Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams.
Speaker: Over the summer we're bringing you a series of weekly podcasts from our 2023 -24 season which wrapped up in mid -May. We will be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be at 10 a .m. on September 21st on Vancouver Cooperative Radio, CFRO.
Speaker: 100 .5 FM and streaming live at co -opradio .org slash redeye and podcasts from that show will be posted the following day. On the podcast today Lorraine Chisholm is joined by Corinne Mason and Leah Hamilton of Mount Royal University in Calgary to talk about the origins of the anti -trans parental rights movement in Canada.
Speaker: The One Million March for Children on September 20th is part of a widespread and growing parental rights movement targeting inclusive public education. That's the message from Two Calgary Academics in an article in The Conversation.
Speaker: The authors say some mainstream analysis suggested simply a group of united parents who were invested in their children's education, but they debunked this characterization by offering a brief history of the origins of the parental rights movement and some of its key organizers. Corinne Mason is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Mount Royal University.
Speaker: Leah Hamilton is Vice Dean, Research and Community Relations in the Faculty of Business and Communications, also at Mount Royal University, and they join me today. Hello, Corinne and Leah. Hi. Hi, Lorraine. Let's start by laying out some of the ways this so -called parental rights movement has already influenced Canadian politics. First, let's look at New Brunswick, Policy 713. What's going on there?
Speaker: Sure. So the Parental Rights Movement, as you said, Lorraine, has already influenced provincial politics here in Canada. So Policy 713 in New Brunswick sets minimum requirements for school districts and public schools to create a safe,
Speaker: welcoming, inclusive, and affirming school environment for all students, families, and allies who identify or are perceived as 2SLGBTQ+. And New Brunswick recently revised this policy before the start of this school year. So now in New Brunswick, youth under 16 years of age are required to obtain parental consent
Speaker: before they can change their name and pronouns at school. So this policy change has sparked a lot of criticism, including from Kelly Lamrock, who's the province's child and youth advocate, that the new policy violates the charter rights of children.
Speaker: And Lamrock said that forcing any transgender and non -binary students to use a name that they don't identify with is a violation of the protected rights under the Human Rights Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And just to give you a bit of context, so in June of 2017, the Governor General signed Bill C -16 into law, which was an amendment of the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code.
Speaker: And that amendment essentially established sort of the legal authority needed to counter discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression. So in other words, the Canadian Human Rights Act protects transgender and gender diverse people. Now, I just want to jump in and ask you here because to some ears, maybe people who don't have friends or family who are transgender,
Speaker: This might sound like fairly benign. Oh, you know, you can't call somebody by a different name or different pronouns. What kind of harms does that expose transgender folks to? Yeah, I think at the heart of this issue is that trans students should be treated with respect and dignity and not outed by their schools to their families. So not every child has the option to come out first at home to their parents.
Speaker: There are high risks of family rejection for some trans children, youth, and adults. So not all 2SLGBTQ plus children and youth can come out at home without risking their psychological, emotional, and physical well -being. So for some children and youth, school is the only place that they can be themselves. Let's turn to Saskatchewan.
Speaker: Education Minister Dustin Duncan is also talking about legislation to suppress pronoun use and chosen names. What's happening in that province? Sure. So similar to New Brunswick, as you said, Education Minister Dustin Duncan announced similar changes. He announced these in August and essentially going forward, schools must now seek the permission of parents or guardians before allowing students under the age of 16
Speaker: To change what the province refers to as their preferred name and pronouns and Duncan also announced that parents must be informed about the sexual health education curriculum that's offered in the children's schools and that parents have the opportunity
Speaker: to opt out of their children receiving those lessons, that sexual health education curriculum. So essentially, parents could decide that their children would receive no sexual health education at school. So that could mean for some children that they don't learn about consent, they're not learning the correct names for body parts, they're not learning evidence -based sexual health information.
Speaker: And we know the evidence is really strong that comprehensive sexual health education gives children and youth the information and skills to make healthy, informed decisions. It reduces rates of STIs and pregnancies in youth under 18. And what's quite problematic about this, well, there are many things that are problematic about this,
Speaker: But Premier Scott Moe has said that when faced with legal challenges, he'll use what's called the notwithstanding clause to override the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity and expression. So essentially, this clause, this notwithstanding clause, allows provincial governments to pass laws that override certain charter rights for up to five years.
Speaker: Two weeks ago, we saw demonstrations and counter demonstrations across the country. How does the so -called parental rights movement, who were out there demonstrating and lobbying governments here in Canada, how does that movement characterize itself to the media and to all of us?
