This is a significant ruling in gender rights jurisprudence, especially trans rights. Canada’s Supreme Court Justice Sheilah Martin has ruled that it was problematic for a lower court judge to refer to a sexual assault victim as a “woman" and instead used the term "person with a vagina.”

The citation is R v Kruk, 2024 SCC 7. Link to full case report and exact quote given below:

Para 109: "Where a person with a vagina testifies credibly and with certainty that they felt penile‑vaginal penetration, a trial judge must be entitled to conclude that they are unlikely to be mistaken. While the choice of the trial judge to use the words “a woman” may have been unfortunate and engendered confusion, in context, it is clear the judge was reasoning that it was extremely unlikely that the complainant would be mistaken about the feeling of penile‑vaginal penetration because people generally, even if intoxicated, are not mistaken about that sensation."

https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/20315/index.do

News coverage:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/supreme-court-decision-say-word-woman-is-confusing-unfortunate

https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/lilley-top-court-judges-take-on-woman-is-no-joke

This is supposed to be progress ?

Why do only women get this dehumanising language ? Where are men referred to as people with prostrates ? Penis owners ? Nutsack carriers ? Semen ejectors ? Why does your version of revolution not Reduce actual men to their body parts ? Oh could it be because they already have power and this is just misogyny on the left ?

Consider how male centric this whole thing is. the reason that "person with vagina" is preferred to women is because they think women actually arent whole and complete people in and of themselves. a person with a vagina is like a person with a disability. The male is the standard issue. You ladies- you have that weird absence of a penis and we need to recognise that youre not just a person- youre a person with a vagina.

If you really did not think being born female was some sort of disability- the word woman- which means adult human female- would not cause you some great existential harm.

Whats worse is that the woman here was a rape victim. Imagine if murder victims were refereed to as " the person with the hole in the head". Imagine if you got stabbed and then court records continuously referred to you by your injured body part and then online activists celebrated that because it suited their politics? How insulting.

Whatever internalised misogyny this lady is dealing with- the compassionate thing to do is not to reify that kind of misogyny and instead help her come to terms with her body. It is the only one she will ever have.

In fact, Chandrachud did follow this approach. He said in a judgment that we should say “pregnant person” and not “pregnant woman”, in order to be inclusive to the trans community, as a person assigned female at birth can get pregnant yet identify as a male and may even have undergone surgery to have certain female characteristics removed. For example, the actor Elliot Page was assigned female at birth and even acted as a female in many movies under the name Ellen Page.

why not provide context? that case was about a 14 year old rape and kidnapping victim who did not know she was pregnant until it was too late to get an abortion. When she got court permission to get an abortion she was informed that they would inject the baby with drugs which may or may not kill the child and she would have to still undergo labour. faced with this horrifying ordeal the teenage female rape victim and her family decided it would be better for her to give birth to the child and have someone in the family adopt the child. The medical board then had to approach the supreme court to ensure that they would not be violating the law by not aborting.

This is the context in which DYC pushed this propaganda.Its inappropriate and ridiculous and disgusting. No one was claiming to be any special gender identity in the case- but allowing teenage rape victims to make the best choices they can isnt good enough for DYC without virtue signalling about how men can get pregnant. Has there ever been a more narcissistic movement that seeks to make everything about themselves?

For what its worth- male and female is not an identity. Its a descriptive characteristic that bodies possess, like height or eye color. every cell in your body is coded with xx or xy genes so a woman getting a mastectomy ( like breast cancer survivors do) or a hysterectomy (like many older women do) does not make them less female. And identifying with feminine stereotypes or getting body modification surgery will not make a man less male.

Male pattern criminality is a thing. something like 95% violent crime is committed by males. And women- adult human females- are subject to that violence. a woman who for whatever reason wants to pretend to be a man needs trauma therapy. not to be supported in her delusional beliefs or coping mechanisms.

Ellen page is your great example? that poor girl was assaulted and molested repeatedly by movie execs as a child. Is it any wonder that she grew to dislike her female body which made her attractive prey to these men? Is it any wonder that she would end up crying after looking at her own body in the shower? do you really think she is happier now that she has had a double mastectomy? even just looking at photos of her will show how deeply traumatised and unhappy she is. how can someone not see how sick it is to celebrate women medically harming themselves irreversibly as trauma responses? how sick it is for quack doctors and online cults to target young rape and abuse victims and convince them their problems would go away if they simply identified their way out of womanhood and radically altered their bodies leading to life long medical conditions. Its disgusting that you think this is what passes for kind and inclusive.