A parental rights advocate raises a sign. (Mei Lee/The Epoch Times)
Critics of Alberta’s proposed pronoun and gender identity policy are “mischaracterizing” Canadian law by saying a child’s right to choose supersedes the right of a parent to make decisions in that child’s best interests, a recently released study says.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced in January the province’s plan to introduce legislation requiring parental consent for children aged 15 and under to change their pronouns or names at school. Alberta’s new legislation would also ban gender-altering surgery for children 17 and under and forbid puberty blockers for those under 16.
Ms. Smith also said women-only sporting divisions will be off-limits to transgender athletes.
“These restrictions will harm Two-Spirit, trans, and gender diverse children and youth by undermining their education, restricting their access to healthcare, and narrowing their sport and recreation opportunities,” the letter said. “We believe these restrictions violate their rights, as enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”
“To date, Canadian academics’ reaction to the Alberta announcement has been one-sided. This is probably to be expected, given the lack of political and intellectual diversity in Canadian universities,” the report said.
“Widespread popular support for these policies is either ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. For opponents, these policies appear to be simply unacceptable in principle as an infringement of the rights of transgender-identifying individuals.”
Critics have fallen short in their arguments in several ways, the authors say, adding that the use of the charter as an argument against the proposed policy shows a lack of understanding about what the laws laid out in the document actually mean.
“We are dispirited by the reflexively ideological character of these critical interventions,” the authors said, referencing the open letter sent to Ms. Smith.
“More importantly, we are concerned by the profound confusion that they display with respect to the role that legislation and other measures can and should play in ensuring the protection of vulnerable persons, particularly with regards to what are perhaps the most vulnerable persons of all—children.”
The study says that the arguments of critics solely reference the right to gender identity but ignore the condition of gender dysphoria as well as the ability of children to understand the ramifications of making life-altering decisions at such a young age.
Parental Consent
Parental notification and consent policies do not contravene a child’s rights, the study argues, noting that Canadian law lists parents and guardians as the individuals positioned to make decisions in the best interests of the children they care for.
“Those who dismiss or diminish the importance of parental rights are not only mischaracterizing positive law but also rejecting foundational liberal principles,” the study says.
While schools and educators play an important role in the lives of children, the report says, it should always be a subordinate one to the role played by parents or guardians. When a child expresses gender concerns, teachers or school administrators are not as well-positioned as parents to understand the what the child needs, the authors argue.
“A parent will almost always have far better knowledge of a child’s particular needs, including mental health needs, than a school teacher or principal, who at best has care for a child for a set number of hours, for a part of a given year,” the authors said. “Parents assume the primary duty to care for and attend to their children’s overall needs, simply because in the vast majority of cases it is in the best interest of their children that they do so.”
Age Restrictions
Age-related restrictions to products and activities such as puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries are “easily justified” in Canadian law as being in the interest of protecting children, the report says.
The authors noted the mounting evidence that medical interventions such as puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones carry grave risks for children.
The MLI report authors argue that critics of Alberta’s plan ignore any medical advice that lists adverse side effects of such drugs.
“They do not consider how children in general require special protections against choices that may irreversibly damage their bodies,” they wrote. “Nor do they offer anything like an even-handed review of the research on the targeted interventions, which suggests that the benefits of such interventions are uncertain while the risks appear quite grave.”
Women’s Sports
Critics have also taken aim at Alberta’s policy on trans women and girls competing in female sport categories, saying that any female-identifying individual should be allowed to participate “regardless of the advantages that the person’s biological sex may provide.” Restricting participation violates equality rights, while forcing female-identifying persons to prove they do not possess a biological advantage infringes their charter rights to life, liberty, and security of the person, critics argue.
The MLI report authors argue, however, that Alberta’s proposed restrictions upholds the special protections offered to women and girls in Canadian law, including sections 15 and 28 of the charter.
“The advantages possessed by biological males, even after medical interventions, are empirically clear and significant such that prohibiting them from participating in female sports serves the non-discriminatory purpose of protecting women and girls against arbitrary and unfair sporting events,” the authors wrote.
“These advantages exist even between biological males and females of roughly the same height and weight, owing most notably to the higher muscle mass relative to total body mass of biological males.”
Ms. Smith has said her government will work with sporting organizations to “ensure that women and girls have the choice to compete in a women’s only division in athletic competitions” and will not be forced to compete against biologically stronger transgender female athletes.
The government also plans to work with sporting organizations to allow transgender athletes to compete by expanding co-ed or other gender-neutral divisions for competitions.