British comedy elder John Cleese has announced that he will be steering clear of British Columbia on an upcoming Canadian tour, owing to fears that he will be prosecuted for non-adherence to gender ideology.

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Cleese, 86, made the declaration in a Saturday social media post issued in response to a $750,000 fine being imposed on a former Chilliwack, B.C. school trustee who refuses to believe that gender is a “social construct.”

“What a pity! I’m arranging a theatrical tour of Canada this Fall, and now I won’t be able to risk doing any shows in British Columbia,” wrote Cleese, adding, “I was really looking forward to coming.”

In a Feb. 18 ruling by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, former trustee Barry Neufeld was ordered to pay $750,000 to an unnamed consortium of transgender teachers because he had publicly questioned the province’s policy that an individual’s gender is whatever he or she declares it to be.

The 143-page decision specified that one of Neufeld’s chief violations was his stated belief that “separating gender identity from assigned biological sex is a fiction and an ‘ideology’ to be opposed.”

As such, Neufeld was declared to have engaged in “extremely serious and damaging” speech, as well as transgender “erasure.”

A long-serving trustee for the Chilliwack School District, Neufeld had been an early public critic of efforts to enshrine gender identity within the B.C. school curriculum. It’s for that reason that his case before the tribunal was brought by the B.C. Teachers Federation.

But the decision was not limited to Neufeld’s actions as a trustee. Under the terms of the decision, anyone in B.C. could presumably face similar sanction under the B.C. Human Rights Code for echoing the same views as Neufeld.

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“A person does not need to believe in Christianity to accept that another person is Christian. However, to accept that a person is transgender, one must accept that their gender identity is different than their sex assigned at birth,” the tribunal decision read.

Cleese has previously mocked the policy of self-identified gender. In 2020, he wrote in a social media post “deep down, I want to be a Cambodian police woman. Is that allowed, or am I being unrealistic?”

B.C. Human Rights Tribunal cases have been brought against non-citizens such as Cleese, and they’ve also been pursued against comedians making comments as part of a performance.

In 2011, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ordered comedian Guy Earle to pay $15,000 to an audience member who had alleged “lasting physical and psychological effect” from her objection to his set.

Cleese is one of four surviving members of the legendary Monty Python sketch comedy troupe, and was the creator of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers.

B.C. has been a regular stop of his, particularly in recent years.

In 2013, he scheduled multiple sold-out Vancouver show dates as part of his Last Time To See Me Before I Die tour. In 2022, Vancouver was one of the stops on his An Evening of Exceptional Silliness tour.

“God I love this city,” he told CBC during a 2014 visit to Vancouver as part of a book tour. “It’s wonderful to have the sea around you… and wonderful Chinese food. It’s just a great place.”