Speaker: So I think that the parental rights movement in the Canadian context has done its best to communicate to, especially to a mainstream audience and to potential followers, that it's just a group of parents who are coming together who don't have enough information about what's happening at schools.
Speaker: who are supposedly left in the dark by their teachers, by principals, by school boards, school trustees, and that there's no possible way into better understanding curriculum or better understanding what supports might be available to diverse students in the school context. And of course, this actually isn't the case. There's lots of ways that parents can get involved in their children's education.
Speaker: But by framing the parental rights movement as just this group of concerned parents who just care so much for their children and so much for their children against this kind of boogeyman of folks who we need to protect them against has really come to frame this larger concern
Speaker: over school and children's rights and what is being spoken about or how students are being spoken to in the school context. It's really taken a unique form in the Canadian context. It seems pretty apple pie to say parents should be involved in their children's schooling.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you spoke to any parent, they would agree that it's really important to take a concerted effort to connect with their children in the school context, especially when our children spend so much time with teachers and outside of the home every single day from Monday to Friday. And so it doesn't seem concerning to suggest that parents should be paying attention.
Speaker: Now, you've sought to debunk this framing. Where did this so -called parental rights movement come from? You say it goes back to the 1970s.
Speaker: Yeah, so there's a few histories that we could trace around the rhetoric of parental rights, but I think one of the most concerning places that the parental rights movement comes from and where we see this rhetoric being really mainstreamed in the 1970s is around backlash to the gay and lesbian movement, which is what the terminology would have been at the time, and also backlash against anti -segregation or pro -integration movements.
Speaker: in the US in the 1970s. And so there were organizations spearheaded and fronted by conservative evangelical activists like Anita Bryant in the United States, specifically in Florida, who used the terminology parental rights and also named her organization Save the Children to speak out against the rising visibility of gays and lesbians at the time.
Speaker: and also calls for better protections against discrimination for gay men and lesbian women in areas of employment and housing. And so when we think about where the parental rights movement has been in the past, it can tell us a lot about what the reality of this movement is in the contemporary. So let's look at that. Who's behind the movement now?
Speaker: So in the United States, folks will point to Moms for Liberty as one of the major organizing factors in the parental rights movement now in the contemporary context. Moms for Liberty started as a group of moms organizing against mask mandates and other public health protection measures in the United States, specifically out of Florida. And when the pandemic shifted and the public mitigation efforts shifted, they kind of set their sights on
Speaker: a new target and that new target for them is diverse education what moms for liberty are concerned about.
Speaker: in the United States is inclusive education for 2SLGBTQ plus students, but also what they call the indoctrination of students around supposed critical race theory. And so the folks in Moms for Liberty have really close ties to evangelical conservatism and also mega republicanism, so the kind of Trumpy version.
Speaker: of republicanism, including a strong relationship with Ron DeSantis, but they also organize and are really cozy with white supremacists, white nationalist organizations like the Proud Boys and other folks who are behind the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Speaker: to overturn the election of 2020. And so when we think about this organization, it's really important to name it. It's not only a parental rights movement or maybe to refuse that framing of it as a parental rights movement. It's very much an anti -government movement.
Speaker: And it's a conspiratorial movement. And it also, I think, is, we could describe it as a domestic terrorism organization, which the Southern Poverty Law Center in the United States is officially named Moms for Liberty.
Speaker: In the Canadian context so far, we don't have a Moms for Liberty movement, but their influence is obvious and explicit. They've had lots of conversations with organizations that would be understood or that are, yeah, that understood as right -wing extremists in the Canadian context. Organizations like Action for Canada. Action for Canada is an evangelical Christian, right -wing extremist organization that has very much
Speaker: taken up the torch of the Monstra Liberty Movement in the Canadian context and is bringing forward much of the rhetoric that we've seen circulating in the United States and translated that into the Canadian context and really targeted Canadian school curriculums and also explicitly targets teachers.
Speaker: Action for Canada as a so -called parental rights movement, not only is agitating and lobbying around some of the legislative changes that we've seen in New Brunswick and in Saskatchewan, but they're also calling on their membership to harass teachers. One of the things that we saw from Action for Canada at the very beginning of this school year was an action plan that included
Speaker: encouraging men in particular. So it's not just a mom's group, but they're including men, men in particular. So dads, uncles, grandpas, brothers to go and drop their kids off at school on the first day to intimidate teachers and to let them know that they were in fact in charge of their children and of their learning and to create a sense of antagonism between parents and the teachers of their children.
Speaker: Now, you say the organizers of the one million March for Children are less cohesive than other so -called parental rights groups, but just as dangerous. Who are they and why are they dangerous?
