Chris Selley: Danielle Smith can’t avoid the combustible politics of children’s gender – National Post

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Over the past few days, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has put a far more compassionate face on new rules and regulations governing gender-dysphoric children than her counterparts in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan did before her. She began a seven-minute online video, posted Wednesday afternoon, and a Thursday-afternoon press conference, by professing love and support for all children going through such challenges. She vowed to recruit more doctors skilled in the field to the province, so patients can receive care at home. (Alberta currently sends patients to Quebec for gender-reassignment surgery.)

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Neither New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs nor Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe seemed half as empathetic in introducing their own rules. Smith speaks from experience, she says: A young person she knows well is in this situation, and her aim is to help children hoe that tough row, not to scapegoat them or make their lives more difficult — but also to make sure they don’t make any irrevocable decisions about their bodies until they are adults.

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At the same time, Alberta’s new rules, which Smith characterized in a “high-level” outline that will accumulate specificity in forthcoming months of consultations, are more wide-ranging and stricter than those of Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. Like those other provinces, Alberta will require parental consent for children to “socially transition” at school — a new name, new pronouns, etc.

The rules require an “opt in” from parents before their kids receive any “formal instruction on subject matter involving gender identity, sexual orientation or human sexuality.” They will “ensure biologically born female athletes are able to compete in a biological female-only division without having to compete against transgender female athletes.” (Have fun with that one, provincial Sports Minister Joseph Schow!) Most notably, they stipulate which treatments and surgeries will be available and unavailable to gender-dysphoric minors.

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No gender-reassignment surgeries would be allowed for Albertans under 18, and puberty blockers would be banned for those under 16. (For the record, so-called “bottom surgeries” — i.e., to the genital region — are already “restricted to individuals 18 years of age and older,” per the Canadian Pediatric Society.)

Many are aghast at all of this, needless to say, or at least pretending to be. Federal Health Minister Mark Holland spoke of “the devastation that (these policies are) going to bring.”

Even the proposed Alberta policy doesn’t mandate that schools immediately narc on a child who wishes to socially transition

Sports and surgeries aside, however, the fact Canadians monolithically support parents being involved in their children’s life-altering decisions is not some unfortunate intolerant detour along the march of progress. The detour is the notion that parents don’t have a right to know about such things (of course they do), and that children have a right to private lives, the details of which they share only with a few unrelated adults at school (of course they do not). In 25 years, people will look back on such ludicrous arguments the way we do nowadays on trepanation or phrenology.

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That said, I’m more skeptical of government than just about any other institution, the medical and educational professions included, when it comes to solving problems like these (or any others, really). The political and culture-war motivations are just too strong to keep politicians on the straight and narrow and compassionate.

The biggest problem with the rules Smith unveiled this week is that they’re not rules at all. They’re proposed rules, presented (and therefore rightly reported on) as faits accomplis, by a politician who may well want to help gender-dysphoric kids, but who also clearly has a political incentive to be seen cracking down as hard as possible on what many conservatives see as a social contagion.

Because a distressing number of Canadian journalists either haven’t read Saskatchewan’s and New Brunswick’s policies, or are simply too activist-minded to care what those actually say, you will often hear and read that those policies require notification of parents as soon as their children request to go by a different name or gender. They do not, because that would be crazy and reckless.

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In fact, both provinces rule out parental notification in cases where the child doesn’t want that to happen. New Brunswick’s policy allows for children to use another name at school, without their parents knowing, so long as they are “communicating with appropriate professionals in the development of a plan to speak to their parents (about it).”

I suspect Alberta’s policy will be very similar, when it lands in its final form. Even the proposed Alberta policy doesn’t mandate that schools immediately narc on a child who wishes to socially transition. It just says “parents must consent for their child aged 15 and under to alter their name or pronouns used by school teachers, administration and other educational staff.”

If we trust teachers and school administrators to adhere to that policy, in my view, we should trust them to use their best professional judgment in how to deal with the very unique individual, familial and community circumstances in which Canadian children have to navigate gender dysphoria. None of these policies should be necessary. But it helps no one to pretend they’re more draconian than they are. If Smith really hoped to “depoliticize” these issues, as she claimed this week, she’s out of luck.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

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