On Dec. 8, 2014, in a landmark vote, transgender rights were added to the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code.
It was a classic Prairie winter day — chilly and overcast — when the Saskatchewan legislature gathered 10 years ago for its last sitting of 2014.
The agenda was full of items to close out before the new year; the galleries were full of guests from across the province.
On the afternoon of Dec. 8, 2014, by unanimous vote, transgender rights were added to the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code.
“(The amendment) remains, to this day, a reflection of our collective commitment to a society that values diversity, promotes inclusion and fosters understanding,” the commission said in a December 2024 statement.
To many of the advocates who had fought to change the law, victory came as a surprise.
“The day of the vote, we had kind of given up,” she recalls. “We hadn’t had a lot of progress. We didn’t know what was going to happen; our minds were elsewhere. We were not anticipating success.”
Mappin got the news later that day, when then-Justice Minister and Attorney General Gord Wyant personally emailed to let her know.
“It was astounding,” Mappin says. “I was honoured that Gord Wyant had the consideration to tell me. And the fact that we’d done it? It was stunning.”
“I wasn’t expecting it,” Schultz says. “I didn’t realize how historical the moment would be. I was surprised when it was a unanimous decision, and it was exciting to know that we had accomplished our goal.
“This decision by our government opened the door for so many things for transgender people in Saskatchewan.”
‘Discrimination has no place in our society’
When Schultz, who grew up in the Regina area, came out as transgender in 2009, the environment was isolating and often hostile.
In a 2009 interview with the Regina Leader-Post, Schultz described how coming out had led to difficulty securing a job, being turned away at clinics before finding a doctor who was willing to take a transgender patient, hostile interactions with “service providers (who) don’t see us in the gender as which we identify,” and “a lot of violent threats.”
“We’re not monsters; we’re just like anyone else,” Schultz said at the time. “We’ve got the same hopes and dreams and goals that everyone else does.”
What transgender people like Schultz did not have back then was consistent and equal protection under Saskatchewan law.
As the law was written pre-2014, the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code protected against discrimination on the basis of sex, which could have covered transgender people as well as cisgender men and women.
“Transgender people have always been protected by the Code,” David Arnot, who was chief commissioner of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission, said in 2014. “However, adding gender identity shows consistency with other jurisdictions and reflects the evolving nature of our province. … These changes remove ambiguity and reinforce the message that discrimination has no place in our society.”
Wyant, who would later describe bringing this amendment to a vote as his “proudest moment in the legislature,” said adding gender-specific wording to the Code was a good and necessary clarification.
Mappin herself came face-to-face with the law’s shortcomings when she was fired from her job after coming out as transgender.
“I was searching for how I was going to survive; it was pretty desperate,” she recalls. “And in being fired from my job, I learned that nobody was going to help me because there weren’t actually any clear protections.
“Despite people like Gord Wyant saying that the existing human rights law could encompass this, the officials I got in touch with found that it was very easy to dismiss my case because it didn’t fit into their categories.
“There was no redress, because of the lack of clarity in the law.”
As long as her protections under the law were ambiguous, the outcome of her case came down to the individual whim or goodwill of whoever happened to be handling the file that day, Mappins says.
Betting your human rights on a roll of the dice is not the same as having them secured in the law.
The first steps
Mappin joined with Schultz and a growing group of transgender people throughout Saskatchewan who were taking up this cause.
“The first important thing was to acquire transgender human rights,” Schultz says. “Then ID would be next, and access to health would be next. So that’s what we did: we set about trying to acquire trans human rights in Saskatchewan.”
To do this, Schultz knew the government would need proof that trans people existed in Saskatchewan, and this community was not going anywhere.
There are trans people here, and it was time to think about our human rights.
Miki Mappin
Statistics Canada would not begin publishing data on gender and sex diversity until after the 2021 census. That year, it counted slightly more than 2,500 transgender and nonbinary people aged 15 and older living in Saskatchewan.
“One of the major things when trying to access services was a lot of the times I got a response of ‘Well, we don’t have transgender people, so why should we provide this service?’ ” Schultz recalls.
“We needed a campaign of awareness. So we founded Transgender Awareness Week, and we approached the province and all the cities in Saskatchewan, asking them to make a declaration of Transgender Awareness Week.
Schultz, Mappin and other trans advocates met with MLAs, pointing out the places where laws and services were coming up short and explaining what could be done to fix them.
