Miscarriage: The Sham Trial of Nurse Amy Hamm

The storm clouds gathering around BC’s ailing healthcare system just got a lot darker.

The BC College of Nurses and Midwives has just proven that the core problem in BC healthcare is its incompetent, irresponsible and ideologically driven leadership.

The Colleges’ marathon, costly, high-profile trial over nurse Amy Hamm’s Tweets has resulted in a pronouncement of misconduct because her writings “challenge the existence of transgender women.”  

Hamm’s sin was to publicly express her view that biological men cannot literally become women, and as such should not compete in women’s sports, change in front of girls at the pool, or reside in women’s rape shelters.

Hamm objects to the idea that burly bearded men should be allowed to merely “self-identify” to gain access to women’s prisons.

Hamm rejects the idea that human babies can, through a metaphysical process, be “born in the wrong body.”   

Hamm, in part due to her public association with Harry Potter author JK Rowling, has become one of the world's most notable public figures in the fight against transgender ideology.

In a 115-page decision handed down March 13^th, the College proves that they don’t care about staffing-shortages, closed emergency rooms or out of control costs.

No.

As it turns out, their main concern is robbing their members of their constitutional right to freedom of expression.

The Decision

The “Reasons for Decision on Verdict” of the disciplinary Panel, set up by the College under BC laws regulating health colleges, are not in form or substance like decision documents typically handed down by BC Supreme Court judges in civil law suits.

Not at all.

Only a cursory laying out of the factual matrix is offered. The brief “Introduction” states that a 2022 College Citation “…alleges that, between approximately July 2018 and March 2021, the Respondent made discriminatory and derogatory statements regarding transgender people…”

A host of problems with the decision make it ripe for appeal to BC Supreme Court.

Begging the Question: 115 Pages of Fallacy

A fallacy readily evident throughout the Decision is the use by the Panel of controversial words and phrases in a way that presupposes universally agreed meaning as a strategy to sidestep the fundamental arguments at hand.

For example, the Decision uses phrases like “sex assigned at birth,” “binary gendered assumptions,” “transgendered persons” and the word “cisgender” when describing matters before the Panel, as if the meaning of those terms are uncontested and universally accepted.

For example, at paragraph 175 the Panel writes:

“The Panel accepts that the experiences of transgender persons in the health care system may differ from the experiences of cisgender patients because of the pervasive nature of binary gendered assumptions.”

The word “cisgender” appears 66 times in the Decision (“cisgendered” 3 times), which is an indication of heavy bias.

“Cisgender” is a loaded word used by academics and activists to describe a person whose “gender” (also disputed) matches their “sex assigned at birth.”

By repeatedly using the word “cisgender” in its quasi-judicial ruling, the College’s Panel assumptively pre-decides that sex is not biologically determinable by objective reality, such as physical observation of genitalia, as believed by Hamm and arguably the vast majority of the public.

The word cisgender is also highly inflammatory in the context of the ruling.

The word, regarded by many as a slur, is often used to imply that people who do not claim trans, queer or “non-binary” status enjoy a measure of “privilege” in society, therefor placing them in a position of power to “harm” “marginalized” “transgendered persons.”

This framing of Hamm as a privileged oppressor of the weak is central to the College’s tendentious case. The abuse suffered by Hamm at the hands of ruthless trans activists was never considered by the Panel.

Expert Evidence: The Panel Preferred its Own Brand

On the face of it, Hamm’s renowned academics seemed to trounce the College’s witnesses, both in their credentials and the voluminous scientific evidence they tendered.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Panel largely dismissed Hamm’s expert evidence, preferring the more activist-friendly College academics.

The Panel’s discussion of the College’s expert testimony is marred by pervasive a priori assumptive language prejudicial to Hamm’s case.

For example, College expert Elizabeth Saewyc, Director of UBC’s School of Nursing, is said by the Panel to have “…testified that transgender and non-binary persons regularly encounter processes that challenge patient privacy and create obstacles to respectful patient-centred care." She explained that such patients may be misgendered which can lead to “intrusive questions, disbelief, mockery, disrespect, hostility, or even denial of care.”

By parsing Saewyc’s testimony using terms with meaning disputed by Hamm, the Panel reinforces the appearance of judicial bias, undermining the credibility of their findings.

For example, the word “misgendered” is a loaded rhetorical expression connoting careless or intentional “harms” inflicted on patients who are anatomically different from their claimed “identity.”

