Transgender woman’s complaint dismissed
Yaniv tried to ‘weaponize’ tribunal: ruling
The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal has thoroughly dismissed the case of transgender woman Jessica Yaniv, ruling her persistent complaints that female salon workers refused to wax her scrotum were part of a campaign to both enrich herself and punish South Asian people, whom she views as hostile to the rights of transgender people.
In effect, the tribunal found the respondents did not offer scrotum waxing to anyone, so they did not deny Yaniv a service in the first place. It also preferred the respondents’ evidence wherever it conflicted with Yaniv’s, which was “disingenuous and self-serving.”
Yaniv “targeted small businesses, manufactured the conditions for a human rights complaint, and then leveraged that complaint to pursue a financial settlement from parties who were unsophisticated and unlikely to mount a proper defence,” reads the new ruling.
Yaniv filed most of her dozen complaints after booking appointments for Brazilian waxes with women who offer the service through Facebook. She would say she is transgender, then file a complaint when the women said they were not willing to offer this service. The B.C. Human Rights Code prohibits denial of service based on a person’s gender identity or expression.
In one case, Yaniv was refused service over an online message app after requesting a waxing for her “male parts,” so she wrote back to ask if the esthetician was comfortable working around the string of a tampon. The tribunal found she likely did this to make the woman, a Sikh from India who testified she was not then aware of transgender women in general, “feel uncomfortable or awkward for (Yaniv’s) own amusement or as a form of revenge.”
The ruling orders Yaniv to pay $6,000 in costs to three of her targets for “improper conduct” including using human rights law as a “weapon” for “extortion.”
It also brings to a close the bizarre public spectacle that exploded earlier this year when a publication ban was lifted on Yaniv’s identity, as she had already publicly revealed herself.
That spectacle took the form of a vicious social media fight that set Yaniv, an information technology consultant with a history of aggressive and sexualized behaviour, against a determined subculture opposed to the ideology of trans acceptance in both culture and law. Several right-wing media outlets covered the case feverishly, including the American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, revelling in Yaniv’s flamboyant image, her history of creepy online behaviour toward young girls, and her ceaseless self-promotion, which included entering beauty pageants for young women.
After more than a year with limited public attention due to a publication ban on Yaniv’s identity, by midsummer 2019 the case was all over the media in Britain and America — unusual for a retail discrimination case in suburban Vancouver. This feverish media attention led to a violent confrontation between Yaniv’s mother and a reporter who approached them at Yaniv’s home, several tense moments at the Vancouver tribunal building, and also to Yaniv’s arrest on suspicion of brandishing a prohibited weapon, a Taser, during an online video interview. She was not charged.
One flashpoint, for example, was the conflict between Yaniv and the writer Meghan Murphy, which led Yaniv to complain to Twitter about Murphy describing her as male, for which Twitter banned Murphy under its hate and harassment policy. Free speech activist Lindsay Shepherd was similarly temporarily banned. That episode has lately caused controversy in Toronto, where activists seeking to prevent Murphy from renting library space for a talk have pointed to Twitter’s decision as a reason she should be banned.
As is the norm for frivolous human rights complaints, this one led to accusations that human rights tribunals in Canada are kangaroo courts, rashly credulous toward complainants, biased against defendants, vulnerable to abuse by charlatans, and tools of social engineering.
The ruling by tribunal member Devyn Cousineau puts the lie to that, with its harsh language about Yaniv’s dishonesty and her effort to “weaponize” the tribunal for her own enrichment. If Yaniv was able to abuse the process, she at least got what any failed litigant can expect — a steep costs order against her.
It also marks the first time a case of this sort has been adjudicated in Canada. A lawyer with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which represented some of the defendants, said a wide search across the country found nothing similar, on the point of transgender discrimination in retail.
“Self-identification does not erase physiological reality,” said Jay Cameron, the Justice Centre’s Litigation Manager, and counsel for the estheticians. “Our clients do not offer the service requested. No woman should be compelled to touch male genitals against her will, irrespective of how the owner of the genitals identifies.”
NO WOMAN SHOULD BE COMPELLED TO TOUCH MALE GENITALS AGAINST HER WILL.