Canada

Tl;dr: Danielle Smith brings shame to Alberta, gets outclassed by Skate Canada on basic human rights.

Worst premier ever.

Tomorrow: Premier Danielle Smith uses notwithstanding clause to force Skate Canada to hold competition in Alberta.

Fuck Alberta
-Albertan

I used to work in arenas for the city of Edmonton. They hosted skate Canada events every winter in my rink. This is gonna be a big hit for them and honestly they deserve it. Happy to have shipped out almost a decade ago.

I am fully anticipating Danielle to throw some kind of media tantrum over this that somehow makes the UCP look even worse than they already do. Absolute joke of a provincial leadership that has no policies other than what lobbyists paid most for and reactionary BS they imported from the US culture war.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

As someone who is a member of a National Sports Organization (NSO) here in Canada, I hope more follow Skate Canada’s lead.

NSOs in Canada that receive any funding from the Federal Government (read: all of them) are required to follow the Universal Code of Conduct to Prevent and Address Maltreatment in Sport (UCCMS). Right now with Alberta’s laws in place, an NSO that is forced to discriminate against an athlete thanks to those laws could find themselves in violation of the UCCMS. The penalties for being in violation (beyond any Criminal Code violations) can be pretty severe — all the way up to being banned for life from participating in any sport anywhere in Canada.

As such, I suspect more NSOs are going to be looking at whether it’s worth the risk holding an event in Alberta. They don’t get a get-out-of-jail-free card from the UCCMS and its penalties just because an event is in Alberta. And most (all?) NSOs already have their own policies for trans athletes that are specific to their sport and the needs of their athletes^0. We don’t need governments making those rules when the NSOs can do so themselves in a manner more targeted to their individual sports.

As a Registered Coach in British Columbia, trans women and trans men are welcome in my tournaments competing under the gender class of their choosing, in alignment with basic human decency and my NSOs guidelines.

^0 — not all sports are made equal, and the impact of gender based development differs from sport to sport. In some circumstances^1 a trans woman might have an advantage in something like wrestling — but has virtually no advantage in something like shooting sports.
^1 — every trans person is different, just as every man (and every woman) is different. So I am somewhat pre-supposing the “worst-case” sort of scenario that right-wing nuts presume is always the case for the sake of argument.