Crafting transgender policy won’t be easy
Speak softly and carry a big School Act.
That seems to be the motto of Education Minister David Eggen.
Despite calls for him to dissolve the fractious Edmonton Catholic school board or to impose an inclusive transgender policy provincewide, Eggen is biding his time. He’s waiting for the next Edmonton Catholic board meeting Oct. 13 to see what the trustees will do.
“They need to show me they can enact policy that honours the spirit and the letter of the law and they need to do so with a functional model of governance,” Eggen said Friday. And if they can’t? “All options are still on the table. I have the School Act just over here. I will have a Plan B if something goes sideways.”
Yet Eggen has set the board a near-impossible task. This week, trustee Patricia Grell released an internal set of pastoral guidelines for dealing with transgender students, written by the Council of Catholic School Superintendents of Alberta in co-operation with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. While most of the guidelines are quite humane and sensible, giving lots of discretion to principals, the document starts with a blunt preface.
“The Catholic Church teaches that the body and soul are so united that one’s gender identity is rooted in one’s biological identity as male and female,” it reads. “In Catholic teaching, one’s sexual identity is considered ‘a reality deeply inscribed in man and woman.’ It is the conviction of the Catholic Church that genetically, anatomically and chromosomally, the body reveals the divine plan, and that humans are ‘obliged to regard (their bodies) as good and to hold (them) in honour since God has created (them).’ Therefore, to attempt ‘gender transitioning’ is contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church.”
In the image of God, male and female, He created them. Transgenderism doesn’t exist. And that’s that.
It’s not going to be easy for the trustees to defy or ignore such a clear-cut statement of church doctrine. The board is already woefully divided. Its ability to work together on a compromise certainly won’t be improved by Grell’s headline-grabbing decision to release the internal document — a policy statement apparently so confidential not even the education minister had seen it before Grell made it public.
“Yes, of course I’m concerned,” Eggen said, referring to the language of the pastoral letter. “But Albertans elect trustees to make policies that are in compliance with the law.
“This board has a responsibility to their electors and to the students in their charge. The trustees make the law. Not the archbishop. That’s ultimately what’s going to happen.”
Perhaps. But it’s not a simple problem to solve.
Freedom of religion is a profoundly fundamental charter right. The Catholic Church has every right to its doctrines and teachings, even if non-Catholics don’t agree with them. Bishops and priests are allowed to preach that transgenderism is contrary to Catholic teachings for the same reason ultraorthodox Muslim women are allowed to wear the niqab. I don’t agree with either choice. But in Canada, we can’t put minority conscience rights to a popular vote. In a multicultural country, people of dif- ferent faiths are entitled to their beliefs, however unpopular or politically incorrect, even if those beliefs make others uncomfortable or angry.
But when those beliefs enter the public sphere, when they have an impact on others, especially on children, then we have a very different issue. Alberta’s Catholic school boards are public. They aren’t funded by Catholic ratepayers, but by all Albertans. In a pluralistic society, we have to make reasonable accommodations for Catholic teachings in Catholic schools or there’s no point in having them. And yet, how can we allow any school district to deny the civil rights of some of its most vulnerable students? Right now, I don’t see any solution that treats trans, intersex and other LBGQT students will dignity and equality, and which still conforms to the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church and to the interpretations of Edmonton Archbishop Richard Smith.
And given the track record of this particular school board, I’m not sanguine that they, of all people, can craft one.
Eggen is undeterred. Whatever happens Oct. 13, he said, the Edmonton Catholic board will indeed end up with a policy “in a spirit of equality and social justice.”
No matter what, seems to be the implication.
“Whenever you widen the circle of equality, you’re going to run into some opposition,” he said.
“This is the social change that people voted for and that I am responsible to enact.”