Anti-Trans Podcaster Nurse in Prolonged Fight Over Right to Harass Trans Women Online
Amy Hamm hosts an anti-trans podcast and regularly conflates trans people with violent criminals. She’s been under investigation by the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives for years, and the story is a perennial favorite in right-wing media.
by Evan Urquhart
Three years ago, in September of 2020, anti-trans podcaster Amy Hamm put up a billboard saying “I ❤️JK Rowling.” In addition to co-hosting the Gender Critical Story Hour podcast, Hamm is a prodigious poster on twitter.com. In just the past few weeks she’s retweeted anti-gay slurs, taunted a trans woman by calling her a man, and repeatedly tweeted and retweeted posts seeking to connect trans women to criminality and violence.
screenshot from twitter.com
Hamm is also a nurse, and has identified herself that way frequently in the course of her activism. This has led to complains of unprofessional conduct against her that were brought to the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives. Over two years of news coverage has followed the effort of the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives to investigate whether her public behavior constitutes unprofessional conduct for a nurse in British Columbia, and if so, what will be done to discipline Hamm and protect the professional reputation of the nursing profession. Most recently, hearings have resumed with a focus on questions about the legitimacy of one of her expert witnesses (James Cantor, a Canadian Ph. D. who has made a career of testifying on the anti-trans side of court cases).
Hamm’s case is similar in many respects to disciplinary proceedings against Jordan Peterson, a high-profile right-wing commentator who makes frequent misleading and inflammatory statements, some of them anti-trans, which he burnishes by relying on his qualifications as a psychologist. The two cases are frequently linked in the press coverage.
Friendly right-wing coverage of Hamm’s case, and op-eds by Hamm herself in right-wing outlets, consistently obscure the nature of Hamm’s very aggressive activism, portraying the dispute instead as a matter of Hamm’s belief that “biological sex is real” rather than her pattern of trollish, provocative behavior. “I am a nurse who has stated a belief in the reality of biological sex,” Hamm wrote, in an opinion piece where she accused the Toronto Globe and Mail of defamation for running a quote that described her behavior as discrimination. (The Globe and Mail updated the article to remove the quote, instead describing Hamm as “a nurse who is involved in a disciplinary hearing after the college determined she made discriminatory remarks against transgender people.”)
screenshot from the Daily Wire
The other defense Hamm frequently makes, on Twitter.com and in quotes for news stories, is that her public behavior doesn’t interfere with the quality of her care for her patients, and that the complaints against her have not come from those patients. This defense sidesteps the question of whether the professional body regulating the nursing profession has an interest in regulating the public behavior of people who use the profession as a credential in their political activism.
Many organizations, both regulating bodies like the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives and individual workplaces, regulate not just the professional behavior of their members at work, but their public behavior as well. It is widely understood that a company or professional body might fire or discipline an individual if their behavior undermines the reputation of their employer or profession. If one agrees that this is a legitimate thing for a profession to regulate at all (and because of the misleading nature of Hamm’s public defenses it’s not clear if she and her defenders agree or disagree on that), the question of exactly what kinds of public behavior cross the line into unprofessional conduct will always be contested. For example, the LGBTQ+ community has been outspoken in protesting the BBC’s guidelines, which ban journalists from marching in Pride parades.
As with almost every story we cover, the discussion in the right-wing press is focused on misleading half-truths and kayfabe, rather than any attempt to wrestle with the facts of the case. What constitutes unprofessional behavior? How should a regulatory body weigh the conflicting interests of making ample room for differences of political opinion within a profession while balancing that with the fact that the public behavior of members of a profession reflects on that profession, and in extreme cases may undermine public trust in all members of that profession? These aren’t easy questions, and presumably the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives is wrestling with them. But you’d never know it from the right-wing hysteria, which presents this as a case of a nurse being disciplined for putting up a billboard advertising her fandom for a children’s book author.