First, don’t harm kids
Schools are right to respect the identity, names and pronouns of students, but that doesn't go nearly far enough. Parents who deliberately harm they kids should be prosecuted.
I don’t know how I managed to miss this piece the first time it ran but here I am with a vengeance. Tom Blackwell, writing in the notoriously TERFian National Post (I mean, it publishes Barbara Kay, for fuck’s sake), clutched some nasty stinking rotting pearls at the thought that schools and school boards respect the human rights of the children in their care.
Boards of education, education ministries and even the Public Health Agency of Canada are urging schools to both automatically honour a transitioning student’s request to change their name and pronouns — and to keep that information from parents if requested.
It’s just one way the education system has become intimately involved in the transgender process, which affects an “exponentially” growing number of young Canadians. Schools accept name and pronoun preferences, provide gender-neutral washrooms and teach from a young age about gender identity. In some cases, they can even refer students directly to gender-treatment clinics.
Some parents, and you know which ones, object. Loudly. I’m glad they’re this public with their harmful bigotry. It’ll help us find them when the time comes to lay charges.
Oh, you bet I’m serious. Schools know who those parents are. There should be a system in place to report them for abuse. Just like there is when school authorities have good reasons to believe a child is being beaten or neglected.
Children, as they grow into teenagers and young adults, often go through a series of phases on their way to figuring out who they are. Some children are very clear about their identity, whereas others have to experiment with a few iterations. Both are perfectly fine, and so is everything in between.
We didn’t use to think that way. We used to think children who didn’t conform to the traditional gendered expectations were freaks and deviant. And by golly those freaks and deviant were beaten (psychologically, but often also literally) into the shape they were supposed to conform to. That was my experience growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. I didn’t fit in those gendered boxes. I was forced to fit into them anyway. I’m still learning to heal from those wounds. Being violently invalidated is no joke. It is profoundly harmful.
When a child decides they want to be open about who they are, regardless of where they land on the gender and/or sexual orientation rainbow, the people who care about that child need to be affirming. Or at the very least not openly dismissive. It takes a lot of guts for a 12-year-old to stand up to their parents’ bigotry. It’s no wonder most who believe their parents won’t be supportive prefer to stay in the closet.
Schools, however, should be a safe space. Especially for those children who live with intolerant, invalidating, dismissive, abusive or violent parents. A child who spends all their time at home being deliberately misgendered and deadnamed suffers enormously. They are being actively harmed, relentlessly.
Spending six hours or so a day in school gives them a welcome break from that harm. When other adults affirm their identity, orientation, name and pronouns, it tells those kids that they are valid, just like anyone else.
Because they are.
In Ontario, we take this so seriously that for a teacher to be deliberately invalidating of a child’s identity can be considered professional misconduct.
I get that it may be difficult for some parents to accept that their child might be gender diverse. Up to a point, that’s fair enough. But it’s a problem for the parents to solve, by working on themselves and digging into their character until they find enough love for their own child to accept them exactly as they say they are.
Struggling is one thing. Making mistakes and forgetting a child’s pronouns? That’s understandable. Trust me, those of us who use non-traditional pronouns and other markers of identity know full well when the misgendering isn’t accidental.
Parents and guardians who categorically, intentionally and repeatedly refuse to respect a child’s identity for religious, ideological or completely bullshit reasons, and who aggressively misgender and deadname their child on purpose, should be prosecuted. What they’re doing is intentionally abusive and we punish abuse in this country. So-called “conversion” therapy is now a crime in Canada, because it is considered so harmful and wrong that the state must punish those who attempt to force someone else to fit into heterosexual or cisgender boxes. The intentional, repeated and relentless pressure to “convince” a child they are not who they say they are is akin to trying to “convert” then back to how that parent sees their child.
I’m glad at least public schools and school boards in this country have as their policy to follow a child’s lead when it comes to recognizing and affirming their gender identity, expression, or sexual orientation. It’s the right thing to do. But it’s not enough by itself. There needs to be a system for school authorities to report parents or anyone else who harms a child, including by deliberately misgendering or deadnaming them.