Trans children's rights - split from Canadian Politics thread
in Epiphanies
This discussion was created from comments split from: Canadian politics 2023.
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Or, parents march to defend parental rights.
Caissa replies: Are you fuckin' kidding?
Parents' rights to do their best to ensure their kids are as bigoted as they are. God help the poor kids if they themselves happen to be LGBT+
Erm - I'm not SharkShooter. I don’t think they were being ironic.
If you are referring to me, it is not an LBGT issue, it is a privacy issue - schools do not have the right to hide information from parents.
Of course the broad umbrella of "parents' rights" is being used to cover some very specific rights: the right of non-affirming parents to reject and possibly abuse their gay and trans children. Maybe that sounds harsh, but if the child knows their parent is accepting and affirming of their gender or sexuality, then there won't be an issue with the school "keeping secrets," and if the child knows the parents is not accepting and affirming, doesn't the child have a right to a place where they can be accepted and safe, regardless what the parents' rights may be?
Having been at one of the counter-protests Wednesday and seen the vitriol flung at counter-protesters by the people who are "only concerned about their children's education," I'm not very sympathetic to the "parents rights" position right now. And the demonstration I was at was one of the milder ones!
Yes, they absolutely do. More than that, they have a duty to do so in certain circumstances; namely when disclosing the information would put the child at risk of harm.
content warning, sexual abuse
Let's put it the other way around. By default schools have a duty to share with parents any and all information about their child (this becomes fuzzy around differing ages of majority and children over them but not enough to matter for these purposes). But they also have a duty to protect children at risk of harm, which would include the risk from parents of physical assault, psychological abuse (including attempts at conversion "therapy"), neglect (e.g. forcing them out of the family home) and so on. If the school cannot keep the confidence of a child in these circumstances what is the alternative? Tell $transphobicdad and let him try and beat his daughter back into being his "son"?
That is, I think, exactly what some of these people want. Oh, they'll condemn actual violence but they know full well it will happen but value the "rights" of parents to know their child belongs to a group they despise over that child's welfare.
I tend to think that if a child is afraid come out to their parents there may well be a very good reason for that, and a blanket duty to break confidence in this way has very real potential to put these children at risk.
What I think some people are hoping is that LGBT+ kids will in fact not be able to come out to anyone, so will stay in the closet, out of sight, out of mind, and not messing with their families' appearance of straight, cis, heteronormativity.
Exactly.
We're not talking about a naive group here who are assuming that parents should know because they'll be supportive and caring. We're talking about a group who want parents to know precisely because they know that some will be unsupportive and hostile.
About 75 to 80 percent of the children's home residents are gay or trans kids/teens who were either thrown out by, or ran away from, parents who abused them when they came out. (To be fair, the 75-80 percent is partly because it's the only children's home in the state that's LGBTQ+-affirming, so some of the social workers try to send all their gay kids our way when possible. We probably have a higher than average number.)
Our state foster care system is so overloaded that my social worker friend has seven teenage boys living in her office.
Under these circumstances I feel it's indefensible to out a child to their parents against the kid's wishes.
Or to put it another way, parent's rights to bring their kids up with (and according to) the same beliefs as them. I for one am quite wary of allowing the state to override that right, because once it's been established that it can do so then who is to say a future state won't decide that my beliefs are ones it will no longer tolerate?
If it were just that you'd have a point, but the issue here is of outing LGBT+ children to parents who those children know will react in harmful ways to it.
If you read some of the posts from @Antisocial Alto and @Trudy above you will see there is a very real child welfare issue there.
What happens when that right clashes with Canadian law? To take an obvious example not related to the current issue around LGBT education, what if a man tries to defend himself in a domestic violence case by claiming that his religion says it's OK to beat his wife? My understanding is that that would not be a valid defense: your right to practice your religion does not give you the right to abuse anyone else, including a member of your own family, despite whether your religion says it's OK or not.
