Gender Identity, Gender Pronouns and Freedom of Expression: Bill C-16 and the Traction of Specious Legal Claims
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bill C-16, An Act to Amend the Canadian Human Rights Code and the Criminal Code was a government bill intended to provide equal protection of the law to trans and gender non-binary Canadians. It protects individuals from discrimination within the sphere of federal jurisdiction, as well as protecting against hate propaganda and hate crimes, on the basis of gender identity and gender expression. The opposition to previous legislative attempts to protect trans rights focused on questions of sex-segregated spaces such as public bathrooms. In the course of the debate over Bill C-16, however, a new discourse of opposition emerged: Bill C-16 was said to be a fundamental threat to freedom of expression. This article argues that this claim lacks validity, yet it gained remarkable traction. The article traces the shifting opposition discourse and argues that freedom of expression provided a new and legitimizing discourse for long-standing conservative opposition to trans rights. Finally, it seeks to explain the traction of the specious legal claims, contextualizing them within existing public discourses of political correctness and freedom of expression under attack.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.094 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".