A TV host in Canada has claimed that the parents of a trans girl have committed child abuse by allowing her to live according to her gender identity, and says it amounts to a “fetish”.

Coy made the news in February after her parents lodged a complaint on her behalf after her school refused to let her use the girls’ bathrooms, saying she would have to use facilities for boys, teachers, or ill students instead.

Michael Coren, a British-Canadian talk show host, made an “investigation” into Coy’s situation earlier this month, and broadcast his views as a segment on conservative news channel Sun News Network.

Mr Coren refers to Coy as a boy throughout the segment, titled “Not Born This Way”, and uses male pronouns as he talks about his “disdain” for the situation, even going as far as to say Coy should be taken from her parents.

He addresses the reports that Coy rejected toys and clothes for boys and showed signs of wanting to live as a girl from a young age.

“So what?” Mr Coren asks. “The role of a parent is to guide, guard, form the child, not to surrender to his every whim.”

“Kids want to dress as Batman and jump from windows and fly,” he adds.

“Before he could speak properly his mother and his father decided that he was born into the wrong gender,” said Mr Coren. He argues that Coy’s parents put the idea of living as a girl in her head, saying “there is parental and medical abuse on display in abundance”.

Mr Coren goes on to say that Coy’s parents are “beyond my disdain”, calling their acceptance of her gender identity a “fetish”, and calling on authorities to take Coy away from them.

The alternative for Coy, he suggests, is a life of “agonising surgery [and] attempted suicide”.

Warning that there is “a growing campaign to normalise this sort of issue”, Mr Coren then invites the opinion of a “former” trans woman, who claims that gender reassignment is “surgical drag”.

Sun News, which hosts Mr Coren’s show, have advertised themselves as being “less politically correct” than other, more popular news channels.