Mappin recalls the careful process involved in drafting the outline of each meeting: inviting trans people to meet with the politicians in their own constituencies wherever possible; pointing out where trans rights intersected with justice and health care and housing; organizing community concerns by “urgency and ease.”
“When we met Gord Wyant, we were scheduled for half an hour, but they ended up giving us an hour and half and calling in additional staff. So it was very productive. (But) at that point, I was pretty sure he was still dead-set against the idea of changing the law.”
As the conversations about the human rights law continued, even politicians who had at first seemed impossible to convince started to change their minds.
“Everybody had done the work and spread the word all over the province that there were trans people here, and there are trans people here, and it was time to think about our human rights,” Mappin said. “Visibility was key, for us. And that began to swing opinions.”
‘I am a person who deserves human rights’
As he got more and more involved in queer spaces in Saskatoon, Tait remembers meeting the people who were fighting to change the province’s human rights laws, listening to them speak at rallies and conferences and watching them organize rallies and letter-writing campaigns.
“I was so inspired and thankful that people were doing the work, and grateful that I was able to be in those spaces while that was happening,” Tait says. “Watching this happen, I felt really supported in those spaces, at a time when I was not being supported at home. It was heartwarming. It gave me some fire in life.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is a community that will love me forever, and this is a community that I will love forever.’ ”
When all those years of advocacy paid off and the law was changed, Tait says he rang in 2015 with a weight lifted off his shoulders.
‘The pendulum is swinging’
For many trans people in Saskatchewan, 2015 was a time of optimism and new potential.
Government ministries “almost immediately” started publicizing the resources they had available to trans people and offering new ones. It became easier to change gender markers on ID documents, and a spate of trans human rights cases were launched and fought and won.
“In the general population, I felt like we had won a lot of acceptance,” Mappin says. “Things were really moving forward. But then it began to stall out.”
Then the “backlash” started ramping up, Shultz says.
“You can look at it like a pendulum, right? It’s going to swing one way and then it’s going to swing the other; politics are always like that. And now, we’re in a moment where the pendulum is swinging, and people who might be opposed to our identities and our acceptance in their communities are starting to gain a louder voice.”
A lot has changed in the past decade.
“I could see the way things were going,” Mappin says. “But the specific (Bill 137), in its absurd small-mindedness, was a total surprise. I can’t say I predicted how horrible things would be.”
As this swing of the pendulum continues its arc, Mappin is marking the 10th anniversary of gender identity being written into Saskatchewan’s human rights protections without much celebration.
“I’m in a little bit of a state of despair, really,” she says.
But maybe this moment can be something more, she adds: A renewal; a reminder of the trans community’s power, achievements and ability to organize for change; a chance to “use the 10-year anniversary of trans people having won human rights in Saskatchewan as a rallying cry.”
“Don’t give up,” Shultz adds. “I mean, the struggle for visibility and recognition did not end on that day; it continues to this day. And we need to fight to have our voices heard and our issues addressed.”
‘Notwithstanding, we exist’
When Tait considers the past decade of transgender rights in Saskatchewan, he remembers how much it mattered to feel like the government was standing up for people like him.
Now, he’s helping a new generation of queer and trans youth stand up to their government — including teens like Elliot CJ, who attended a rally Tait organized in Saskatoon the day after Bill 137 passed in the legislature.
At another rally held in Saskatoon in May 2024, 15-year-old Ollie Mead-Ramayya spoke about what it has felt like over the past few years to grow up with their rights and identity under debate.
As she got ready to head back to school in the fall, 14-year-old Bu Wells-MacInnis says she and her friends were also feeling that fear.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the government abuse their power and endanger youth like this. Obviously, there has always been homophobia and transphobia, but in the past year it got worse.
“It’s more direct and it’s more targeted.”
He is also trying to recapture the support, care and inspiration he had felt during the fight for trans human rights in Saskatchewan a decade ago.
“In Saskatchewan, we help our neighbours,” he said. “I’ve had neighbours push me out of snowbanks several times this past week, and it doesn’t matter who they are or what their background is. It doesn’t matter that I have bright red hair and a septum piercing. What matters is that they’re helping out their neighbours, because that is what Saskatchewan people do.
“It’s easy to feel like the fight is never-ending, like we’re always two steps behind and trudging through snow.
“But we have always made it through. And we will always continue.”
