Any effort to balance the needs of transitioning young people with the legitimate concerns of parents was going to be unsatisfactory to one extreme or the other, or both.
Essentially, the provincial policy, announced Wednesday, says once you are an adult you get to be whatever you want to be. Indeed, the province is trying to recruit one or more gender-reassignment surgeons to the province so transitioning adults no longer have to go to Montreal for “top” or “bottom” surgery.
Not only is the Smith government accepting of adults’ gender transitions, they’re actively seeking to make those transitions more convenient and less expensive.
It’s among young adults that the government is calling for a more complex approach that the activists are calling oppressive.
What Smith announced (in a YouTube video I suggest every Albertan watch), is no reassignment surgery for children 17 and under. No hormone therapy for those 15 and under. And parental consent for pronoun changes for students 15 and under.
That all seems perfectly sensible and non-ideological, unless you believe 14-year-olds have enough life experience to change their genders permanently and, in the case of pronoun use in schools, that the state is always a better judge of a child’s needs than their parents.
I hope the final draft of this policy has a bit more discretion for teachers. The government would be wise to remember not all teachers are transgender zealots who will immediately seek permanent changes for any student who opens up about their gender struggles.
A teacher simply may be the adult a transition-questioning student feels most comfortable telling first.
In her Thursday video, Premier Danielle Smith said letting parents know in every case was safe because if any parents become abusive after learning of their child’s goals, we have laws to deal with that.
But there are a whole range of negative parental reactions possible short of criminal abuse, and if concerned teachers have some discretion about how and when to tell parents, that could actually be better for preserving families.
All-in-all, though, despite the loud criticism, this is a sane policy.
