Father who was jailed for violating gag order about child's medical gender transition to plead guilty

The Canadian father and gender dissident who became a prisoner of conscience when he refused to stop speaking out against the transitioning of his child, is set for release prior to trial because he has entered a guilty plea in return for a reduced prison sentence.

Robert Hoogland, the father, is charged with criminal contempt of court, pending trial. However, according to his lawyer Carey Linde, he has made a plea agreement with David Eby, the Attorney General for British Columbia.

The trial was initially set for 12 April. It has now been postponed until 10 am on 13 April at the Law Courts in Vancouver. Due to his entering a guilty plea, the trial will not go ahead, saving the court the time and cost of proving the charges to the criminal standard of proof.

On that day, Hoogland will admit to willfully breaching certain orders of the Supreme Court restricting his speech. He will accept a sentence of 18 months probation with one month off to reflect the time he has already spent in custody.

The terms of the plea agreement are subject to the discretion of the judge. If they are granted, Hoogland should be released from custody later on the day of 13 April.

Assuming the trial does not go ahead, there will be no full hearing of the issues in court with media in attendance. Had Hoogland's trial for breaking gag orders gone ahead, he stood to face a sentence of up to five years in prison if subsequently found guilty.

In response to the jailing of Hoogland, author and former University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson—who came to international attention after giving public testimony against bill C-16 which encoded "gender identity" into the Canadian human rights charter and the criminal code — tweeted "This could never happen, said those who called my stance against Bill C16 alarmist. I read the law and saw that it was, to the contrary, inevitable."

Peterson went on to predict that the negative impact of gender identity laws on the human rights of Canadian citizens will only increase.

Hoogland is currently being held in North Fraser Remand Centre in Port Coquitlam, east of Vancouver.

According to a source close to Hoogland, he is being held in an individual cell "due to covid protocols" and is not allowed any in-person visits. He is permitted to take exercise "for a couple of hours a day so the living conditions are not ideal, akin to solitary confinement."

According to another source, Hoogland says he misses his dog and has received "verbal support" from prison staff for doing what he thought best for his child.

Canadian citizens are compelled by force of law to adhere to the dangerous belief system of sex denialism even at the expense of their children's long-term health and fertility.

On Tuesday 16th March, the father attended court in response to the Attorney General of British Columbia's warrant for his arrest on charges of criminal contempt. He was then arrested and jailed.

His child, who is biologically female but identifies with masculine gender stereotypes, was put on the path of taking wrong sex hormones at the age of 13. When the father—who was separated from the mother—learned that this was happening, he attempted to find non-medical alternatives for his child, to no avail.

When he challenged in court the decision to transition his child, on the basis that a child cannot give informed consent to be sterilised and become a lifelong medical patient, the judge held that the medical experimentation should continue. The court also ordered him not to speak to the media about what was being done to his child, and said that to do so would constitute "family violence."

In that hearing, Hoogland raised his hand to speak. "I do love my child. That's why I did this," he said. "I did what I thought was right."

In an interview shortly before his arrest, Hoogland asked for those watching the case unfold to "Educate people. Tell people what's going on… talk to your neighbor and say, 'Hey, this is what's going on in the world'…To even do a simple thing like that…that's commendable; that's courage to me. To even do a simple thing like that."

In an earlier interview with a woman who used to believe she was transgender, before desisting in that belief and accepting her sex, the interviewer said "I'm feeling really sad right now that you could be put in jail because you're standing up for your daughter."

That is precisely what happened. A father will now serve a substantial prison sentence for trying to parent in the best long-term interests of a child whom he loves, and wants to protect.

There is mounting evidence that children who are subjected to the experimental medical procedures of gender affirmative so-called "healthcare" can live to regret what was done to them by adults who were supposed to have their best interests in mind.

A young English woman named Keira Bell, who made history when she successfully sued the Tavistock state pediatric gender identity clinic for hastily prescribing wrong sex hormones when she was 15, recently spoke out about her regrets, and all of the different factors which combined to lead her think transitioning was the cure for her pain.

"From the earliest days, my home life was unhappy," she said. "My parents—a white Englishwoman and a black American who got together while he was in Britain with the U.S. Air Force—divorced when I was about 5. My mother, who was on welfare, descended into alcoholism and mental illness. Although my father remained in England, he was emotionally distant to me and my younger sister."

"By the time I got to the Tavistock, I was adamant that I needed to transition," she went on to say. "It was the kind of brash assertion that's typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation."

"But the further my transition went, the more I realized that I wasn't a man, and never would be. We are told these days that when someone presents with gender dysphoria, this reflects a person's "real" or "true" self, that the desire to change genders is set. But this was not the case for me. As I matured, I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause."

"Five years after beginning my medical transition to becoming male, I began the process of detransitioning. A lot of trans men talk about how you can't cry with a high dose of testosterone in your body, and this affected me too: I couldn't release my emotions. One of the first signs that I was becoming Keira again was that—thankfully, at last—I was able to cry. And I had a lot to cry about."

In a landmark ruling in December 2020, a panel of three judges in the English High Court found that children cannot give informed consent to puberty blockers. Keira Bell's lawyers argued that the Tavistock had failed to protect children who sought its services, and that the clinic had conducted what amounted to uncontrolled medical experiments on their patient cohort.

The judge's verdict was unanimous. In the judgement, they repeatedly expressed surprise that the Tavistock had failed to gather basic data on its patients, including follow-up data on longer-term outcomes of the transgender treatment pathway. They noted that there was a lack of evidence for putting children as young as 10 years old on puberty blockers, a move that is nearly always followed by wrong sex hormones--powerful and damaging drugs which must be taken for life to maintain the illusion of having changed sex.

In the last decade, increasing numbers of girls have been seeking treatment for gender dysphoria—unhappiness with their sexed body. In 2009-10, 77 children were referred to the Tavistock, 52 percent of whom were boys. As the overall number of referrals began to soar, that ratio started to reverse. In 2018-19, 624 boys and 1,740 girls were referred—74 percent of the total.

Over half of referrals, of whom 74 percent were girls, the patients were aged 14 or under. Some patients referred for experimental "trans healthcare" were as young as 3 years old.

We live in a society where three years olds are being labelled by adult as cross-dressers and transexuals—labels which, until very recently, would only ever be applied to adult men whose sexual fetishism had taken over their lives.

The sheer lack of curiosity about these extraordinary facts is a clear signal that ideology and financial interests are behind the wheel here, not care for children, and certainly not medical ethics. Sex denialism is a uniquely dangerous creed.

We can only hope that, thanks to the self-sacrifice of brave people like Robert Hoogland, countries like Canada whose legal, medical and social care systems are captured by transgender ideology, will very soon wake up and smell the coffee. It cannot be long before society looks back upon this period of the medical transition of children with shame and regret.