What We Don't Know Hurts Us - Early Education in Canada

It feels impossible not to comment on the Not sure what I mean?, feel free to peruse this depressing list!: here, here, here, here, and here. :)'keep children safe from the gays' rhetoric that is floating around Canada right now. People claim that children are being groomed, that kids are potentially being harmed by schools, or indoctrinated into 'gender ideology.' I very truly and sincerely disagree, but that disagreement alone is not helpful. Those who believe that 'to be transgender' is to express an ideology will likely never see eye to eye with those who believe that being transgender is a state or quality of one's life—i.e. that one can be transgender or not. I don't believe it particularly helpful either to try and resolve this debate by biological arguments or the medicalization of being transgender vs. suffering from gender dysphoria. What I do want to focus on is hopefully a shared idea, and middle ground, between the entrenched camps: the importance of quality education.

On the topic of children and school, queer Canadians want the same thing all Canadians want: for children to be happy, safe, healthy, educated, and ready to lead full, interesting, and positive lives. We can dive into each of these categories and get to work debating what will constitute the boundaries and measurements of what a happy or positive life entails; but if we agree on the big picture then really the details aren't for us, as a broad digital abstracted society, to decide. It's for PTA meetings, schoolboards, and provinces to attend to the people in their community and make the best effort they can to follow the best public advice to meet the demands of their communities—and for their respective communities to be involved, raise concerns, and together, iterate. A bureaucratic body will almost never get something right on the first go, but that's why these functions are 'always on' parts of society.

Hopefully this mission statement is uncontroversial, and it's this reframing that leads me to make a more particular argument that I hope all communities can engage with and learn from: banning a book will never help.

The Lack of 2SLGBTQ+ Resources

As a young 13 year old, when puberty began kicking in and I had feelings and questions that were not obvious, I had no outlet or path to understanding who I was or what I was experiencing. We had a great public health and sex education program that introduced me to my body in a welcoming and parent driven environment when I was 10. All the dads came to school to be in the class with their sons, and all the moms for their daughters. Classes were separated by gender and then we had the opportunity to learn, to question, to have our fathers set good examples by respectfully questioning and prompting discussions. Homosexuality, intersex presentation, and transgender people did not come up. 3 years later, I felt wrong and confused. I found representations of men who looked like women in unrealistic media and for 6 months would look for information daily on the internet: who was that character and could that be real?

It's laughable in hindsight: just google 'gay people community' and you'll find the resources you need as fast as you can; but what this shows is that ignorance of possibilities prevents people from finding that information in the first place. If anything "turned me gay", it was probably growing up in a boarding school where my mom took care of 40+ teenage girls 24/7. Living with a never-ending stream of teenage sisters exposed me to more than the world ever willWatching TV didn't turn me gay, but it certainly presented an image, a concept, that was not available to me before. I felt a certain way, experienced a new representation of life, and then coinciding with my own physical development realized I had unanswered questions. You might feel a sense of doubt, of concern that you're missing something, but if you're never made aware of what options there are then you can't 'just google it'.

Eventually I did find the language I needed, the base case to begin further googling, in the form of a blog written by a transwoman in the US—nothing more than a plain recounting of her feelings, her being a parent and the conflict with her partner that ensued from pursuing her identity, her process seeking care. Knowing that this—transition, her story—was an actual real-life possibility didn't suddenly relieve me of all my concerns; but it allowed me to imagine myself differently. I knew who I was (or rather who I was going to be), but had no clue what that meant for me. How do I get from where I am to where I know I want to be? What will happen to my family? Would I be supported? How long would it take? So 13 year old me tried to keep it to myself (failing miserably, usually) and spent the next 4 years crying myself to sleep and feeling alone. I had "answers" but still no way to go from question to answer.

During my twenties I transitioned medically, and throughout the process had to walk the awkward ritual of changing my name in my professional life, pronouncing my identity to all of my colleagues. Such a swap cannot really be 'half-done' and so this public declaration spurred many to reach out and talk to me. In particular, one coworker began offering guidance and an understanding ear, another trans person, and one who had just begun hormone therapy. It was funny for us to connect this way since they thought I was "new", just beginning a journey of self discovery and medical support, and I had to break it to them that I'd been transitioning for a while already without making it "known"; but this small happenstance exposed something dramatically relevant. This coworker was older than me, had been living a full life, was a parent and partner in a straight relationship, and despite feeling conflicted for decades about their sexual experiences and body, only just found out that hormone therapy was a medical possibility. This makes me livid. The information about queer lives is deemed "prevalent", "everywhere", "thrown in people's faces", etc. and yet a transgender person struggled in Canada for 30+ years without ever being aware that HRT even existed. They lamented the years lost and are now facing a new world of so many struggles as they come to terms with not just the current political climate, but also the shape of their life and how experiences they've had have transpired—a barrage of "if only's".

Information "Access" vs. Information "Appropriateness"

Much of the conversation now currently revolves around when Queer content is appropriate (at age 4? age 13? maybe after highschool?). And in a small way that's a win over if queer content is appropriate; but regardless of how slippery that slope is, I don't think either is the correct question. We needn't talk about appropriateness at all. Make resources available and then let people find and access those resources when they're needed. Our sexual education doesn't need to make every 10 year old learn about the intricacies of pursuing HRT, of the processes surrounding professional recommendation, of the needed recurring bloodwork with specialists, or surgery waitlists. But if your child is entering puberty and homosexuality and gender is left out of the picture completely, if they never even have the chance to learn the words to describe the different kinds of ways people live, then you are doing your child a disservice.

