Checked: The BC Conservatives’ Claims about Trans People

On June 20, a wave of excitement swept the hotel conference room where John Rustad was about to give a speech to the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade.

Earlier that week the BC Conservatives had announced former Surrey mayor Linda Hepner had joined their slate. Former BC United MLA Elenore Sturko had already joined the Conservatives. Both were considered signals the party could appeal to centre-right female voters.

Polls continue to show the BC Conservatives challenging the NDP, while BC United is a distant fourth behind the BC Green Party.

With Hepner and Sturko lending credibility to a party that had very recently been wandering in the political wilderness, the business suit-clad crowd waited to hear what Rustad had to say about taxes and B.C.’s economy.

But while talking about health care, Rustad made a strange comparison.

“A doctor I was talking to just last week, he is a specialist in spinal injuries and neck injuries — a specialist surgeon. He gets two days every two months at the facility he’s working at. That's it — that's all the time that has been allocated,” Rustad said.

“One of his colleagues gets 12 days a month for doing gender-affirming surgeries. We can do better folks. We can figure out how to make sure that our professionals have the ability to go and provide the services that we need in British Columbia.”

It’s the latest comment from Rustad on transgender people. In this fact check, we’re breaking down his claims and, as hateful incidents directed at trans people become more common, their potential impact.

THE CLAIM: Gender-affirming surgeries are using a lot of health-care resources.

FACT CHECK: Gender-affirming surgeries represent a tiny proportion of the total number of surgeries performed in B.C. each year.

The Tyee approached Rustad after his June 20 speech to ask him for more details about the doctor he’d mentioned, including asking where he worked and for any other details about his experience. Rustad said he could not provide more information. All he knew was that the medical facility where the doctor works is located in Vancouver.

The Tyee asked Rustad why he included the comparison in his speech. Rustad responded that his comment was meant to draw attention to using surgeons’ time effectively, not to suggest that certain types of surgeries should not be available.

“There are many people I know who are suffering from spinal injuries and I just think when you have a surgeon who has that kind of capability, we have to make sure we utilize him,” Rustad said. “And I don’t mean by taking away from other surgeries.”

But Morgane Oger, a trans rights activist and former BC NDP candidate, said Rustad’s comments come after a series “of little targets and little aggressions” from the Conservative Party of BC leader against trans people.

“The comment... represents not just a passing idea, but a question, which is ‘Why do we spend so much money on population A for critical care, medically necessary care?’” said Oger.

“The question could have been framed as ‘Hey, let's revisit how we provide surgical care in B.C.,’ or something like this. But no, it was intended to target one population.”

Transgender people represent a tiny portion of the Canadian population. Across Canada, just 0.33 per cent of the population identifies as transgender. In British Columbia, 0.44 per cent of people identify as trans, according to data from Statistics Canada. Both of these statistics include people who identify as non-binary.

Just 115 gender-affirming surgeries were performed in British Columbia in 2023, compared with 4,035 spinal surgeries that were completed in the province in the same time period. That figure includes lower body surgeries completed through the Gender Surgery Program in Vancouver. It does not include top surgeries, which are done in health-care facilities throughout the province.

This data was provided to The Tyee by B.C.’s Ministry of Health. It took over a month to obtain the information after repeated inquiries to the Provincial Health Services Authority, Vancouver Coastal Health and the University of British Columbia.

THE CLAIM: Sexual orientation and gender identity policies in schools violate “parents’ rights” and indoctrinate children.

FACT CHECK: SOGI policies are intended to protect children and youth from bullying.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets in Canadian cities last September to protest sexual orientation and gender identity policies in public schools. These protests had links to the convoy protests of 2022, and many participants carried signs equating education and advocacy about LGBTQ2S+ issues with pedophilia.

In response to these protests, Rustad promised to end SOGI 123, as the policy is known in B.C. schools, calling it “a distraction” and “divisive.” In its place, he promised to put in place a “zero tolerance anti-bullying approach.”

Rustad has also repeatedly compared SOGI policies to the government’s removal of Indigenous children from their homes to be taken to residential schools.

Wilbur Turner, an LGBTQ2S+ advocate who lives in Kelowna, said there’s a common misconception that SOGI includes sex education. It does not. In B.C., parents or students can ask for alternative delivery of sex education, but they cannot opt out.

SOGI 123 provides optional queer and trans-affirming lesson plans, policy templates and professional development materials for schools. While the ministry encourages the use of SOGI materials in schools, it’s not mandatory. The purpose of SOGI is to make sure trans and non-binary students feel welcome and included at school and are supported if they wish to use specific pronouns, names or other markers of their identity.

The BC Conservatives have not promised to go as far as New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, which have both introduced legislation that requires parental consent before a student under 16 can be referred to by another name or pronoun in the classroom.

