Bill C-16, the Canadian Human Rights Act passed the Senate on Thursday and thus will become law with Royal Assent later this year.

The Act adds gender identity and expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination under Canadian law. The bill was introduced over a year ago and passed the House of Commons last November. Conservative forces once again tried to stall it in the Senate, claiming it imposed limits on free speech.

The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 67 to 11, with members of the trans community and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould watching from the gallery above the chamber.

Nicole Nussbaum, a lawyer with expertise in gender identity and gender expression issues, says she's relieved the bill has finally passed. Parliament has seen earlier versions of the bill for more than a decade, but never approved one.

Including gender expression and gender identity in the Canadian Human Rights Act will "address the really desperate situation that many trans and gender non-confirming, non-binary people experience as a result of discrimination, harassment and violence," she said in an interview with CTVNews.ca.

The passage of this bill really represents an acknowledgement and welcome to transgender [and] non-conforming people in Canada, and so we are at least in theory, at least in principle, officially equal citizens.

--Nussbaum

The Senate took seven months to study and debate the bill, a process that included discussions about whether it would force people to use unusual pronouns.

The Canadian Bar Association, which spoke in favour of the bill, called those fears a misunderstanding of human rights and hate crimes legislation.

Nothing in the section compels the use or avoidance of particular words in public as long as they are not used in their most 'extreme manifestations' with the intention of promoting the 'level of abhorrence, delegitimization and rejection' that produces feelings of hatred against identifiable groups.

--Rene Basque. CBA

It was very difficult to listen to and to try to understand how senators and other witnesses understood these rights as being something so different than the other rights and the other protected grounds in the act.

--Nussbaum

As it sat in the Senate, Bill C-16 became fodder for hyperbolic and ill-informed criticism. Some argued that the bill would require Canadians to memorize a seemingly endless number of gender-neutral pronouns — and failure to do so would land them in jail. Virtually every legal expert has rejected this claim.

Bill C-16’s amendments to the offences of advocating genocide and hate propaganda simply add transgender people to the existing list of protected groups. These carefully tailored offences — which attempt to strike a balance between freedom of expression and other fundamental values such as equality and multiculturalism — apply when an individual calls for the wholesale destruction of a group of people.

The third amendment instructs judges to treat hate-motivation as a factor that may lead to a more severe sentence — this provision only applies after a crime, typically assault, has already been committed.

While disrespectful, pronoun misuse does not constitute a criminal offence.

--Kyle Kirkup, Ottawa Citizen

Others have argued that prospective predators will wait for the passage Bill C-16 and then proceed to infiltrate sex-segregated spaces such as washrooms. Again, this argument is fundamentally unserious.

There is no suggestion that, in jurisdictions such as the Northwest Territories, where there have been explicit transgender rights protections on the books since 2002, washrooms are any less safe. There is strong empirical evidence to suggest that transgender people themselves are uniquely vulnerable to discrimination, harassment and violence in sex-segregated spaces.

After a difficult period where some have put the very existence of transgender people up for debate, Thursday marked a pivotal moment in Canada’s history.

--Kirkup

Kirkup is an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law.

While changing what the law says about a community is unlikely to bring about change on its own, Bill C-16 is a step in the right direction — one that promises to spur new government policies, while also providing hope to transgender people across the country.

Now, the more difficult work of undoing transphobia in all facets of social life begins.

--Kirkup