Constitutional Power as Systemic Violence: Alberta, Trans Girls, and the Ethics of Care
On Transgender Day of Remembrance 2025
A personal note from Kim Williams, PhD MSW RSW
ID: A black background with the text ‘let kids play.’ in the transgender flag colours.
In recent weeks, Alberta’s United Conservative Party has crossed a threshold that should unsettle anyone who cares about human rights, gender justice, or the wellbeing of young people. Premier Danielle Smith and the majority UCP government have invoked the notwithstanding clause to shield three of its new laws targeting trans girls and gender-diverse youth from constitutional challenge. These laws restrict gender-affirming healthcare, police names and pronouns in schools, and bar trans girls from participating in girls’ sports.
As a professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and a Social Worker who supports young adult students and clients across Alberta, I want to be clear about what this moment represents, legally, politically, and psychologically. Because the stakes are not abstract. They are embodied. They show up in my classrooms, in my sessions, in young people’s fear, in families’ confusion, and in my community’s grief and anger.
Bill 9 is not just unconstitutional. It is gender-based violence made into policy.
What Alberta’s Legislation Does, and Why It Matters
Three laws are now being insulated from court scrutiny by the notwithstanding clause:
1. Gender-Affirming Healthcare Restrictions
Physicians are prohibited from providing puberty blockers or hormone therapy to anyone under 16. Gender-affirming surgery is restricted for anyone under 18. These decisions are now framed not as individual medical decisions, but as political positions.
2. Pronouns and Names in Schools
Students under 16 are not allowed to change their name or pronoun at school without parental consent. This outs children, blocks self-recognition, and hands gatekeeping power to institutions that are not equipped to protect marginalized youth.
3. Sports Participation Restrictions
The Fairness and Safety in Sport Act restricts girls’ sports to those assigned female at birth. This does not protect cis girls. It establishes a surveillance-based regime of “proving” one’s womanhood, undermining bodily autonomy of all girls', whether trans or cis.
Invoking the notwithstanding clause tells us something even more alarming: the government expects these laws to violate Charter rights and would rather override those rights than protect some of the most vulnerable youth in the province. Even Amnesty International has weighed in on the situation.
From a Feminist Lens: This Is Structural Gender-Based Violence
My professional field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies teaches us that gender identity and expression are never only personal. Rather, they are sites where institutions, norms, and power are constantly negotiated.
What Alberta has enacted is textbook gender-based violence at a structural level in the following ways:
Identity Surveillance: By policing pronouns and sports participation, the state legitimizes the idea that trans girls’ identities are up for review, validation, and denial.
Narrowing Who Counts as a Girl: The sports restriction is not just transphobic. It also reinscribes a narrow, exclusionary vision of girlhood that restricts freedom for all girls – including those assigned female at birth.
Punishing Autonomy: Restricting healthcare denies young people, in consultation with medical professionals, the right to make informed decisions about their own bodies.
Weaponizing Parental Authority: Framing pronoun use around “parental rights” ignores the harm this can cause in unsupportive or unsafe homes, and it collapses children’s rights entirely. Children’s rights are enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), to which Canada is a signatory.
The UCP’s actions are not about fairness or protection. They are about legitimizing a worldview where gender nonconformity is treated as a threat requiring state intervention.
From a Clinical Perspective: The Psychological Fallout Is Immediate
In session after session with my clients, I see how legislation becomes lived reality. Trans clients of all ages tell me they feel less safe at school/work, less safe accessing healthcare, and less safe simply existing in public. This is not imagined. It’s a rational response to policy that presents their identity as a problem to be solved.
Further, research has long indicated that restricting gender-affirming care increases depression, anxiety, and suicidality. These aren’t political talking points; they’re established clinical findings recognized by every major medical association in Canada and the U.S. Restricting access to evidence-based health care intensifies risks to the mental and physical wellness of my queer, trans, and gender non-conforming students and clients.
More broadly, the UCP’s actions also contribute to a breakdown of institutional trust. When young people are told that courts cannot protect their rights, they internalize the idea that they are not worth protecting. That has long-term impacts on resilience, attachment, self-concept, and even on civic participation.
The pronoun policy places educators in the position of enforcing misgendering. Even well-intentioned school staff are being pushed into moral and ethical conflict, and students are caught in the fallout, resulting in increased stigmatization.
This is what happens when law ignores both lived experience and decades of scientific research: the harm is immediate, intimate, and profound.
But This Isn’t Just About Trans Youth
One of the most dangerous misconceptions is that policies targeting trans girls affect only trans girls. That's a big fat lie. The UCP’s actions ensure that:
Cis girls will be scrutinized too. Any girl who doesn’t conform to narrow feminine gender norms becomes suspect.
All youths’ rights become precarious when the state demonstrates its willingness to override constitutional protections.
Clinicians, educators, and caregivers are forced to navigate ethical minefields created not by best practice, but by political ideology.
Democracy itself is weakened when the notwithstanding clause, which the UCP has used twice in the last month (first to force teachers back to work), is wielded not as an exceptional remedy, but as a preemptive shield for discriminatory laws.
This is very much a broad social issue, not a niche one.
What To Do: Caring as Resistance
1. Support Legal and Advocacy Efforts
Organizations in Alberta and across Canada are preparing and pursuing challenges, even in a constrained landscape. They need resources, signal boosting, and public solidarity. Follow and support the work of movements/organizations like TransAction Alberta, Skipping Stone, Egale Canada, and Queer Momentum.
2. Create and Protect Affirming Spaces
Clinicians, educators, community workers, and parents can offer what legislation tries to take away: recognition, safety, and dignity.
3. Centre Trans Voices
Trans youth and adults have been naming these harms long before the state chose to legislate them. Their voices belong at the centre of the conversation.
4. Teach About Government Overreach and Structural Gender-Based Violence
In classrooms, workshops, and community settings, we must name what is happening. Euphemisms protect no one.
5. Refuse to Normalize This Moment
The use of the notwithstanding clause to target a marginalized group is not politics as usual. It is a moral and political rupture.
Closing Thoughts
As a feminist scholar, I recognize the patterns: whenever marginalized people begin to gain visibility and rights, backlash follows. As a professor and social worker, I see the human cost of that backlash every day with my clients and in my classrooms.
Let’s be clear: The legislation in Alberta is not even a little bit about keeping kids safe. It is about control — over bodies, identities, and futures. And invoking the notwithstanding clause to entrench that control is a direct assault on constitutional protections, gender justice, and the wellbeing of young people.
But here is what I want my students and clients in Alberta to know:
You are not the problem.
Your identity is not negotiable.
Your existence is not up for debate.
And to everyone watching from within or beyond Alberta: this is the moment to show up with action, with care, with clarity, with solidarity, and with the unwavering insistence that all young adults deserve safety, autonomy, and the freedom to become themselves.
#ProtectTransKids
#TransRightsAreHumanRights
Crisis Services Canada and Suicide Prevention Hotline: Call 1-833-456-4566 or Text 45645
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 686868
Help for Wellness (for Indigenous peoples): Call 1-855-242-3310
Trans Life Line: 1-877-330-6366
LGBTQ+ Youthline: 1-800-268-9688
To find local resources and supports near you please click here.
Dr. Kim Williams (she/her) is a queer, fat, feminist, white settler therapist with proud working-class roots and a deep love for stories—especially the ones we tell ourselves, rewrite, and reclaim.
Before becoming a social worker, she spent years teaching, organizing, and working alongside systemically marginalized folks trying to navigate a world not meant for us.
In light of the harmful political decisions made recently in Alberta and on the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), Kim felt called to write and share this blog post.