But in his Sept. 20, 2023, statement on Facebook, Rustad did say that “children in B.C. should never be told by any teacher or government employee, ‘You don’t have to tell your mom or dad.’”

Turner, who sits on an advisory board on homelessness in Kelowna, said he’s aware of a number of LGBTQ2S+ youth who are homeless either because they were kicked out of their homes or because their parents didn’t accept their identity.

Turner also pointed out that Rustad has called homosexuality a “lifestyle,” implying that being gay is a choice.

“This kind of talk coming from a political leader, someone who has influence and power, just reinforces those messages to those parents that it's possible that kids are being convinced or recruited to be gay or trans,” he said.

“When he's saying that this is an assault on parents’ rights, it's actually an assault on the rights of parents who have trans and binary kids. That's who the assault is on.”

THE CLAIM: To keep sports fair, transgender athletes must be excluded from women’s sports.

FACT CHECK: There is no sure way to test women’s bodies to ensure they are female, and experts note that at most levels there are no competitive or safety reasons not to allow all participants.

In April, B.C. Conservative MLAs introduced a bill that proposed to limit provincial funding to sports organizations that use “biological sex” to classify participants. The bill would have limited participation “to individuals of the biological sex that corresponds to the sex classification of the sporting team or event.”

The proposed legislation defined biological sex as the sex that appears on the participant’s birth registration, or was stated in a statutory declaration by the participant, their parent or guardian, or someone who has knowledge of the participant’s individual sex at birth. The bill also stated that sports organizations could require proof of a participant’s biological sex.

The bill was quickly voted down, with opponents calling it “hateful and discriminatory.” Rustad said the bill was needed to make sure sports are fair to female participants.

At the highest levels of sports, there is a long history of attempts to verify that women athletes are female, from visual inspections to gynecological exams to testing of chromosomes and sex hormone levels.

But these testing methods have always run up against the same problem: human bodies don’t always conform to binary sex markers.

According to Jaime Shultz, a professor of kinesiology at Penn State, in the 1980s it was established that some women have the XY chromosome, typically found in biological males; this chromosomal difference did not result in an athletic advantage.

When testing later moved to check for testosterone levels, the tests led to some women being excluded from sports because their testosterone was deemed to be too high. Caster Semenya, a South African runner, has been open about being targeted for sex testing because of her appearance, then being pressured to take birth control medication to lower the amount of testosterone in her body. About half of people with polycystic ovary syndrome — an estimated 1.4 million cisgender women, trans men and non-binary people in Canada — have elevated levels of testosterone.

The culture war over transgender athletes in sport reached a fever pitch during the 2024 Olympics, when two female boxers, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, were falsely accused of “being men” by the now discredited International Boxing Association because they had supposedly failed a gender test administered by the association.

Despite intense online harassment and inaccurate media headlines, Khelif won gold in boxing at the Olympics. “I am a woman like any other,” she said in response to the bullying she experienced.

When The Tyee asked Rustad why he has repeatedly focused on transgender issues, he repeated his position on women’s sports.

“I do not believe that it’s right to take away rights from women,” he said. “Women and girls should have their right to be able to compete fairly in sports.”

The focus on judging gender in sports has had impacts on children as well as adult athletes.

In Kelowna in 2023, a nine-year-old girl was falsely accused by an adult man of being a boy. In response, and instead of supporting the young girl, Rustad and B.C. Conservative candidate Karin Litzcke focused on the importance of making sure transgender people did not gain entry to women’s sports events.

When a commentator on X suggested that Litzcke’s rhetoric and policy directions helped inspire this kind of behaviour, Litzcke didn’t deny it or condemn the man’s actions.

“Of course confronting children or parents directly is not optimal; a quiet query to organizers and polite response would do. That said, this kind of tension arises when societal trust is eroded by glorifying dishonesty,” she tweeted.

Rustad then released a statement supporting Litzcke’s comments, saying the BC Conservatives “will not back down. Our position is crystal clear: biological males do not belong in women and girls’ sports.”

The statement made no mention of the actual incident or the psychological harm suffered by the nine-year-old girl at the heart of the story.

Oger said the actions of political leaders are having a real impact on the lives of transgender people. She recently posted on social media about the unsettling experience of having a man stare at her in a hostile manner while she was travelling on public transit.

“I have noticed that there's more aggression towards me and towards others than I've seen, I would say, in almost a decade,” Oger said.

“Since the ‘freedom’ convoy rallies, people have been freer with their personal attacks on people because of who they are. This has been reported in lots of contexts, but in the transgender community, we're really noticing it, and we're really noticing that people are being verbally attacked or physically attacked in ways that include their being transgender as a factor.”

With files from Katie Hyslop.