What the stories above highlight is that "appopriateness" caused harms, it leads to pain and problems. Appopriateness means people never learn, or when they do, they don't feel like they can share that knowledge. Whatever the thing learned, it becomes a dirty secret, a self fulfilling prophecy, where those who seek to label something inappropriate literally cause it to become inappropriate when it is inevitably found. Instead we should be focusing on "access". Accessible does not mean highlighted, does not mean taught, does not mean forced; but it also does not mean protected or safeguarded.

Of course the first instinct is to say that for information to be accessible it means that the information exists. The issue with leaving the conversation there is that practically none of us have ever sat down to read an encyclopedia, and none of us really want to try and make the argument that we should. The world is full, full of information already. The problem is not having the information floating around in some nebulous way, but connecting people to the information relevant to them when they need it. And to dig deeper, the real issue I'm trying to press upon here is that when we deem something inappropriate, we rob ourselves and others the opportunity to ask questions which inform which resources are relevant in the first place. Of course, I'm speaking of an epistemic injustice here. For a more thorough explanation please read more here!I don't know what I don't know, and if I have strong feelings and no way to navigate or express them, I won't find answers.

So if I don't mean that the information is available, what do I mean? I mean that the information is both present and considered okay to talk about. It doesn't help that teenage-me's highly reputable "source" was pre-2000's Japanese animation and 4chan theadsMy finding out about trans people didn't lead to a conversation, a better relationship with my mom, or help me navigate any of the feelings I had—only made me feel like I was wrong, broken, and trapped. The "allowable-ness", the opportunity to navigate and understand information can only come from parent's and teacher's engagement with children. An idea can be there, a book to be read, but if the idea is uncomfortable it's rare for a child to engage or when they do engage to take away a healthy perspective. When parents and teachers get involved in those hard ideas and make it more approachable, children learn. They don't become, they're not indoctrinated, they navigate information. Few parents would deny that it's their responsibility to help their child, to support their interests, or to give them opportunities; but once it comes to education, the role that a parent plays not in dictating what or when to learn, but how to learn and shaping what can be learnt is suddenly forgotten. It's not the worlds obligation to make information accessible to your child it's your responsibility as a parent.

Besides, children are fickle: they'll read the same book ten times, claim it's the best, then never touch it again. They'll start a book and go nowhere; they'll start 30 books and get halfway through each. As an early reader, I routinely tried to rent the 'big kid' books from the library, and could read them but not understand a goddamn thing. A teacher told me that the copy of Edgar Allen Poe's poetry I'd rented from the school library was inappropriate and so I rented it 10 times over in defiance. My mom or dad never read the book with me or asked me why I liked it, they rarely ever talked to me about the books I took out from the library; and this is an issue not because I found any content about the queer community, or because Edgar Allan Poe was truly inappropriate; but because all the information that was available, historically important poetry, was rendered inaccessible despite it being literally in my hands. Had someone taken a real interest in helping me with the poetry, I might have learnt what Poe was on about and then found a better poet to read after. I could rent the book over and over, and read it in class and at home, but what good did that do when neither a teacher or my parents would ever help me with it?

The Mission Statement

All Canadians want for children to be happy, safe, healthy, educated, and ready to lead full, interesting, and positive lives. The way to get there is never by taking away information or reducing the accessibility of information. With the internet it isn't even possible to actually hide or remove or prevent people, no matter their age, from finding certain information. We need to be focusing on making information accessible: that is available or discoverable, and culturally ok and healthy to learn from.

When I was a young child (about 7 or 8) my granddad took me to a public lecture held in the community theatre on meth. Yes, there's no typo, on crystal meth. We watched interviews with addicts, a documentary including how its made, the pain it causes, and the health information. Active addicts were on stage alongside public nurses and social care workers talking about the impact the drug had on their lives and because of how my granddad talked to me, the way he built an atmosphere of trust and learning, I walked away from that lecture with so much deeper of an understanding of drugs and drug abuse. I didn't want those things to happen to me, I felt pain and empathy for those who had been affected by the drug, and I left emboldened to never do hard drugs and to forgive and understand those who did. That single public lecture did more to educate me on drugs than all the rest of the drug education in the school system combined."Appropriateness" would have dictated that it was not acceptable for a child to be there, but what a positive and amazing learning opportunity it was because my grandparent and the public health officials made it possible to engage earnestly in the information. They did not make the topic shameful or wrong to think about, and I was not left to my own devices, I was asked to think and engage as genuinely as my grandfather was also doing beside me. He was learning, and I learnt with him.

Sadly, it feels often these days like the sides of this debate will never see eye to eye and ignore the wide open commonground we all share. And so vainly, I implore parents, if you don't think that transgender people are OK, or healthy, or normal, then don't ban books with queer content, don't try and shame and control information that you'll never successfully hide from someone for the rest of their lives. Instead, treat homosexuality and queerness like my grandfather treated drugs: as an opportunity to learn, even about things that are uncomfortable or that you think are morally wrong. Talk to your child openly, not in a judgmental way, and challenge them to think about important ideas in their life. I would rather live in a society that seeks to help engage one another earnestly, even where we disagree, than in one that buries it's head in the sand.