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The decision against Amy Hamm, detailed in the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms document from March 13, 2025, casts a shadow over the rights of women to speak freely. As a nurse, Hamm faced professional misconduct charges for sharing gender-critical views, a ruling that suggests her words were too heavy a burden for her profession to bear. This outcome feels like a quiet wound to women who rely on open expression to navigate a world that often overlooks their perspectives. It raises a somber question: if a woman’s honest thoughts can cost her livelihood, what space remains for her to speak without fear?
Women’s rights depend so much on the ability to voice what matters—whether it’s about their bodies, their work, or the policies that shape their lives. The Hamm case hints at a troubling pattern: when women step outside accepted lines, even thoughtfully, they risk being muted by those meant to protect fairness. It’s disheartening to think that a nurse, someone who cares for others daily, could be penalized not for her actions but for her words. This doesn’t just touch Hamm—it brushes against every woman who hesitates to speak up, wondering if her voice might carry too high a price.
Please, let’s hold onto the simple truth that free speech is a lifeline for women. I ask for a gentler approach, one that doesn’t rush to punish but listens instead. Hamm’s story shouldn’t end with her silence; it should remind us to safeguard the right of women to express themselves, even when it’s hard to hear. We need a world where women like her can share their views—raw, real, and human—without losing what they’ve worked so hard to build. That’s not too much to hope for, is it?
The recent ruling against Amy Hamm by the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives (BCCNM) is nothing short of a travesty, a glaring assault on free speech and common sense that should leave any reasonable person fuming. Hamm, a nurse and vocal advocate for women’s sex-based rights, was found guilty of “professional misconduct” in March 2025 for stating biological facts and expressing opinions critical of gender identity ideology. Specifically, the disciplinary panel zeroed in on a handful of her online statements—made while identifying as a nurse—deeming them “discriminatory and derogatory” toward transgender individuals. This isn’t just a punishment for Hamm; it’s a warning shot to every professional in Canada: step out of line with the prevailing ideology, and your career could be next. How dare a regulatory body, meant to ensure competence in healthcare, stretch its tentacles into policing personal beliefs expressed off-duty?
What’s particularly infuriating is the absurdity of the tribunal’s reasoning—or lack thereof. One so-called expert reportedly argued that being a woman is a “social identity category rather than a biological reality,” a statement so detached from science it’s laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. Hamm’s crime? Asserting that biological sex is real and matters, especially when it comes to women’s spaces and rights—a position grounded in observable fact, not hate. Yet, the panel chose to side with ideological fantasy over evidence, slapping Hamm with a guilty verdict for daring to speak her mind. This isn’t about protecting anyone; it’s about control, about silencing dissent under the guise of professionalism. The fact that her extensive Twitter posts, where she didn’t explicitly tie her nurse status, were spared only highlights the flimsy, cherry-picked nature of this witch hunt.
The implications of this ruling are chilling, and that’s putting it mildly. If a nurse can be professionally crucified for advocating for women’s rights and biological truth, what hope is there for free discourse in Canada? The BCCNM’s decision doesn’t just harm Hamm—it erodes the freedom of every regulated professional, from doctors to teachers, who now must tiptoe around controversial issues or risk their livelihoods. This is the kind of dystopian overreach that should spark outrage, not apathy. Hamm’s fight isn’t over—she’s hinted at appeals, potentially up to the Supreme Court—and thank goodness, because someone needs to stand up to this madness. We should all be rooting for her, not because we agree with every word she says, but because the principle at stake is too precious to let slip away without a fight.
In what context do I mean?
Like these:
Here are three recent examples where fear of being labeled racist might have influenced the handling or reporting of crimes or corruption:
Rotherham Grooming Scandal (1997-2013) – In Rotherham, UK, there was significant delay and inaction by authorities in addressing the grooming and sexual exploitation of young girls, largely due to the perpetrators being of Pakistani descent. The Jay Report from 2014 highlighted that fear of appearing racist slowed down the response to these crimes, allowing them to continue for years with minimal intervention.
Telford Child Sexual Exploitation – Similar to Rotherham, the Telford case involved the sexual abuse of hundreds of children over several decades, with local authorities and police reportedly hesitant to act decisively due to fears of being accused of racism. The victims were primarily white girls, and the perpetrators were predominantly from the British Pakistani community. The council’s reluctance to enforce regulations on taxi drivers, some of whom were involved in the abuse, was noted as an example of this hesitancy.
Grooming Gangs in the UK – There have been multiple instances across the UK where grooming gangs operated with a significant delay in intervention by law enforcement or social services, reportedly due to concerns about racial sensitivity. These cases often involved British Pakistani men targeting vulnerable white girls, and the fear of backlash or being labeled racist has been suggested as a reason for the slow response. General posts on social media platforms like X have highlighted this issue, pointing out how political and law enforcement officials avoided confronting the issue to dodge accusations of racism.
These examples illustrate a pattern where cultural sensitivity and the fear of racial accusations have potentially influenced the speed and effectiveness of institutional responses to serious crimes.
This is a brutal attack on freedom of speech and expression. The people of the UK need to stand up and stand up quickly before they lose more of their rights and freedoms.
Just the imagine the tangled nightmare of how this is enforced. Who decides what is “hate speech”? What is the metric used? I cannot believe this is actually a thing in 2024.
That couldn’t possible happen in Canada…
Oh dear…
Of course there was a protest. Because women speaking about their rights and boundaries is a hateful activity.