One issue that many of the "parents' rights" people are protesting is simply their kids going to (publicly funded) school and learning that other people have different lifestyles and beliefs from what their family beliefs. Like, reading a book to kids where a child has two mommies. That's not "the state overriding your right to bring your kids up according to your beliefs" (as per @Marvin the Martian's post); it's just giving them the information that not everyone in the world follows your beliefs. Something you can discuss with them at home when they come home and tell you about the book their teacher read and ask why some families have two mommies or two daddies -- it's a great opportunity for discussing things with your kids. Frankly, anyone who's not prepared to have those kinds of conversations, and not comfortable with their kids learning about different beliefs, should not be sending their child to public school. That's part of what public education does -- exposes children to people and ideas different from what they're exposed to at home. If you can't cope with that, you should be homeschooling, or sending your child to private school that teaches only the tenets of your religion.
The other issue that's being protested under the issue of "parents' rights" is the one we've touched on already -- outing gay and trans kids to their parents. This is where a parent could definitely argue that the school is encouraging the child to violate the family's religious beliefs. If the family believes being gay or trans is a sin, and the teacher and school counsellors allow the child to openly express their LGBT identity while in school, then yes, you have a case that your "right" to have your children follow your religious beliefs is being violated by the school.
That's when we come back to the apparently unrelated example of the man who beats his wife because God says he can -- it's not unrelated at all. Conservative religious parents have a track record of abusing LGBT kids emotionally and physically, and often (if attempts to change or suppress the child's sexuality or gender identity don't produce the desired results) forcing them out of the home, leaving them homeless and vulnerable to all kinds of dangers and further abuse.
So in that case I would say, your right to practice your religion in the home does not extend so far as to trump your child's right to safety. I can't see anything in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that would put your "parental rights" above the child's rights. I don't know as much about other countries but I suspect it's the same at least in most Western democracies.
I suspect there will be an increase in people doing exactly that.
I worked across the street from one such shelter for homeless youth a number of years ago. Got to know some of the staff members. You are right, 80% of the kids had been thrown out of their homes because they had come out, and their parents could not handle it.
I saw it in my uncle's family. I think all of us cousins knew M was gay, but my aunt and uncle did not realize it until he went to college. For many years they would not talk to him, but eventually his sister and brother got the parents to reconcile with M before their deaths.
Here in the states, under the HIPPAA rules, when a child turns 14, medical personnel are not supposed to convey any confidential information to the parents without the child's permission. I think my kids started seeing their medical care providers on their own around puberty. Of course, if a medical procedure had to be performed, the providers would have to seek parental permission.
Down here, we have an ultra conservative group called Mom's for Liberty. They are far from that. They want certain books banned from public libraries. They will disrupt school board meetings. They want schools to out children. I guess they think it will give the parents the opportunity to change their kids. That is far from the case. A friend posted this meme on her Facebook page.
The response to this seems really simple to me: you absolutely have a right to practice your religion in Canada, but your freedom of religion does not include the right to discriminate against anyone else -- but I don't see our political leaders articulating that as clearly as I'd like. (Not that people would necessarily agree if it were articulated more clearly, but I think the distinction is really important to make, loudly and frequently).
I thought this CBC article does a good job of highlighting the voices not just of the "concerned" Muslim parents who protested against inclusive education, but also of LGBTQ+ Muslims who are at the intersection of this intersectionality, as it were.
You can bet that "your freedom of religion does not include the right to discriminate against anyone else" would be proclaimed considerably more loudly if this weren't an issue on which conservative Christians agree with conservative Muslims...
Conservative Hindus too from what we've seen in Manchester recently. And of course plenty of conservative atheist former feminists.
Oh, very much so.
At the recent counter-protest I attended on the day of the "one million march," one of the counter-protesters directly addressed the immigrants in the protesting crowd, saying, "You are allying yourself with white supremacists who will turn on you in a second when you're no longer useful to them." Which I think is accurate, for many in that group.
Given that the India is home to the the 10-million strong Hirja community (third-gender, neither male nor female) that is ironic, hilarious and sad on many levels.