Remembering My Friend barbara findlay

We lost a hero and champion on Saturday. barbara findlay had a preference to stylize her name in lower case, which said something about how she saw herself in relation to the causes she fought for.

She was a friend, an inspiration and an encouragement. I will miss her dearly.

What I will recall fondly about her is her measured speech and soft tone that underscored a very sharp legal mind. I learned much about human rights law on our many phone calls. She loved to educate.

barbara was a Queen’s counsel, a human rights advocate and one of the most consequential lawyers in the history of LGBTQ2S(IA)+ rights in Canada.

She was called to the bar shortly after homosexuality was decriminalized in 1977. During her first year of university she was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric ward after she had shared that she was attracted to women.

This had a profound effect on her work and focus on human rights advocacy. She wanted to make sure that other queer and trans people never had to face something similar. Her Facebook cover photo is the trans flag with the words “PROTECT TRANS KIDS” overlaid.

barbara built her career around family law for LGBTQ2S+ clients and child custody cases, and from there she took on some of the defining human rights cases in the country.

She represented Kimberly Nixon, a trans woman whose offer to volunteer as a rape counsellor was refused by Vancouver Rape Relief because Nixon was transgender. Nixon won at the BC Human Rights Tribunal, but Rape Relief fought the decision through judicial review, and the Court of Appeal eventually ruled against Nixon on the basis of a non-profit exemption.

barbara called that outcome losing the battle and winning the war, because the case established the legal framework for how trans issues would be understood in Canadian human rights law going forward.

She co-founded the December 9 Coalition, a working group of community leaders advocating for queer rights in the late 1990s, and she was a founding member of the Canadian Bar Association’s queer lawyers group, the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Conference. She was also a founding member of Lawyers Against Transphobia.

In 2001 she became the first openly gay lawyer in Canada to be recognized with a Queen’s counsel designation. She later received an award of merit from the University of Toronto’s sexual diversity studies department and, in 2013, a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.

In 2023, Simon Fraser University awarded her the degree of doctor of laws, honoris causa, the university’s highest honour. That’s something we shared. I received the same degree from the University of British Columbia in 2025. barbara was one of the first people to congratulate me.

‘Acknowledge, without embarrassment’

If you look at her case history it reads like a history of queer rights law in Canada. She worked on landmark cases including same-sex marriage in B.C. and the right of two lesbian mothers to both be registered on their child’s birth certificate.

She also took on a municipality that refused to proclaim Pride, the Terrace Rainbow Committee’s case against the City of Terrace in 2002, which she argued herself at the Human Rights Tribunal.

On one of our calls, we discussed the similarity of that case with the one between Kelowna’s Okanagan Rainbow Coalition and former mayor Walter Gray, who refused to proclaim Gay and Lesbian Pride. He balked at using the word “Pride.” He also lost the case at the Human Rights Tribunal.

In her own words, barbara’s bio reads: “barbara findlay is a fat old white cisgender dyke lawyer with disabilities who was raised working class and christian on the prairies and all of those locations have informed her work as an activist and a lawyer.”

I remember last year when she was rightfully outraged that someone said they couldn’t read those words to introduce her at a diversity, equity and inclusion event.

She wrote about it in a social media post. “I am working toward a world in which no one has to leave part of themselves behind. In which we can acknowledge both the ways we have been privileged and the ways we have been oppressed by the feckless winds of inequality. Acknowledge, without embarrassment.”

This statement summed up her life’s work.

My last virtual meeting with barbara was on May 13, with Attorney General Niki Sharma. That meeting was possible because of a reputation barbara had spent decades building.

We talked about strategies for confronting transphobia in B.C., from community-level education to gaps in how police and prosecutors handle hate crimes.

barbara closed the meeting by sending the attorney general a link to Expelling Transphobia, the resource Lawyers Against Transphobia had sent to every school board in the province, the only one of its kind in Canada. That was findlay: always the educator and never missing an opportunity to contribute.

She was an early subscriber to my Substack. In one of her last emails to me, on July 18, she replied to one of my articles.

“I just wanted to thank you for your work covering what’s happening in B.C. I trust your writing above any of the others. So, thank you.” Words of encouragement coming from a friend who was dealing with the weight of a long chronic illness that left her worn out.

I’m glad you’re at rest now, barbara, but I’m already missing your quiet presence on the other end of the line.

barbara was also an accomplished artist. I will leave one of her creations here that she called Love at rest.