Speaker: So the one million march for children had gone through multiple iterations of organizing. And so what's so interesting as a social scientist, as a researcher in this moment, is to look at how many moving parts there are within this broader frame of parental rights. And to put it simply, there's kind of two main organizers.
Speaker: One piece of the organizing puzzle is what they're describing themselves as, as a religious conservative movement, as an explicitly anti to SLGBTQ movement. And then there's other folks who lended their kind of organizing power and their organizing labor.
Speaker: who describe themselves to be more secular and actually inclusive of two SLGBTQ people. And so you see organizations and just like grassroots groups of individuals who are naming themselves as part of this parental movements from such a wide variety of ideological backgrounds, of organizing commitments, different kinds of goals. What I think glues all these folks together
Speaker: Is there concern with one public education? I think what gets lost in the parental rights movement rhetoric or the kind of mainstream framing of the parental rights movement?
Speaker: is that folks are organizing, yes, against 2SLGBTQ plus inclusion in schools, but they're also anti -public education. And so their goal is to not just challenge curriculum within public schools, but to overthrow public education. They call our schools public schools government schools. They talk about government indoctrination. And so their goal is to really muddy the waters and
Speaker: create such a concern for what's happening in schools that people will begin to either take their children out and increase homeschooling practices or to challenge public funding for public schools as an effort towards privatization. And so when we see Moms for Liberty and we see Action Canada and other organizations who are doing this kind of organizing, they're really scapegoating to SLGBTQ
Speaker: youth and children towards very broad anti -government aims. I'm wondering if these two main organizing groups also form a bit of an umbrella group for other people who are anti -government and are just jumping on this bandwagon.
Speaker: Absolutely. And so I think what we saw in terms of the outcome or perhaps the fallout of the 1 million march for children is that it's become impossible for even mainstream media to cover what happened
Speaker: on September 20th as a movement for parental rights. If you saw what happened in Ottawa in particular, which saw a very large protest, but I would say an even larger counter protest, is that the folks on the so -called parental rights side invited and were, I guess, attractive to all kinds of anti -government white nationalists
Speaker: white supremacists, right -wing extremism, to the extent that we saw the draping of an indigenous veteran's monument near Parliament draped with a flag with a swastika. And so if you find yourself in a movement
Speaker: or thinking about your relationship to a movement of having maybe questions or concerns about what's going on in your school and you find yourself standing beside Nazis, I think there's a lot of self -reflection and kind of thinking, critical thinking that needs to happen in relationship to people's relationship to this question of parental rights.
Speaker: I went to the counter demonstration here as a participant and it was a really lively, engaging, very energetic counterprotest. But one thing that I heard from a queer friend of mine who went then over to the so -called parental protest was that they saw three very large rainbow flags.
Speaker: And apparently these maybe were being carried by gays against groomers? Am I, what's going on? Yeah, so there's two major groups on I guess the parental rights side or who find themselves connected to this right wing extremist organizing right now. One is gays for groomers and the other one is dikes on the right. And there are two of probably many grassroots organizing groups that are trying to disassociate themselves.
Speaker: From trans people in particular and so it's not uncommon for trans people within 2SLG BT or maybe 2SL Q communities to experience transphobia and I think it looks really complicated for folks who don't understand the power dynamics and
Speaker: within two -spirit queer and trans communities, where we have racism, we have transphobia, we have misogyny. All of those systems that function in mainstream society also function in our communities. And so it is really painful as a trans person to see
Speaker: folks with rainbow flags standing on this parental rights side. And I wonder how much maybe cognitive dissonance or what kind of mental gymnastics people are doing to see themselves aligned with folks who were organizing in the 1970s against them.
Speaker: in their relationship to children. And so I think there's a lot of ways that people are trying to cozy up to power in this moment when there's so much on the line. And so it's easy I think for some, maybe some gay men and some lesbian women who are cisgender to see themselves as finally getting some recognition
Speaker: finally experiencing perhaps some safety in mainstream spaces and not wanting to lose those entitlements and those privileges and are willing to target trans people and are willing to target trans youth and trans children in order to maintain the little power that they have. It's extremely disappointing. It's not shocking, but it's definitely painful. Absolutely.
Speaker: Let's come back to the people who organized the protests this past month and who are lobbying governments. If it isn't clear yet how these movements are harmful to youth who may be struggling or trying to determine their gender identity or maybe they know it, their sexual orientation, can you spell out the harms these kids can face as a result of this environment?
