British Columbia tribunal orders medical lab to pay for misgendering patients

A private medical laboratory chain must pay $32,000 in damages, plus further costs, for misgendering and outing transgender and non-binary patients, British Columbia's human rights tribunal has ruled. The decision against LifeLabs and its subsidiary Excelleris Technologies concerns three patients at clinics in Vancouver and Burnaby in 2019.

According to the decision, a non-binary patient was told they had to choose either male or female to receive lab services, and was outed to other patients by being required to discuss their gender identity in a public space. One transgender patient could not update the gender marker on their medical records. Another was misgendered on lab reports and told the tribunal they had since opted out of necessary cancer screening rather than risk a repeat.

An expert told the tribunal, which heard the case last year, that gender-diverse people face barriers accessing health care and that misgendering is a "significant source of distress." Tribunal member Theressa Etmanski's orders run beyond money: LifeLabs must update its policies and staff training around gender identity and make private spaces available for patients to discuss their identity. The compliance costs — rewritten procedures, retrained staff, refurbished rooms — land on the company's books. The case was decided under a provincial code that bars discrimination in services; what that code means for a laboratory's intake forms was settled here by adjudication rather than legislation.

Etmanski also weighed the binary itself. Information about a patient's sex "may be medically relevant in the provision of laboratory services," she wrote — but "there is no evidence before me" that the male-or-female standard was medically necessary or justified.

The ruling was issued on Oct. 29, seven years after the clinic visits that produced it.