methodological bankruptcy of WPATH’s Standards of Care and all the guidelines built upon them, its disregard for child and adolescent developmental theory, and its failure to recognize that ideology, not science, guides the judgment of professionals in the field of “gender-affirming” medicine.

What followed was a cascade of legal chaos: first, a judge issued a temporary injunction declaring that allowing children to progress through normal puberty potentially constitutes “irreparable harm,” while chemically disrupting that natural process with powerful unproven drugs apparently does not.

Then Smith’s government, facing years of litigation during which children would continue to be subjected to this experiment, invoked the Charter’s notwithstanding clause—a constitutional provision allowing provincial governments to temporarily override certain Charter rights—to shield the ban from rights-based challenges for five years.

In response, Egale performed a tactical pivot: since health care is provincially regulated, the group reframed Smith’s ban, which is backed by penalties like fines or imprisonment, as a disguised criminal law with “a moral purpose aimed at prohibiting a practice the province deems socially undesirable” rather than legitimate medical regulation. This framing argues provincial overreach into federal criminal jurisdiction, meaning the legal challenge is no longer about the violation of Charter rights and thus enabling the complaint to bypass the notwithstanding clause entirely.

Clever as this reframing may be, it seems unlikely to succeed given the significant body of evidence that these interventions are experimental, unsupported by high-quality science, and fundamentally at odds with child and adolescent developmental theory.

Every twist in this saga unfolded against a backdrop of escalating fury and catastrophising from Canadian trans activists. Smith was accused of launching “hateful attacks on trans kids,” crafting policy out of “ignorance and misinformation,” and—according to a member of Canada’s Senate—advancing legislation that was “unscientific and immoral.” The final act in this circus of outrage is a newly launched petition urging the federal government to revive an obsolete constitutional mechanism: the power of disallowance, as a means to override Alberta’s use of the notwithstanding clause. Popular in the 19th century, this relic of the turbulent decades following Confederation fell into disuse long ago and has not been invoked once since 1943. At the time of writing, the petition had already amassed over 18,000 signatures.

These frantic reactions stem from a foundational error in reasoning. Opponents to Smith’s legislation start from the place that trans kids exist, and that the treatments euphemistically packaged as “gender affirming care” are evidence-based, medically necessary, and life saving—despite the lack of scientific grounding for these claims. This fundamental misunderstanding then permits the application of malicious motives to anyone who holds a different view. Senator Kristopher Wells provided the textbook example of this when he asserted that Smith’s legislation “does nothing to protect children” and exists solely to “hurt them by denying doctor supported, life saving care.”

Canadian trans activists remain so detached from reality because Canada still exists inside a protective bubble: a nationwide echo chamber where countervailing evidence is considered bigotry and alternative viewpoints are forbidden. Only in a nation where the mainstream media refuses to expose the scandal of paediatric gender medicine—and where not a single federal political party is willing to challenge it—could this degree of mass delusion be sustained.

McMaster Fans the Flames

Another embarrassing chapter in the 2025 gender medicine fiasco was provided by McMaster University, one of Canada’s most prestigious institutions. The long, messy backstory is documented elsewhere, but the short version is this: researchers at the birthplace of evidence-based medicine conducted a series of systematic reviews of paediatric “gender-affirming” interventions, and found—like every review before them—that the evidence was low quality. Publication was met with a predictably feral backlash, with local trans activists harassing researchers at their workplace and proudly documenting the behaviour on an alarmingly obsessive Instagram account.

Then, in a masterclass of institutional cowardice, instead of standing up to the bullies and defending scientific integrity, McMaster folded. It denounced the group that had commissioned the reviews—the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine—issued a statement declaring these unproven interventions “medically necessary,” condemned Smith’s puberty blocker ban as “unconscionable,” and, in what felt like the final act of a struggle session, publicly declared that each member of the team had made personal donations to Egale’s legal fund supporting the litigation described in the section above.

That the birthplace of evidence-based medicine would side with extremist trans activists who have no respect for evidence or the scientific process, while throwing an organization devoted solely to demanding high-quality evidence in gender medicine under the bus, was Canada’s peak irony moment of 2025. Even Dr. Gordon Guyatt’s excruciating appearance on Beyond Gender, where he admitted he hadn’t read the statement he’d signed and openly said he doesn’t believe paediatric gender medicine is medically necessary, wasn’t enough for McMaster to retract its shameful declaration. Genspect Canada has since published an open letter demanding precisely that, yet at the time of writing the university has taken no action. This whole disappointing saga proved, once again, that no force is more effective at torching the credibility of once-respected institutions than trans activism.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, Nova Scotia announced the expansion of its paediatric gender clinics in 2025, Statistics Canada sought advice from subject-matter experts on how to disseminate the data it had collected on transgender and nonbinary toddlers, the Liberal government raised the Pride flag on Parliament Hill and proudly celebrated International Pronouns Day, and a Vancouver park, in response to backlash from trans activists for showcasing a hugely popular Harry Potter Forbidden Forest Experience, publicly disavowed JK Rowling’s political activity, accusing her of harming the global transgender community. Rowling was thoroughly untroubled by the disavowal.

The Beginning of the End

In truth, Matt Walsh’s declaration that “transgenderism is effectively over” was premature even in the United States. While identification rates among young people certainly do appear to be falling, the ideology that drove the contagion remains deeply embedded across medicine, education, media, and law, and it’s not going to disappear any time soon.

Events in the US in the final days of 2025 provide convincing evidence of this. On December 23, 19 Democrat states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over a recent declaration threatening to withhold federal funding from hospitals offering unproven, life-altering interventions to healthy youth in gender clinics.

Thus, one thing is certain: 2026 will be another year of chaotic legal battles, in the US and beyond, between those who believe in the existence of “trans kids” and those who do not; those who believe medicalising children’s identities is ethical and those who believe it is a scandal. And the chasm separating the two sides is vast with no possibility of finding middle ground.

And all of this could be further complicated in Canada, where, to add to the nation’s woes, a proposed amendment to our hate speech law (Bill C-9) threatens to chill the gender debate just as it’s starting to get warmed up.

But still, there are reasons for Canadians to be hopeful: Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has finally begun to take a firmer public stand on the gender issue, the CBC has—remarkably—addressed the puberty blocker controversy with something approaching balance, and for the first time in years a Canadian university hosted a debate on gender identity. And there has been a perceptible shift in the mood of the nation too. Once content to politely look the other way while innocent young people sacrificed their futures in our gender clinics, more and more ordinary Canadians now have the courage to face the magnitude of this medical scandal and demand that children be protected. So while the fight ahead will undoubtedly be long and ugly, at least the first battle has now truly begun.

Mia Hughes is Director of Genspect Canada and author of the WPATH Files

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