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A federal bill passed last June that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or expression had been hotly contested by critics who called it a drastic restriction on free speech rights.

Now, just five months after it became law, Bill C-16 has its first big controversy — and it shows how the legislation is being misinterpreted in practice.

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Lindsay Shepherd, a 22-year-old teaching assistant in communication studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, was disciplined this month by faculty for showing first-year students clips from a debate on pronouns and gender. The debate, aired on Ontario’s public broadcaster TVO, involved University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who’s become internationally known for railing against gender-neutral pronouns as radical left-wing indoctrination.

Shepherd was called into a meeting with her supervising professor, Nathan Rambukkana, as well as another professor and an official from the university’s diversity and equity office. In a recording, Rambukkana is heard telling a tearful Shepherd that she created a “toxic climate” for students by showing parts of Peterson’s argument, and compared it to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler.”