When human rights go crazy....

We need more common sense and less of a rush to use the Human Rights Commissions...

An Ontario human rights case involving a pre-op transgender man seeking access to a women-only gym is just one more listing in the catalogue of human-rights commission absurdities accumulated over the last 40 years. It stands with another piece of present lunacy in which a bar owner, also in Ontario, is caught between conflicting jurisprudence: the Ontario Human Rights Commission says he must allow the smoking of medical marijuana outside his premises, but Liquor Control Board of Ontario regulations are clear he will lose his liquor-licence if he does.

However, one ignores such cases at one's peril. They illustrate a grim and damaging social pathology now at work in Canada. In the stampede to a new definition of rights, the old idea of getting along as society's cement has been abandoned --as have old concepts of what's even appropriate.

Take the case of the women-only gym. Set aside the awkward fact that it's acceptable in Canada today to have exclusive gyms for women. Anachronistic as it seems--try starting a gym that excludes women --I actually can justify the women-only gym on the same grounds I would justify exclusively male gyms: if that's what people want, live and let live.

The facts are that two years ago, gym owner Jim Fulton opened a women-only section at his fitness club. Not long after, an apparently female person applied for membership, noting as he/she did so, that "she"was actually a male sex-change candidate, who hadn't yet had the surgery.

Now, one can appreciate this individual's dilemma. Before irreversible sex-change operations are performed, a prospective transsexual is advised to try living the other gender's life. Thus, a male would dress female, perhaps use makeup, and showing up in the men's locker-room looking like a woman might not be something he would want to do. On the other hand, having this same fully endowed person in a girls-only changing room is almost certainly something the women wouldn't want. In fact, the consensus of the admittedly modest sample I surveyed was that it would "creep me out."

So, when Fulton told the applicant he needed time to think, he was doing what any responsible business owner would do: trying to figure out where he stood with the law. Sure, the human rights commission was a possibility; but he also had legal obligations to his clientele, with whom he had signed contracts to provide an exclusively female environment.

He didn't get much grace. He soon had a lawyer's letter from the applicant--to whom he says he had still not actually refused membership-- asking for an apology.

And money.

Was it a shakedown? The Globe and Mail reports another pre-op transsexual was refused membership at Guelph's Exclusively Women's Fitness Centre four years ago, but won an undisclosed settlement at a mediation session. If it walks like a duck . . .

But the Ontario Human Rights Commission took this complaint seriously. Its code wraps in gender-identity with sex as a prohibited grounds of discrimination. And, says a commission spokesman, the code pays less attention to what stage in the process transsexuals are at than what they feel. Commented Afroze Edwards to the Globe, "I think the important thing to remember is how they identify themselves. . . . Regardless of whether they're preop or post-op, it's their lived gender that's important."

I suppose in the crazy human rights world, that passes for a well-considered judgment on an admittedly difficult decision. However, it's a feebleminded thing to say: Sorry about the man who wants to be a woman, but we're more concerned with the women who don't want every Tom, Dick or Harry in their changing room.