A primer for the transgender debate
A policy for transgender students is again on the agenda for a Tuesday meeting of Edmonton’s Catholic school board.
Divisive, passionate, and heartfelt debates started in May when a seven-year-old transgender student wanted to use the girl’s bathroom. She was born a boy but identifies as a girl and has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Her Catholic school initially asked her to use a gender-neutral washroom before eventually permitting access to the girl’s washroom.
The debate over bathrooms — and the broader approach to transgender students in a religious school district — has been simmering ever since. Here’s a primer on key issues.
Q What are other Alberta school boards doing?
A There is no clear record of how many of Alberta’s 62 school boards have adopted stand-alone policies on gender identity and expression. Kristopher Wells, a professor with the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies at the University of Alberta, has count- ed eight boards that have done so. Edmonton Public Schools was the first to pass a stand-alone policy in 2011, along with accompanying regulations.
Q Bill 10 came into effect in June, enshrining sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression in the Alberta Bill of Rights as protected grounds from discrimination. Doesn’t that provide adequate protection for students?
A The difference between the Bill of Rights and a stand-alone policy is that a policy tells educators exactly how to create safe spaces for students.
For example, Edmonton Public Schools provides a list of regulations that provides specific instruction on various issues. For example, students and staff have “the right to be addressed by a name and pronoun that corresponds to his or her consistently asserted gender identity,” the policy states. It makes several other action-oriented rules.
“The policy is the why and the administrative regulations are the how,” said Wells. “Without those, teachers wonder, ‘If I do inter- vene, or talk about this in class, will I be supported?’ ... I talk about these policies as building institutional resilience so that everyone at any level knows exactly what the responsibilities are.”
Q What role does the Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton play in setting policy? Do Catholic trustees have to follow the archbishop’s lead?
A Board chair Debbie Engel has said the board is in no way bound to follow the archbishop’s direction on a transgender policy. “I have never worked with an archbishop who wasn’t willing to appreciate that we’re publicly funded and appreciate the circumstances we’re in,” Engel said earlier this month.
But Patricia Grell, the trustee who first championed the transgender student’s plight, has said the board was trying to pass its own transgender policy but was asked to “wait for and follow” a guideline document drafted by a group of Catholic superintendents and endorsed by the archbishop.
Last week, the archdiocese asked people to “pray a novena” starting Tuesday to strengthen Catholic education in Edmonton.
Q Why does this issue seem so divisive for the Edmonton Catholic school board?
A There are seven trustees on the board and the dynamic between them appears, at best, uncongenial and, at worst, caustic. A board meeting Sept. 15 erupted in shouting, tears, interruptions, accusations of defamation and controversial comments. One trustee said if they were to “allow” transgender students into Catholic schools, “every time we do not acquiesce to their demands, they will be saying we are discriminatory.”
Reaction to the meeting was loud and furious from the public, media and government. In its wake, Education Minister David Eggen reviewed the legislation that gives him the power to dissolve a board. He met with trustees to discuss “governance, decorum and function” and a policy for transgender students.
Q Why not just put one policy in place for all Alberta school boards?
A Eggen appears hesitant to do that. “I have to look at the integrity of democratically officials and their purview to build policy,” he told reporters. “I respect that. But certainly I have to also uphold the letter of the law.”