Speaker: Sure, so I think Dr. Mason has already articulated some of those harms, and earlier I mentioned that for some children and youth, school is the only place that they can be themselves safely. As Dr. Mason pointed out, we are seeing a lot of scapegoating and dehumanization of trans children and youth, the denial of full humanity for these youth. I think
Speaker: To recognize, as Scott Moat has done, that a policy violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and then to double down and say that he'll use the notwithstanding clause to get around this, this is the very enactment of discriminatory policies. And I think right now,
Speaker: The target here in Canada is education, but as we've seen in the United States, I think many of us are worried about gender -affirming care, including healthcare, being targeted next. So, as you know, dozens of bills in the U .S. have restricted access to gender -affirming care, and so this includes trans children and youth obtaining care
Speaker: that psychologists and physicians consider medically necessary. So in some states like Texas now, providing gender affirming care is considered a form of child abuse. And I think just for a minute, I do want to point out the evidence here. So just this month, Brendan Nolan and colleagues published a new paper. It's a randomized controlled trial in a medical journal published by the American Medical Association.
Speaker: And essentially what they did in this study is assess the effect of testosterone therapy compared with no treatment on gender dysphoria, depression, and suicidality in 64 transgender and gender diverse adults who are seeking masculinization. And in this study, the results showed that the intervention group, so the group that received gender affirming hormone therapy,
Speaker: had a decrease in gender dysphoria. They had a significant decrease in depression and a significant decrease in suicidality. So studies like this provide really solid evidence that gender affirming healthcare is critically important. It saves lives. And so I think these issues, you know, that the parental rights movement is incredibly harmful to 2SLGBTQ plus youth.
Speaker: What concrete actions can people take to combat this regressive movement?
Speaker: You know, actions can happen at the individual level, at the organizational level, and the societal level. I think individuals, it can be as simple as checking in and showing some love and support to the 2SLGBTQ plus people in your lives. Last week was really rough for a lot of people. This isn't over. I think checking in and being allies is really important.
Speaker: I think we need to amplify 2SLGBTQ plus youth voices and lived experiences. This is really important, especially in times like now when adults are speaking over youth. Youth need to see adults standing alongside them and amplifying their voices during this fight.
Speaker: I think two individuals or the organizations that they're involved in can advocate for the importance of using chosen pronouns and names. And individuals, if they work in organizations that don't have gender inclusive bathrooms, can fight to change that. Measures like this have incredibly positive impacts on the lives of 2SLGBTQ plus people, especially children and youth.
Speaker: And I think as we saw last week, advocacy can also involve organizing or amplifying counter actions to this parental rights movement. So for instance, last week we saw the support trans youth rally in Winnipeg, which was a really moving and powerful event over, I think 4 ,000 people came to show their love for the community.
Speaker: And I think as a society and in communities, we need more actions like that. I also think individuals can start calling their organizations up. I think many organizations display pride flags. They kind of enter their sort of corporate floats in pride. That type of allyship
Speaker: is easy, but when things get really hard for the 2SLGBTQ plus community and for trans youth like they did last week, where are these organizations? I think individuals need to ask them how they are showing solidarity with the community during times like this.
Speaker: Yeah, I would say if you're here for the party, you have to be here for the fight. You don't get to choose. And so if you showed up a pride, you should be showing up to these counter protests now, and you should be showing up for people in your life day to day, but you should also be having hard conversations with the folks in your life who are curious about or supportive of the parental rights movement. All folks who are parenting children, especially those who are not parenting trans,
Speaker: children and trans youth should be having conversations. If they call themselves allies, they should be having conversations in their mom's groups, in their parent groups, on a WhatsApp chat, at drop -off, at pickup, at the school board meeting or parental advisory councils. They should be standing up and showing up
Speaker: in those moments to debunk the misinformation and disinformation that is circulating and ensure that they're shielding trans youth, trans children and their families from the vitriol that is being spewed at us in all kinds of places. And so we really need folks who have more power in this moment to use that power to leverage it against a really, really dangerous right wing extremist movement.
Speaker: that if Leah said it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Well, I really appreciate these suggestions and I think we need to all really step up at this moment and fight back against this insidious movement. Thank you both so much. This has been really a great first deep dive into what's going on and we'll stay on this story and keep following up on this movement.
Speaker: Thank you for having us. Thanks so much for having us.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Corinne Mason and Leah Hamilton. Corinne Mason is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Mount Royal University. Leah Hamilton is Vice Dean Research and Community Relations in the Faculty of Business and Communication Studies at Mount Royal University. And I want to point folks towards their article on the conversation, which also has a lot of links to other relevant sources. It's called
Speaker: how the parental rights movement gave rise to the one million march for children, and you can find it at theconversation .ca. The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio .org slash redeye.
