An Easy Solution to Gender Disclosure in Schools

Over the past few years, more and more schools and school boards have embraced a policy to not tell parents if their child wants to use new pronouns at school or change their gender.
After a grade six student came out as transgender earlier this year in Calgary, the National Post reported that the child’s teacher even went so far as to tell classmates not to tell the student’s parents.
This approach has been an especially surprising development when you consider that schools can’t give a child so much as a Tylenol without checking with their parents first. For school boards to develop policies to keep parents in the dark when school staff engage in deeply psychological discussions with children … well, that brings to mind the famous line from the hit movie Anchorman, “that escalated quickly.”
SecondStreet.org decided to ask the public what they thought about this development, as there was no great debate or consultation in Canada before school boards began developing these ‘keep parents in the dark’ policies.
In early May, SecondStreet.org hired reputable polling company Leger to ask Canadians about this issue. The poll results were lopsided – the public overwhelmingly believes schools should have to inform parents when their child discusses changing genders or their pronouns with school staff.
57% of Canadians support informing parents while only 18% oppose this approach. The rest of Canadians didn’t know. Further, if you strictly looked at responses from parents with kids under 18, support was even higher for disclosure (62%).
Considering the results are so one-sided, school boards have an easy solution to this matter. By default, they could establish a policy to inform parents. If a parent does not want to be informed, they could ask schools to refrain from telling them when their child discusses changing genders.
This should please everyone … Although those who want to interfere with how other parents choose to raise their children may not like this option, but that’s another story.
Critics argue that if parents find out what their child is discussing with teachers, some may harm their children. Sure, there may be the odd case where that could happen. But that’s no reason to assume all parents are monsters who need to be kept in the dark. Don’t forget, schools are currently required to inform child welfare officials if they suspect a child is truly in an unsafe home.
To be sure, this is an emotionally charged issue. It did not help when the Prime Minister of Canada recently suggested that the New Brunswick government was acting as “far right political leaders (who) are trying to outdo themselves with the types of cruelty and isolation they can inflict.’
Comparing parents who want to support their children with the kind of people who marched six million Jews into gas chambers during World War II was an inappropriate statement, one that’s unbecoming for someone in the highest office in the land.
To be sure, this gender controversy could have been avoided had school boards and governments spoken with the public about it in the first place. They would have learned, once again, that parents want to know what their kids are up to in school.
Colin Craig is the President of SecondStreet.org, a Canadian think tank.
About SecondStreet.org: We launched in 2019 to focus on researching how government policies affect everyday Canadians. In addition to policy research, we tell short stories featuring Canadians from coast-to-coast explaining how they’re affected – for better or worse – by these government policies.