Michael Coren

There has been a great deal of discussion in Ontario recently about a radical and intrusive sex education curriculum being proposed by the province’s Liberal government. The entire campaign to indoctrinate young people into a gratuitous and obscene version of sexuality has been enormously damaging not only for children, but for parents as well. But what is sometimes forgotten in all this, is how so many of these redundant and damaging proposals are initiated by teachers’ unions. Not, it should be stressed, ordinary teachers, but the extremists who have the time and inclination to work within their unions.

 

If you ask almost any teacher on the front line, working hard to educate our children and for the most part trying to do the right thing, the last issue they’ll want to discuss is sexuality. It’s largely irrelevant, and a massive digression from the genuine challenges of literacy, decency, and preparing kids for university and the workforce. Apart from anything else, teachers are embarrassed by the whole thing, and know from experience that it’s not about teaching.

But consider, for example, what the B.C. Teachers Federation have placed on their website recently. Inside a long, predictably tedious and badly written section entitled “The Gender Spectrum: What Every Educator Needs to Know,” the usual nonsense about the fluidity of sexual identity is spewed out, all dreadfully done and nauseatingly one-sided. Then, under a sub-chapter called “Myths and Facts,” we have this: “Hormone blockers are a safe way to ‘buy time’ as the transgender teen decides whether to go on cross-hormones. This treatment prevents the (often traumatic) development of secondary sex characteristics that do not match the person’s gender identity. It also prevents the need for painful and expensive surgeries to undo these changes later in life. This treatment is widely endorsed by family doctors, endocrinologists, psychologists, and other specialists involved in transgender health programs.”

This is bad, bad stuff. First, there is a great deal of medical research proving that these profoundly serious drugs have deleterious effects on the brain, and can do untold damage. Second, such treatment is not widely endorsed at all, and there are very few doctors who would advise or prescribe such medication. Third, the whole argument rests on the assumption that young people may be “trapped” in the wrong body, rather than being confused, abused, unhappy kids.

In fact, children and teenagers who might believe that they are of a different gender, may well be in acute need of care, and the last people to be handed over for some ghastly social and medical experiment. A lot of teens find sexual development and even straightforward puberty a tough process, and embarrassment and clumsiness are common, and in no way unnatural. That their vulnerability can be exploited is terrifying.

This is not about an effeminate boy being bullied, a girl who does boyish things feeling excluded, or a gay student being allowed to be happy and respected at school. It’s an agenda, with consequences that are so far-reaching that no parent or doctor should be allowed to influence a child – and certainly not a radicalized teacher.

There was a time when teachers taught, and their unions made sure they were fairly paid; a time when mums and dads assumed that their tax-dollars went to schools so that their children could learn history instead of histrionics, and science instead of sexual perversion. It all seems such a long time ago now, when sanity and sense were considered more important than extremism and redundant intervention. Solutions will be extremely difficult, because politicians are reluctant to interfere, and clerics have more than enough to do without this nonsense.

We have to look below the issue to find change, and embrace fundamental change. Scrap the system, introduce vouchers that give parents back their educational tax dollars, and allow families to have their children educated where they want. If mums and dads want schools where radical sexual politics are taught, they can send their kids there – believe me, these schools will be so badly attended that they will soon fold. For the rest – whether they be evangelical, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, gay, fat, black, whatever schools, give choice back to parents. Hey, we’re always being told that choice is a good thing.

Michael Coren can be booked for speeches at www.michaelcoren.com.