British Columbia’s Human Rights Tribunal has ordered LifeLabs and its subsidiary Excelleris Technologies to pay $32,000 in Canadian dollars to three transgender and non-binary patients whom its staff misgendered or outed at labs in Vancouver and Burnaby in 2019. “The Complainants’ dignity was harmed by each of these interactions,” tribunal member Theressa Etmanski wrote in the decision.
Noa Moses and Devan Snow each get $15,000 for injury to dignity, and Vincent Viezzer gets $2,000, under the LifeLabs misgendering ruling, dated Oct. 29 and posted Nov. 3. “The Respondents refused to recognize Noa’s non-binary gender identity and misgendered them,” Etmanski wrote.
LifeLabs also owes almost $3,000 in lost wages, CBC News reported Saturday, plus $11,100 for the expert report and testimony, the decision shows. The expert was Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc, a University of British Columbia nursing professor. As the decision sums up her evidence, “misgendering in health care settings based on binary gender assumptions can be a significant source of distress.”
The company argued that “their laboratory records for a person must reflect the sex marker on the person’s government issued identification,” the decision says, and that the changes the patients wanted were “legally impermissible and technically impossible.” Etmanski rejected that defense. “The Respondents are a large corporation with a dedicated software development team,” she wrote.
‘Neither’: Noa’s Repeated Questioning at a Vancouver LifeLabs
Noa, “a non-binary transgender person,” went to a LifeLabs location in Vancouver on Oct. 10, 2019, carrying a doctor’s requisition with “U” typed in the sex field. Staff asked “whether they were male or female,” the decision says, and Noa answered “neither.”
The questions kept coming. “I am a non-binary trans person, neither marker is appropriate for me,” Noa testified they eventually told staff, who refused to draw blood without a male or female marker.
Noa says “this back-and-forth went on for about an hour,” according to the decision. They were “so exhausted and upset by that point that they just pointed to a letter on the paper,” Noa told the tribunal.
“I refer to each Complainant in the manner they requested at the hearing: Noa, Snow, and Mr. Viezzer,” Etmanski wrote.
Noa was questioned “where they believed other people could hear what was being discussed,” the decision says. “I find this conduct placed Noa at risk of harm,” Etmanski wrote.
LifeLabs argued Noa could have avoided this by switching their BC Services Card to an X marker, an argument the tribunal rejected. “BC residents can apply to change their marker to ‘F’, ‘M’ or ‘X’ without medical approval,” the decision notes. But for a card that already shows an X, “LifeLabs’ practice is to enter ‘U’ for unknown in IntRlab,” its lab records system, a witness testified.
Devan Snow’s Burnaby Lab Visit Became a ‘Huge Thing’
Snow is “a transmasculine person who does not identify as male or female,” and “uses the pronouns they and them, as well as he and him,” the decision says.
At a LifeLabs patient service centre in Burnaby on Oct. 12, 2019, Snow showed a driver’s licence that still carried his deadname and the sex he was assigned at birth. His requests had become a “huge thing,” Snow testified, and “the people in the waiting area could hear his voice and were staring at him.”
LifeLabs declined to update his record and labelled his requisition with the ID’s gender, which the tribunal found was misgendering. The visit “had the serious impact of causing them to avoid further medically necessary testing to prevent a similar experience,” Etmanski wrote.
‘FTM’ Written on Vincent Viezzer’s Requisition Form
Viezzer “identifies as a man, a man of transgender experience, and a trans man,” according to the decision. At a Vancouver LifeLabs in July 2019, his form ended up with “a circle around the ‘M’ with the letters ‘FTM’ handwritten slightly below.”
He found it “nauseatingly offensive.” LifeLabs denied that its staff wrote the letters and suggested his doctor’s office had. “I am satisfied on a balance of probabilities that LifeLabs staff did write the notation,” Etmanski wrote.
“On their face, the initials ‘FTM’ may not appear to be particularly egregious or virulent,” she added. She also understood the term to be “an oversimplified and inaccurate way to describe some peoples’ lived transgender experience.”
Viezzer left that day without getting his blood drawn. The note appears to have been, “at a minimum, an unnecessary and non-consensual disclosure of Mr. Viezzer’s transgender status,” Etmanski wrote. His smaller award reflects that “a single discriminatory comment generally calls for more modest damages,” the decision says.
LifeLabs Misgendering Ruling Sets Six-Month and One-Year Deadlines
Within six months, LifeLabs has to take reasonable steps so trans and non-binary patients have, and know about, “the option of a private space to discuss or answer questions relating to their sex or gender.” Within a year, it must train “all staff and management in British Columbia” on those patients’ privacy.
It gets 18 months to “take all reasonable steps to correct, remove, or otherwise mask the misgendering” from Noa’s and Snow’s 2019 visits.
The tribunal credited LifeLabs with “significant efforts to train their staff” since the 2019 visits, after the company pointed to a staff education project it developed with TransCare BC in 2021. “I do not find the conduct of the LifeLabs staff members was malicious in nature,” Etmanski wrote, pointing instead to “the Respondents’ policies and procedures” in Noa’s and Snow’s cases and a “lack of understanding or appreciation of the sensitivity of trans status information.”
The complaint was filed Oct. 9, 2020, and heard in 2025. “I apologize to the parties for the delay in issuing this decision,” Etmanski wrote.
Quest Diagnostics’ LifeLabs and B.C.’s 2016 Gender Identity Protections
LifeLabs runs “approximately 130” laboratories and patient service centres in B.C., the decision says, and has been owned by Quest Diagnostics of New Jersey since Aug. 26, 2024. Quest’s announcement of the roughly C$1.35 billion deal called LifeLabs “Canada’s leading provider of laboratory diagnostic information and digital health connectivity systems.”
B.C. added “gender identity or expression” to its Human Rights Code through Bill 27 in July 2016. “This is a significant day for human rights in our province,” then-Attorney General Suzanne Anton said in a provincial news release.
Either side can ask the B.C. Supreme Court for judicial review “within 60 days of the date the decision was issued,” the tribunal’s website says, a window that runs to late December.
