An update on my daughter’s hearing at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal
My daughter’s human rights case was finally heard earlier this spring. We are waiting for the decision and expect it sometime this summer. What happened is still a raw and painful topic for us. Our daughter – now age 11, still recalls that her teachers’ lessons were very upsetting to her.
When we consulted a lawyer 4 years ago about trying to find some resolution for what happened to our daughter, we were told that we may have a case for discrimination because the only option the school provided to us was to have our daughter removed from her Grade 1 class when lessons on gender came up. We went ahead with a case because we wanted her voice to be heard, and because we would have an avenue to request a public interest remedy that could help prevent this kind of situation from happening to others. If the Tribunal finds that the school board is liable for discrimination based on sex, gender identity or both, they can direct the school board to make revisions to their policies.
One benefit of the hearing for us is that we were finally able to get a better picture of the full extent of the lessons that had been taught and put more of the pieces together. It’s now perfectly understandable why our daughter was adamant that these “girls are not real” lessons were happening “lots of times” and why they had such a lasting and negative impact on her.
Our daughter had become very distressed about what her teacher was saying in class and started to ask us why she wasn’t “real”. At one point she compared herself to inanimate objects in her room and said “the table is real, the fan is real, and even if the fan was made out of cardboard, it’s still real.”
My husband and I described the effect of the lessons on her as dehumanizing and resulted in undermining her sense of self as a girl.
A new teacher had taken over the Grade 1 class in January and within a matter of weeks had put up a poster of the Genderbread person; read the class “The Princess Boy” – a book about a boy who likes dressing as a girl which apparently prompted a student to tell the class that you can go to a doctor to change your body and which the teacher affirmed was true; showed the class a “Queer Kids Stuff” YouTube video to explain that some people aren’t boys or girls (the video uses a teddy bear as a prop to introduce the idea that “I don’t know if I’m a boy or a girl”); declared to the students “there’s no such thing as boys and girls” when they tried to organize in groups according to sex; instructed the children on another occassion that your body can be one way but you can feel another way in your heart; and gave the class a lesson using a gender spectrum teaching tool with a horizontal line running from “girl” on one end to “boy” on the other and where several students spontaneously jumped up to label themselves on the teachers whiteboard before she stopped them from doing so (her testimony).
In the hearing proceedings, the teacher only admitted to telling the children “there’s no such thing as boys and girls” once. This happened while the children were trying to organize themselves into groups of boys and girls. My daughter (age 6 at the time these lessons were taking place) interpreted all of her teacher’s lessons on gender as having the same flavour: to deny any differences between the sexes, and to ignore her biology as a valid indicator of who she is. This undermined my daughter’s understanding of herself as a girl because of the simple fact that she is female. It led to her questioning her validity and reality as a female human being in remarks and questions she raised with my husband and me.
Our daughter told me that her teacher had also unequivocally instructed the class that “girls are not real and boys are not real” during the whiteboard lesson where children came up to write their names on a gender spectrum and where she wrote her name at the girl line. The teacher did not recall saying this and testified that she taught this whiteboard gender spectrum lesson to “correct” her earlier statements but it seems she only addressed her comments to the class about being able to go to a doctor to change your body. This lesson took place on the very same day I met with the teacher to express my concerns about what she was teaching.
Under cross-examination by our lawyer, the teacher admitted that she did not use this opportunity to explain or affirm that there are two sexes, male and female, or to describe differences in body parts (something that actually IS in the grade 1 curriculum) and that her intent (yet again) was to explain that there is a spectrum of genders. The school board policy, she had told me earlier that day, was that gender is fluid and that she was trying to help children that were struggling with the idea that gender is binary.
It was not until the hearing, 4 years later, that we were told anything about this attempt to apologize or correct any earlier remarks. We had had 6 separate conversations with school staff about this topic at the time and that never came up.
We asked our daughter over the course of the hearing whether she felt that her teacher had ever apologized or corrected the lessons with the class. Our daughter scoffed at the idea that her teacher might have ever apologized to her or the class or corrected the remarks that were making her feel that her sense of self was being erased.
Our lawyer, Lisa Bildy, did an amazing job in cross-examining the school board witnesses who were very open about their policy and agenda to promote gender fluid identification to students. They even referred to the Human Rights Commission’s own policies and definitions of “gender identity” to support their position that gender exists on a spectrum and that gender self-identification is the only way that gender is recognized at the OCDSB school board, because they believe this to be the most “inclusive” way to recognize all “genders”.
Our daughter knew she was a girl, they said – she identified herself as such on the gender spectrum whiteboard lesson – so what’s the problem?
The one thing conspicuously missing from the school board policies is the protected characteristic of sex. Our lawyer pointed out that sex is effectively being written out of the school board policies and out of the Human Rights Code.
The school board has adopted gender identity as a wholesale replacement for sex. The only criteria for being a boy or a girl is gender identity, not one’s sex.
The lessons that our daughter was taught were designed to replace her understanding of herself in terms of her biological reality as a female with the idea that “girl” or “boy” are completely subjective concepts and up to each individual to decide how they want to label themselves in terms of their “gender”.
This is textbook Queer Theory – promoting the idea that gender and sex are socially constructed and that our biology has nothing to do with our experience of gender. Queer Theory does not recognize the validity of biological sex. The recognition that human beings are born with a sex and that gender is a subjective experience for each sex from a scale of masculine to feminine does not fit into the new agenda the school board is promoting. There is one gender spectrum according to the school board policies – not two (one for males, one for females). Or even three, to recognize that a tiny fraction of people (much less than 1%) are born with visible differences of sexual development.
There was no recognition that a child’s existence as an embodied human being born with a sex (an immutable part of ourselves) is important to recognize and affirm. The school board staff explained that they felt it was more “inclusive” to only use the concept of gender identity to instruct children about their gender.
Ironically, the OCDSB’s updated Gender Identity and Gender Expression policy declares:
“When students feel that some parts of their identity are being left out, it has a negative impact on their mental health and learning. If a student can talk about being trans or gender diverse but not about experiencing racism, a major part of their identity is being erased, and erasure is a form of oppression.”
OCDSB Gender Identity and Gender Expression policy
The OCDSB does not recognize that when students cannot talk about their sex, or when a school will not acknowledge a student’s sex as an important characteristic that affects how they experience the world – this is erasure. Our lawyer tried to no avail to get them to see this point.
Gender-Identity-and-Gender-Expression-OCDSBDownload
Gender Identity Rules All, or Does It?
We heard a lot of statements from the school board witnesses that ended with “regardless of gender identity.” We never heard them say “regardless of sex” or “regardless of gender expression.” I found this significant because both sex and gender expression are also protected characteristics in our Human Rights Code.
Gender identity is a completely subjective concept that this school board is applying to all of their students. “Male” and “female” have become labels that people identify into and out of. After a considerable grilling by our lawyer about gender spectrums and what they mean (my favourite was the one with a Barbie doll at one end to represent “female” and GI Joe at the other to represent “male”) their Inclusivity Consultant declared “the terminology is evolving”.
SOURCE : https://genderreport.ca/transgender-ideology-in-our-schools/
