Human Rights in Ontario: Gender, gender identity and harassment

In Canada, both provincial and federal regulations are in place to ensure that everyone has the right to equal treatment and freedom from discrimination. The importance of freedom from discrimination has been recognized as essential to promoting human dignity.

What regulates the protection of human rights in Ontario?

While the Canadian Human Rights Act requires that federally regulated businesses – banks or post offices, for example – ensure they do not discriminate, the protection and promotion of human rights provincially falls under Ontario’s Human Rights Code. The Code governs all interactions between individuals and ensures that no one is discriminated against on the basis of a protected ground. The code recognizes that how one expresses one’s gender should be included as a ground that should be protected against discrimination and harassment.

What is gender and gender identity?

Gender is a person’s individual internal and external experience of gender. It can be male, female or somewhere else on the gender spectrum. Gender expression is how one presents their gender publicly. For example, while I may have been born with male genitalia, I believe that internally I am a woman and dress exclusively in women’s clothing.

How is my gender and gender identity protected in Ontario?

The code states that gender and gender expression is a protected ground and that no one should experience unequal treatment or harassment as a result of the person’s gender or gender expression. This means that regardless of your gender or gender expression, you have an equal right to employment, housing and to goods, services and facilities. Under the code, no employer, employee, landlord, landlord’s agent or fellow occupant may harass someone on the basis of the person’s gender or gender identity. This harassment may include the use of transphobic language.

Employers should accommodate an individual’s gender identity to the point of undue hardship. For example, an employer should ensure that there are gender-neutral bathrooms or a flexible dress code so that a transgendered person can dress in a manner that expresses their gender identity.

Sexual harassment and gender

The code stipulates that every person, regardless of their gender or gender identity, has a right to feel safe from sexual harassment in their homes and workplaces. For example, a male employee cannot make explicit sexual comments about a female co-worker because she is a woman. Nor can a landlord send a tenant explicit transphobic drawings because of how that person expresses their gender.

For more information on human rights law in Ontario, visit the Ontario Human Rights Commission website at ohrc.on.ca and the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal website at hrto.ca.

This column is brought to you by Community Legal Services at Western University. It provides legal information only. The information is accurate as of the date of publication. If you need specific legal advice, contact a lawyer, your community legal clinic, Justice Net at 1-866-919 -3219 or the Law Society Referral Service at 1-800-268-8326.