# 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.

## Biography
### 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.
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.

#### Gender modality

Ashley coined the term gender modality in 2022, which has been applied in trans health and education literature, and by governments and courts.

## Selected academic publications
### Books

* Ashley, Florence (1 April 2022). Banning transgender conversion practices: a legal and policy analysis. Law and Society. UBC Press. doi:10.59962/9780774866941. ISBN 978-0-7748-6692-7. OCLC 1276933161. OL 35589970M.
* Ashley, Florence (13 February 2024). Gender/Fucking: the Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body. CLASH Books. ISBN 978-1-955904-93-3. OCLC 1376495878.

### Articles

* Ashley, Florence; Brightly-Brown, Shari; Rider, G. Nic (13 June 2024). "Beyond the trans/cis binary: introducing new terms will enrich gender research". Nature. 630 (8016): 293–295. Bibcode:2024Natur.630..293A. doi:10.1038/d41586-024-01719-9. PMID 38858484.
* Ashley, Florence (1 July 2023). "What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity?". Mind. 132 (528): 1053–1073. doi:10.1093/mind/fzac071. ISSN 0026-4423.
* Ashley, Florence; Parsa, Neeki; kus, t; MacKinnon, K. R. (2023). "Do gender assessments prevent regret in transgender healthcare? A narrative review". Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity (Advance online publication). 11 (4): 553–562. doi:10.1037/sgd0000672.
* Ashley, Florence (7 February 2022). "Youth should decide: the principle of subsidiarity in paediatric transgender healthcare". Journal of Medical Ethics. 49 (2): 110–114. doi:10.1136/medethics-2021-107820. ISSN 0306-6800. PMID 35131805. S2CID 246636156.
* Salway, Travis; Ashley, Florence (10 January 2022). "Ridding Canadian medicine of conversion therapy". Canadian Medical Association Journal. 194 (1): E17 – E18. doi:10.1503/cmaj.211709. ISSN 0820-3946. PMC 8800469. PMID 35012950.
* Ashley, Florence (20 December 2021). "The Constitutive In/visibility of the Trans Legal Subject: A Case Study". UCLA Women's Law Journal. 28 (1). doi:10.5070/L328155794. ISSN 1943-1708.
* Ashley, Florence (2021). "The Misuse of Gender Dysphoria: Toward Greater Conceptual Clarity in Transgender Health". Perspectives on Psychological Science. 16 (6): 1159–1164. doi:10.1177/1745691619872987. ISSN 1745-6916. PMID 31747342. S2CID 208214158.
* MacKinnon, K.R.; Ashley, Florence; Kia, H.; Lam, J.S.H.; Krakowsky, Y.; Ross, L.E. (2021). "Preventing transition "regret": An institutional ethnography of gender-affirming medical care assessment practices in Canada". Social Science & Medicine. 291: 114477. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114477. PMID 34666278.
* Ashley, Florence (2022). "The clinical irrelevance of "desistance" research for transgender and gender creative youth". Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity. 9 (4): 387–397. doi:10.1037/sgd0000504. ISSN 2329-0390. S2CID 239099559.

### Essays

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