Not only that, but for people who consider themselves so very much more educated and worldly than everyone else, I’m shocked, again, in retrospect, at how insulated they are — how little they seem to understand about how people in other parts of the world, other cultures, other classes, and other communities think. The CBC blinders have offered not only a political virtuousness that prevents them even wanting to see outside their bubbles, lest their purity be tarnished by a wrongthought, but has also offered a version of “facts” and “truth” that don’t adjust according to the facts and the truth.
https://x.com/MeghanEMurphy/status/1800069761243718091
The absolute state of the progressive Left in Canada.
A common thread that runs through many of the issue around free speech and the freedom of expression in our Canadian society is the application of the rules and making sure they apply to everyone in the same manner. If our institutions could stand up and once again treat equality before the law as a meaningful statement it would solve many of the problems we’ve been having. The long shadow of Herbert Marcusé’s Repressive Tolerance has made the enforcement of our laws regarding protest apply only to one category of protester. Demonstrations and gatherings perceived to be “on the right” are subject to the full letter of the law, while most activity from the Left – especially the activist Left – seems to fly underneath the authorities radar. This permissiveness has emboldened the radical left and they will continue to push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in society because of lack of equanimity when enforcing the rules of our society.
We have very clear rules when it comes to protests, demonstrations, and freedom of expression in Canada – what we need is a return to a the just application of those rules to all parties in our society.
Greg Lukianoff in this excerpt looks at the encampment situation that is developing on many college campuses in the United States and how free speech is being used and abused within that context.
GREG LUKIANOFF: Since October 7th we’ve definitely seen a combination of clearly protected speech by pro-Palestinian students—speech that we’ve proudly defended because we are a nonpartisan organization; we will always defend people regardless of the content of their speech—but we’ve also seen an awful lot of assault, we’ve seen a lot of shout-downs, we’ve seen a lot of vandalism, and we’ve seen a lot of unprotected speech. It’s been accelerating for several months now.
Probably one of the worst places for this phenomenon has been Columbia University in New York City. What happened over the weekend, with the crackdown on the encampments that they had there, was interesting from a free speech standpoint, partially because you don’t have a First Amendment or free speech right to camp out on campus grounds. You have a protest right. But generally, every school in the country has rules that basically say, “No, you can’t camp here. You can’t turn this into your own encampment.” They just haven’t been enforcing them. So Columbia, to a degree, is paying the price for not actually fairly enforcing their rules, going far back.
Now, do I think that in the course of this, there are students engaged in protected speech who are getting in trouble? I have very little doubt that there are. And we want to know about those cases. But we’ve also seen, particularly at Columbia, examples of assault. Certainly examples of students being blocked and surrounded. Also, students engaging in things that, by pretty much any definition, would count as discriminatory harassment, which is a severe, persistent, and pervasive patterns of behaviour that a reasonable person would understand is discriminatory. And that’s something that we’ve seen, unfortunately, all over the country.
Now at Yale, we even know the student who was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag, and she had to go to the hospital for it. That obviously isn’t protected. I think that there was a chance for a lot of these schools to prevent a lot of this from escalating by simply, fairly, and evenly enforcing their rules from the very beginning. But in a lot of cases, they simply didn’t.
One thing that readers really need to understand is that if you care about free speech on campus, you need to know that last year was the biggest year for deplatforming in recorded history, that we know of, on American college campuses. Deplatforming includes getting speakers disinvited and shout-downs. Yet this year, 2024, is going to blow 2023 out of the water, even just from shout-downs. And that has overwhelmingly come from pro-Palestinian students. Some of them have engaged in violence, including at Berkeley where they chased off an IDF speaker, for example, several weeks ago.
Controversial topics are hard to talk about. What makes the process even more difficult is when one side, for whatever reason, decides that disagreeing with their position is equivalent to you *hating* their position.
The disagreement=hate confab is almost an exclusive feature of attempting to dialogue with someone on the Left of the political spectrum. I hesitate to use the Left/Right distinction though because the terms are not describing the political reality we now inhabit. Perhaps authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian might be a better way to describe positions these days.
Authoritarians whether on the Left or the Right seem to have a built in predisposition to thinking that their choice is the moral choice and that somehow by questioning their assertions you are questioning their morality or ethics.
It really isn’t that, at least not a first. One must grapple with the argument the person makes not the morality or ethics the person in question happens to hold.
An easy example is a person stating the fact that women, exclusively, are adult human females. The simple action of stating a fact can lead to accusations of hatred, discrimination, and even bigotry.
How does that even work? My hypothesis is that when you encounter the disagreement=hate trope the person that you are dealing with isn’t willing to put the thought or effort in to make a reasonable counter-argument. It is much easier to simply dismiss statements and thoughts that do not comport with what you hold to be true than do the work to properly refute them (also the statement in question may be closest to the truth and thus more accurate than your worldview).
Another issue is that your interlocutor may rate highly on the authoritarian scale. Woke ideologies like transgender ideology are totalizing, for them to reach their final stage *everyone* has to believe in the ideology. The utopian magic can’t happen until everyone is ideologically congruent thus wrong-thinkers must be converted or removed from the equation. If you are speaking against gender ideology -for the converted it simply must be “hate” – because the ideologue is convinced that their position is not only factually correct, but morally and ethically correct as well. Thus, the problem lies in you, not them as they have deep insight into the question, that gives them access to the “truth” and speaking against this “truth” must be hateful in nature.
It isn’t.
Being able to interrogate and critique ideas is part of the bedrock of a free society. We need to be able to objectively look at what people say and determine for ourselves the value of their arguments. Doing this now in society can be challenging precisely because questioning the orthodoxy is often misconstrued as “hatred”, thus speech and debate must be kept in check to stop the “hate” if one is to follow the reasoning from those who seek to limit speech in our society.
Limiting speech is such a completely terrible idea and we should really pause and consider the nature of so called progressive movements that advocate for the censure of speech in society.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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