Background
Amanda Joy Cooper is a post-operative transgender woman serving an indeterminate sentence as a dangerous offender since 2001. Her convictions predate her 2024 gender-affirming surgeries and include four sexual assaults, assault with use of force, forcible confinement, and uttering threats—offences committed primarily against adult women and one minor girl. Ms. Cooper has spent significant time in Structured Intervention Units (SIUs) and has accumulated 44 institutional incidents, many involving violent and sexual assault allegations against female staff.
In July 2025, Correctional Service Canada (CSC) decided involuntarily to transfer Ms. Cooper from Atlantic Institution in New Brunswick to Millhaven Institution in Ontario—both men’s maximum-security facilities. Ms. Cooper sought an interlocutory injunction to be transferred to a women’s institution pending judicial review; the court denied that request, finding safety risks to other women inmates and staff outweighed potential irreparable harm to her. Ms. Cooper then proceeded with judicial review of the transfer decision itself.
The Court’s Holding
The Federal Court dismissed Ms. Cooper’s application for judicial review, finding the transfer decision reasonable under the presumptive reasonableness standard established in *Vavilov*. The Assistant Deputy Commissioner of Correctional Operations properly considered the applicable statutory framework, including sections 28, 33, and 4(g) of the *Corrections and Conditional Release Act*, as well as Commissioner’s Directives CD-100 and CD 710-2 and Guideline GL 710-2-3.
Justice Fuhrer held that the decision-maker meaningfully engaged with Ms. Cooper’s rebuttal, her gender identity concerns, and her safety preoccupations. The court found that Millhaven Institution represented the least restrictive appropriate environment given the statutory factors: public safety, security, offender safety, staff safety, program availability, and linguistic accessibility. Critically, the court distinguished between initial placement decisions for gender-diverse inmates (which default to gender-identity-aligned placement unless overriding health and safety concerns exist) and involuntary transfers between institutions at the same security level (which involve different procedural and substantive considerations under GL 710-2-3).
The court emphasized that its dismissal “should not be viewed as any kind of blanket determination that a transgender or gender-diverse inmate who is designated as a DO cannot be transferred to an institution that aligns with their gender identity.” Each case depends on unique circumstances.
Key Takeaways
- Involuntary institutional transfers of gender-diverse inmates are governed by different legal frameworks than initial placement decisions; the court created no blanket rule precluding placements that align with gender identity but recognized context-specific reasonableness analysis.
- CSC must consider gender-affirming care needs and accommodate gender identity, but these obligations are balanced against institutional safety, security, and risk assessment conclusions in transfer decisions.
- Refusal or failure to exhaust internal grievance procedures does not automatically bar judicial review where urgency and inefficiency concerns are present and the court’s resources are already engaged.
- A reasonableness review does not permit courts to substitute their judgment for the decision-maker’s; the analysis focuses on whether the decision is “transparent, intelligible and justified,” not whether other outcomes were possible.
Why It Matters
This decision establishes important precedent for how Canadian correctional authorities balance gender-affirming accommodations with institutional safety in cases involving serious offenders. By distinguishing placement frameworks (initial vs. transfer decisions), the court created flexibility for future cases while upholding CSC’s authority to consider security and safety factors in transfer contexts. The judgment signals that gender identity accommodation is a legal obligation under human rights law, yet remains subject to genuine overriding safety concerns supported by psychological risk assessments and institutional incident records.
The case also clarifies that courts reviewing correctional decisions will defer to administrative decision-makers’ interpretation of Commissioner’s Directives and will not conduct de novo analyses of risk or substitute their own policy preferences. This deference standard may prove significant in future litigation involving vulnerable or marginalized inmate populations, where safety justifications must be evidence-based and genuinely considered by decision-makers, but need not be agreed with by reviewing judges.