Hamm’s expert witness Dr. James Cantor strongly disagreed with the “harm” assertion.  Per the Decision document, Cantor “…observed that “misgendering” sometimes just means a simple mistake using a pronoun or gender when someone has indicated a preference for different terminology. He noted that terminology can be weaponized to express, resist, or agree with a particular idea. He testified he has not seen transgender clients who were traumatized or suffering harm by misgendering in a clinical context.”

The Panel’s written Decision, and their finding against Hamm, are an example of the “weaponization” of words like “misgender” and “cisgender” to curtail speech.

The evidence of Canadian scientist Cantor seems to have been entirely ignored.

His qualifications are significant, as summarized by the Decision:

“Dr. James Cantor is a clinical psychologist and sexual behaviour scientist who has researched and published extensively on the development of human sexuality, with a particular focus on atypical sexualities. Dr. Cantor formerly held various positions at the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health (“CAMH”), including Senior Scientist and Head of Research. He is currently the Director of the Toronto Sexuality Centre. Dr. Cantor has clinical experience in assessing and assisting individuals aged 16 years and older with gender dysphoria and medical transitioning.”

Cantor testified about his direct experience with medical transitioning in the 1990s and onward. He said that the phenomenon at one time was restricted almost entirely to adult males who wished to live as women. Cantor described rigorous “gatekeeping” protocols, such as requiring that men live as women with unambiguously female names for a year prior to being considered for sex-change operations.

Cantor said everything changed in 2012 when guidelines promulgated by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (“WPATH”) “…changed from a “gatekeeping model” to an “informed consent model.”

Cantor was highly critical of WPATH's seemingly arbitrary changes to its standards: “…if a standard can be raised or lowered, it’s not a standard anymore. It’s blanket permission for a doctor to do whatever the doctor wants, none of which has any basis whatsoever in science.”

Cantor also accused WPATH’s authors of being in a conflict of interest. Per the Decision document:

“Dr. Cantor believes that clinicians who provide medical transitions are in a conflict when they recommend the guidelines for WPATH. He testified that the decision of whether medicalized transition is beneficial to patients cannot only be made by those whose incomes depend on the medicalized transition of minors.”

Cantor also testified that around 2014-2015, a period he described as a time of exponential growth of social media, persons seeking sex transitioning surgery changed from mainly adult men to overwhelmingly adolescent girls.  Cantor attributed the dramatic change to a “social contagion,” citing a 2018 study by Dr. Lisa Littman:

Per the Decision document, Cantor:

“…believes that individuals now seeking to transition between the ages of 18 to 20 years of age, while technically adults, are childhood or adolescent onset cases characterized by disorders and difficulties with social functioning and that many of these cases represent a social contagion. Dr. Cantor testified that research from Dr. Littman demonstrated that when an individual within a group indicates to others that they are gender dysphoric, there is a social clustering of that condition rather than a random distribution.”

WPATH = Wrong Path

Another significant flaw in the Panel’s decision on Hamm is their reliance on testimony by the College’s experts that cite WPATH as a reliable source of medical information and guidelines.

For years criticized as an activist-led quasi-scientific body, WPATH has been rocked by scandals that have left it at worst completely discredited and at best largely irrelevant.

In March of 2024, working with US journalist Michael Schellenberger’s Environmental Progress, Canadian researcher Mia Hughes released a damning 241 page report entitled The WPATH Files: Pseudoscientific surgical and hormonal experiments on children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults.

The WPATH Files include leaked internal correspondence between doctors indicating that dramatic “gender affirming” surgeries (e.g., amputation of breasts and penises) should be provided to persons with severe mental illness, and prescribing sterilizing puberty blocking medications to minors who they admitted could not understand the lifelong impacts on their lives.

A further blow to WPATH’s legitimacy as a scientific body and revealing it as an activist-led group is The Cass Review, commissioned by England’s National Health Service, was released in April 2024 in the UK. 

Led by pediatrician Dr. Hillary Cass, the Review found that WPATH’s “gender affirming care” guidelines were not scientifically supported and that the rapid rise, especially among teenage girls of “gender dysphoria” was likely caused in part by social contagion.

The report led the NHS to repudiate WPATH’s guidelines, which led to widespread distancing of health regulators worldwide from the organization. Its policies are accused of being based on weak data and biased opinions.

