Geoff Sinclair

Dear @LDoerkson, Your government needs to seriously consider disbanding the BC Human Rights Tribunal. It has made many egregious errors in recent year, but this one takes it beyond the pale. The Tribunal is now playing with people’s lives. The BC Human Rights Tribunal just ordered LifeLabs to treat the sex marker on a government ID card as optional and to prioritize self-identified gender over the data that lab reference ranges actually use. That decision is not just an insult to common sense. It creates a foreseeable risk that lab results will be misinterpreted and patients will be harmed. While LifeLabs still has time to seek judicial review, your government should not sit back and wait. It should get involved and reverse this dangerous life-threatening decision. Lab reference ranges for hemoglobin, creatinine and eGFR, high-sensitivity troponin, certain liver enzymes, PSA and others differ by biological sex because of physiology that cross-sex hormones only partially change. When a laboratory is forced to suppress or override accurate sex data, the risk is false-normal or false-abnormal results. The Tribunal itself acknowledged that sex information “may be medically relevant,” but then dismissed the point. They said that because LifeLabs already processes some “X” marker patients. This is not a safety analysis. It is an ideological one. The BCHRT is engaging in ideological fantasy at the expense of medical certainty. This demonstrates a pattern for them. The BCHRT repeatedly compels people to lie about sex in the name of inclusion. If a patient is injured because a critical result was interpreted against the wrong range, the laboratory, the province’s laboratory system, and ultimately the public health system face the consequences. A judicial review is probably the cleanest, fastest way to force the Tribunal to confront that evidence under the proper legal test. The BC Conservative Party needs to make this a political issue for the public to understand. It should urge LifeLabs to file for judicial review within 60-days. It is their duty. We are dealing with a patient safety and regulatory issue, not culture war. The Tribunal’s finding that there was ‘no evidence’ of medical necessity is open to challenge and must be challenged. This is not a fringe complaint. LifeLabs is a large corporation that can absorb a fine. What it should not absorb is a precedent that requires medical laboratories to suppress biologically accurate data. The 60-day clock is running. The case for judicial review is straightforward: patient safety is a bona fide justification. We need to say that clearly, publicly, and soon. And the BC Human Rights Tribunal should be given notice that it is about to be disbanded.