Florence Ashley



Florence Ashley is a Canadian academic, activist and law professor at the University of Alberta. They specialize in trans law and bioethics. They have numerous academic publications, including a book on the law and policy of banning transgender conversion practices. Florence served as the first openly transfeminine clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada. They are a winner of the Canadian Bar Association SOGIC Hero Award.

Personal life and education
Ashley came out as trans and transitioned in 2015. They use singular they pronouns.

Ashley attended McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where they graduated with a Bachelor of Civil Law and a Juris Doctor in 2017 and with a Master of Laws in bioethics in 2019. They earned a Doctor of Juridical Science from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 2023, where they were also a Junior Fellow of Massey College.

Career
In 2019, Ashley became the first known openly transgender clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada, where they worked in the chambers of Justice Sheilah Martin. During the same year, the Canadian Bar Association awarded Ashley the SOGIC Hero Award. In 2023, they joined the University of Alberta Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor.

Ashley's work is cited in the World Professional Association for Transgender Health‘s Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People Version 8.

In 2022, Ashley published the book Banning transgender conversion practices: a legal and policy analysis. The book is about conversion therapy for transgender people and studies how they can be legally banned, and what impact this ban would have on the countries which would decide to implement these laws. Ashley believes that conversion therapy needs to disappear and that a formal ban improves the situation without fully solving the issue. They cite the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto as an example of practices that were so bad, they served as a precedent to get conversion therapy banned in the province of Ontario. 

Ashley coined the term ‘gender modality’, which is increasingly cited and applied in trans health and education literature, and by governments and courts.

In 2023, Ashley was one of 21 members appointed to the World Health Organization's guideline development group concerning the health of trans and gender diverse people, but as of 15 January 2024, they were no longer listed as a proposed member of that group due to a schedule conflict.

Essays

 * 'Trans' is my gender modality: a modest terminological proposal, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, 2nd ed., Laura Erickson-Schroth (ed.), Oxford University Press (2022)