Alberta transgender move should come as no surprise

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/02/2024 (692 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’ve seen more than a few columnists, pundits and politicians express surprise — and disgust — that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith cast her political net wide this week in announcing a raft of policies aimed at curbing treatments for transgender youth in schools, sports and health care.

In a video posted to social media on Wednesday, Premier Smith announced that her United Conservative government intends to prohibit gender-affirming surgeries for youth under 19 and the use of hormone therapies such as puberty blockers for kids under 16.

And as the Globe and Mail reported, Alberta will require parental notification and consent before use of the preferred name and pronouns of students under 16, while parents will be notified of changes for children 16 and 17.

Also, parents will now have to sign off on their child’s participation when it comes to formal instruction on gender identity, sexual identity, sexual orientation or human sexuality. Further still, the Smith government intends to work with sports organizations to exclude transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ teams.

There’s a lot to digest in these changes, and Albertans may not fully understand how these changes will impact their province until they’re actually enacted.

Nevertheless, the scope and breadth of these changes may have come as a shock to Canadians both inside and outside Alberta, particularly those who were looking for the Smith government to mimic less draconian parental rights laws introduced by Saskatchewan or New Brunswick last year.

Saskatchewan’s Bill 137 that passed last October, for example, made parental consent required before a child under 16 is able to use a different gender-related name or pronoun at school.

Similar legislation to that of Scott Moe’s government was being considered by the former Stefanson government in the leadup to last October’s provincial election.

In August, the Progressive Conservative government committed to updating the province’s Public Schools Act to enhance parental rights and force teachers to tell parents when their child goes by a different name or gender. Premier Heather Stefanson said she believed parents should be informed about changes to their child’s gender identity at school, though she had a hard time defending questions over student safety should those changes become manifest.

The PCs planned to conduct consultations with parents and educators before amending the act if the party had been re-elected. With an NDP government now in power under Wab Kinew, obviously these plans aren’t worth the paper they were printed upon.

But the policy that was put forward was an attempt by Stefanson and her campaign team to capitalize on their belief that a vast majority of parents were small-c conservative enough to buy into the idea that they have a right to know about how their child perceives their own gender.

And to be fair, however cynical the campaign promise was, it wasn’t a bad political move in the grand scheme of things. An Angus Reid Institute poll released that same month had suggested that roughly three-quarters of Manitobans believe parents should be informed about changes to their child’s gender identity.

Results showed that 49 per cent of Manitobans surveyed said parents should be informed and give consent on changes to their child’s gender identity at school. Another 27 per cent believe parents should be informed about the change, 16 per cent think parents should neither be informed nor have a say and seven per cent said they were not sure or couldn’t say.

It’s safe to say that even though the Tories’ designs on retaining government were shut down, this particular issue is still resonating with a certain percentage of Manitobans.

In this same vein, Premier Smith is clearly playing to the hard right social-conservative core of her province, going “all in” with a plan that may well put some LGBTTQ+ kids in danger should they have to disclose to a parent who they may feel unsafe admitting that to.

That same Angus Reid poll showed Albertans were much the same as Manitobans — three-quarters of respondents said either parents must be informed and/or give consent if their child wants to identify differently

In the wake of Smith’s Wednesday announcement, critics have argued that trans-affirming health care for youth can save lives, and accuse the Alberta premier of deliberately spreading disinformation. For example, parents are already required to give consent for their young children to receive puberty blockers or to allow teens to access hormone-replacement therapy.

These kinds of conservative populist policies come straight out of Republican political playbooks in the United States, where sex education in schools and gender identity have fuelled seemingly endless political fights. In a province billed as the Texas of the North, this should come as no surprise.

Brandonites don’t need to look south to see the divisions these kinds of cynical politics bring about in normally sanguine communities. This city has been on the front lines of this kind of fight.

After a full year of arguments and protests at school boards, councils libraries and election debates in Manitoba of all places, the only real surprise when it comes to Smith’s own gender-identity policy drop was why Alberta was so slow to the fight.

» Matt Goerzen, editor