Guidelines suggest minimizing gender-segregated sports
The B.C. Catholic
Catholic schools in Alberta are mired in a heated debate over how to make accommodations for transgendered students.
Within the last year, the topic has sparked angry letters, human rights complaints, and a school board meeting that burst into a war of words. Now Catholic bishops are speaking up against the government’s most recent proposal.
“It saddens me to say, but totalitarianism is alive and well in Alberta,” wrote Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary in an open letter Jan. 13.
“The Alberta government guidelines issued on Jan. 13 show no evidence of consultation with or sensitivity to the Catholic community. They breathe pure secularism.”
Those guidelines suggest minimizing gender-segregated sports and allowing transgendered children to use whichever name, pronoun, and washroom they wish.
It also suggests schools wipe Mr. and Mrs. from communication with family members and “develop and maintain mutually supportive relationships with a variety of sexual and gender minority groups who can share resources and expertise” for use in lesson plans.
The fight over this issue has been heating up since March, when the provincial government approved Bill 10. It required all schools to open peer support groups called gay-straight alliances if students requested them.
Catholic schools originally pushed back, saying they already had policies in place against all bullying and discrimination, but accepted an amended version. Bishop Henry then considered it a “win-win for everyone.”
But the debate was far from over, and it came back to the fore in Edmonton when a 7-year-old child born a boy wanted to use the girls’ washroom. After the school asked the child to use a new gender-neutral washroom, the family filed a human rights complaint.
Sixty-one school boards across the province are now working on policies for how they will accommodate transgendered students.
The Edmonton Catholic school board made headlines when it tried to craft a policy last fall. Meetings became heated, with crying, shouting, and trustee Larry Kowalczyk calling transgenderism a “mental disorder,” a comment that took social media by storm before and after he apologized.
Education Minister David Eggen even appointed a consultant for six months and $60,000 to help resolve feuds between board members and to get them “back on the rails” to agree on a policy.
Now at issue are guidelines the Alberta government released Jan. 13 to help all of the 61 school boards write policies to accommodate transgendered children. These are the guidelines Bishop Henry finds totalitarian.
“This approach and directive smack of the madness of relativism and the forceful imposition of a particular narrow-minded, anti-Catholic ideology,” he wrote.
“Our teaching is rather simple and direct. God created beings as male and female. In doing so, He gave equal dignity to both man and woman. In this plan, men and women should respect and accept their sexual identity.”
He added he’s backed by the Supreme Court of Canada’s Loyola decision last March that ruled: “to tell a Catholic school how to explain its faith undermines the liberty of the members of its community.”
Archbishop Richard Smith of Edmonton also denounced the province’s guidelines, saying while they contain “many constructive, thoughtful, and reasonable suggestions,” others are “not congruent” with Catholic teaching.
Archbishop Gerard Pettipas of Grouard-McLennan, Alta., and Bishop Paul Terrio of Saint-Paul, Alta., have also spoken out against the guidelines.
Minister Eggen has given the boards until March 31 to write their own policies. The battle over how far to go to accommodate transgendered children while respecting Church teaching continues.
