In 1991, Delwin Vriend was fired from then-King's College for being gay. The Alberta Human Rights Commission refused to investigate because the province's Individual Rights Protection Act didn't cover discrimination based on sexual orientation. Vriend took the provincial government to court and lost.
Vriend and a team of advocates lobbied the government to change human rights legislation to include sexual orientation as a protected area.
Psychiatrist Lorne Warneke was one of those advocates.
This wasn't the first time Warneke had stood up for LGBTQ rights. For several years, he had been the only psychiatrist in Alberta to work with transgender people, including those wanting to transition. In fact, when someone is interested in gender reassignment surgery, Warneke was - and still is - often the first person they talk to.
"They want affirmation," he says. "I take great care not to say 'You have the diagnosis of ...' This condition is a normal variation of gender identity and our society is such that they sometimes need help to move on."
Warneke convinced the government to pay for gender reassignment surgery for three people in the 1980s. He also opened a gender clinic in 1996 at the Grey Nuns Hospital, and helped update the Alberta Motor Vehicle Act so people can change the gender marker on their driver's licences.
But it is the Vriend case that remains one of Warneke's proudest moments. In 1998, the case of Vriend vs. Alberta was decided at the Supreme Court of Canada and sexual orientation became a protected area in Alberta human rights legislation. It was a significant milestone for LGBTQ rights.
"This was at a time when transgender, for example, was seen as a sexual deviation," says Warneke. "We fight against that and see attitudes changing. In medicine, things are changing all the time. You have to keep up, but sometimes you have to be the person at the front pushing forth new ideas."
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