The Wrong Side of History

Given the global retreat from WPATH, its reputation in tatters, it would be logical to think that the BCCNM would not rely on the discredited organization in their findings.

Shockingly, the opposite is true.

College expert witness Dr. Greta Bauer not only cited WPATH as an authoritative body, she is a member of WPATH.

Per the Panel’s Decision document describing Bauer’s credentials: “She is also a member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (“WPATH”).”

Under cross-examination, Bauer dismissed the Littman study cited by Cantor about social contagion, the findings of which are now accepted as valid by the NHS and other major regulators.

Littman proposed a phenomenon called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria to explain why so many young girls were suddenly “coming out” as transgender, pointing to social media activity.

Baurer suggested this theory relied on the testimony of the parents, brushing aside the findings.

“No adolescents or young adults were interviewed in the study. The parents perceived that their child, who had suddenly announced they were transgender, were sometimes spending considerable time online and had friends who came out as transgender.”

As a member of WPATH, Bauer’s testimony should have been discounted as biased, given how embattled the organization has become. Bauer’s objectivity as a witness was questionable and her testimony should not have been relied on.

Unfortunately, even though the WPATH scandal has been raging for over a year, largely proving Cantor right, the Panel went with Bauer.

“The Panel prefers Dr. Bauer’s evidence,” wrote the Panel at paragraph 170, buying wholesale into Bauer’s dismissal of the social contagion phenomenon evidenced in the Cass Review. The Panel rejected the idea  “…that female youth are suffering from issues with social functioning as a result of social media rather than gender dysphoria.”

Stock and Blade

Two other Hamm experts were UK philosopher Dr. Kathleen Stock and Canadian Dr. Linda Blade.

Stock is described in the Decision as “…a former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, where she taught for 18 years. Dr. Stock has published scholarly philosophical works on imagination, fiction, sexual objectification, sexual orientation, and the importance of referring to human sex in language.”

Blade is described in the report as “…a former professional athlete, professional coach, and kinesiologist, who has expertise in sexual dimorphism.”

Not pointed out in the Decision is the fact that the College asked no questions of either Stock or Blade. No cross-examination of either whatsoever.

Dr. Stock has been heavily persecuted in the UK for publicly rejecting the idea that humans can change sex. Stock says biological men who believe they are women are “living a fiction” and that society at large should not be forced to live that fiction with them.

Per the Decision, Stock has paid a heavy price for her views:

“As a professor, Dr. Stock faced protests and attempts to defame her character because of her views. She was subjected to threats, complaints, and the weaponizing of the university’s internal complaints process. Dr. Stock testified there were people, including other academics, who were vocal, dogmatic, and falsely insisted that her views constituted hatred.”

Dr. Blade for her part laid out robust scientific data regarding the physiological superiority of men in the field of sport:

“She testified, for example, that males have a 15% advantage over females in running events, a 25% to 50% advantage in activities involving the upper body such as weightlifting and pole vaulting, and up to a 160% advantage in boxing. This raises both fairness and safety concerns. Dr. Blade explained that even one male athlete who identifies as a woman on the rugby pitch will increase the chance of injury to female athletes by up to 30%.”   

Stock’s testimony was largely dismissed by the Panel, who swept aside her argument that expressing strongly worded disagreement with transgender ideology is fair comment and protected speech. 

The Panel disregarded Blade’s testimony, ignoring the problem of men in women’s sports entirely.

Mystical Musings

In their analysis, the Panel renders all the testimony moot, relying on nebulous and ethereal concepts like “erasure” and “denying the existence.”

So bent on humiliating Hamm, the Panel decided to freely admit that it is expressly guided by a quasi-religious dogma about a “gender soul.”

From page 105 in a discussion about Tweets expressing disbelief in a metaphysical gender soul: “…the Panel agrees that the statements which discount a mystical belief in a gender soul are a form of discriminatory erasure as they deny the existence of transgender people.”

What?

Why the New Age incantations?

How can a supposedly law-based tribunal invoke higher wisdom from the spiritual realm for its findings? Are they channelling insight from another dimension to shed light on the meaning of existence?  

Surely the decision of the College cannot stand. It's ridiculous.

The BC College of Nurses should be immediately wound down.

Their extravagant waste of taxpayer funds on a holy war is unconscionable.

Their mistreatment of Amy Hamm is a sin. Full stop.