OP-ED: Resisting gender ideology in Canada’s public schools

John Sikkema writes: “Today it is not only acceptable, but often expected, that schools will teach children that a boy can be born in a girl’s body, and vice-versa. How did we get here? And how..."

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Author: John Sikkema

Today it is not only acceptable, but often expected, that schools will teach children that a boy can be born in a girl’s body, and vice-versa. How did we get here? And how can we stop it?

The dominance of gender ideology in universities and teachers’ colleges began even before the addition of “gender identity” to human rights and education laws across Canada in the early to mid-2010s. But once embedded in law, it quickly took over the school system as well. Not until 2023 has this ideology encountered any serious political resistance.

Gender ideology teaches children they have a disembodied “gender identity” that’s separate from their biological sex, yet somehow still defined by reference to the categories of male and female. Gender identity is said to be one’s internal sense of being male or female, both – or neither.

Despite its vagueness and subjectivity, gender identity ultimately is claimed to override biological sex. The latter is merely “assigned at birth” and is (supposedly) changeable via synthetic hormones and surgery. Apparently, just “being yourself” may now require major medical alterations to a healthy body.

The first push-back began in June 2023, when New Brunswick’s government announced it would not permit public schools to socially transition a child without parental permission. Cue a country-wide performative progressive freakout. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the move as a “far-right” initiative to “inflict cruelty and isolation” on vulnerable kids. Regardless, Saskatchewan quickly followed New Brunswick’s lead, forbidding school staff from using a student’s preferred name or pronouns without parental permission for students 15 and under.

After a judge issued an injunction preventing Saskatchewan from implementing its policy, the government responded by enacting a suite of amendments to its Education Act to protect parents’ authority to act as the primary decision-maker regarding their child’s education and development, and parents’ right to be informed about school policies and lessons and about their child’s school records and performance.

To make this move judge-proof, the government protected its parental bill of rights with the notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Alberta followed in 2024. In fact, it went considerably farther in resisting gender ideology. Beyond requiring parental consent for socially transitioning a child, Alberta’s law also requires parents to opt-in to school lessons about sexuality or gender identity and mandates that school boards obtain permission from the Education Minister before permitting external advocates to teach sexuality or gender identity. Beyond education policy, Alberta also passed a bill to ban puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children age 15 or younger, along with all “gender affirming” surgeries for minors. Finally, Alberta also passed a bill last year to protect female-only sports.

The Canada Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) was the first organization to challenge these new policies in court, filing suit against New Brunswick’s parental permission policy. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the CCLA fought to remove religious instruction from public schools. Now it appears the CCLA believes that supporting the notion of a mystical, disembodied, true gender self should be mandatory in public schools.

The CCLA also fails to grasp that a policy making public schools more transparent and accountable to parents is a pro-civil liberties policy deserving of their support. A society needs strong social institutions, families especially, to remain free. Non-government institutions need not adopt whatever ideology prevails in government. And a “progressive” government shouldn’t be able to force parents or religious communities to adopt progressivism as their operating worldview.

In response to the totalitarian regimes of the early 20^th century, which targeted children for ideological indoctrination, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights called the family “the fundamental group unit of society… entitled to protection by society and the State”. The Declaration also affirmed that “parents have a prior [i.e. natural, pre-political] right to choose the kind of education that shall be given their children.”

A free society is threatened whenever government employees can secretly instill the state’s favoured ideology in other people’s children. The primacy of parental authority in education is still reflected in Canadian constitutional jurisprudence. But we should not take it for granted that it will remain so.

Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian who is the director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, England, in his 2024 book The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism cautions that although it may seem the Western world has passed “peak woke”, the ideology still has deep roots in key public institutions.

The generations being formed by these institutions, Kaufmann warns, are far more woke than older generations. To avoid an ever-more deeply-entrenched cultural Marxism, he urges elected officials to “implement sweeping and sustained reforms to the country’s meaning-making institutions – especially public schools and universities.”

Even the few provincial leaders finally standing up for parental rights generally avoid any criticizing gender ideology itself, or its promotion in public schools. They restrict themselves to the position that parents ought to have a say.

It’s time for Canadian conservatives to recognize that merely trying to preserve choices for dissenting parents or opting kids out of certain lessons is not enough. It’s time to remove this poisonous ideology from our education system root and branch.

John Sikkema is a lawyer in Ottawa and the Director of Law and Policy for the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA). The original and longer version of this story first appeared at C2CJournal.ca.