Education Unions are Focused on Activism

Pursuit of the truth is totally absent from their discourses

On May 17 (International day against homophobia, biphobia and transphobia), Lester B. Pearson High School’s student council celebrated inclusivity with a lunch carnival.

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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator).

It’s “pride month”. Scrolling through my Facebook feed yesterday, I saw a post from the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, my union, about an event that a number of executive members had attended. Not surprising. They never miss a chance to promote gender activists and shower them with praise. But then I noticed something interesting: The commenting had been turned off.

If you asked them why they did that, they would no doubt have responded that they did not want to platform homo/trans/whatever other group is in the coalition these days phobia, and, to be fair, it is true that most of the comments on their “pride” related posts this month have been negative, and some of those negative comments were pretty much expressions of hatred. So, in the interest of “protecting” gay, lesbian, trans etc. members from “harm” it does make some sense to turn off the comments. But in doing so, they have also blocked rational debate.

My gay friends don’t attend pride events. They are in fact embarrassed to be associated with the fringe whackos you see publicly exposing themselves and engaging in their fetishes in front of young kids. Any straight person who did any of that would be arrested, and rightly so. Most of the attendees are straight white people, many with their kids in tow, who are desperate to signal their allyship. You’ll find the same crowd at climate change events, “anti racism” rallies, and Indigenous demonstrations about the “missing children”.

I follow some people on YouTube who attend these events and ask attendees basic questions, like “do you think affirmative care is a proven approach to ameliorate mental health among gender dysphoric youth” or “do you think it is factually established that pursuing net zero carbon emissions will improve the quality of life for most people” or “what is the evidence to support the theory of systemic racism” or ”can you name even one kid who was sent off to an Indian Residential School and disappeared”?. The responses they get may be amusing but they are also very depressing. People feel absolutely no obligation to educate themselves about an issue before jumping on the bandwagon to support activists and many will simply tell you to take your questions to the leaders of the event. It just feels good to be “on the right side of history” I guess. Go Greta!

Clearly, a lot of people are ready to side with activists on controversial, complex, and nuanced subjects without much knowledge and no interest whatsoever in an academic approach, i.e. rational debate based on facts and evidence, but you would think, or at least hope, that a union made up of education workers (about half of the OSSTF members are high school teachers and the rest are various groups of support workers like psychologists, office assistants, and custodial staff) would be a bullwork against ideological approaches and emotional rather than logical arguments, but sadly, you would be mistaken.

When the OSSTF provincial assembly approved the creation of an LGBT etc. working group a few years back, at an annual cost to members in the six figures, a friend of mine privately asked the person proposing it whether the group would be a forum for diverse perspectives or if it would be seeking a consensus from which to plan activism. She looked at him like he had two heads and gave a short, incoherent response.

That makes sense, because from the activist point of view, there isn’t any debate to be had. They are operating with a foregone conclusion. If a kid says they’re trans, they are, full stop. Go directly to social transition, puberty suppression, cross sex hormones, and surgeries. To do so is to “affirm who they are”, not to do so is “transphobia”. It is the same with any of the issues activists are promoting. But teachers, in their professional lives at least, are academics, not activists, or at least that is how it should be. Topics like transgenderism, climate change, race-based learning gaps, and the Indian Residential Schools should be discussed rationally, dispassionately, and factually. We should follow the evidence to a conclusion, regardless of where that may lead. But you will find the OSSTF and other education unions are fully captured by activists and they are not interested at all in any of that.

At school, teachers are encouraged and rewarded for their activism. It is in fact a requirement for promotion to administration. That is because school boards don’t give a hoot about academic pursuits either. Neither does the Ontario College of Teachers or the Ministry of Education, and I hear it is even worse in the postsecondary system.

This is a very serious problem. Universities are not just ivory towers where snobby intellectuals sip tea and engage in esoteric discussions. They are the places where our professionals are trained: Doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc. Do you really want a doctor who is guided by emotion rather than reason, who does not believe in the concept of objective truth?

It will truly be a monumental task to turn this ship around, but the unions may seem to be a good place to start. They are democratic institutions ultimately under the control of their members. But here’s the thing: If you say anything contrary to the prescribed doctrines the activists have established at a union meeting, they will report you to your employer or the Ontario College of Teachers, and the union will not defend your right to challenge institutionally entrenched doctrines by asking for evidence, at least not if someone claims you doing so is causing “harm”. The unions actually employ officers specifically to root out people who ask questions.

That’s why most teachers, who don’t agree with all this lunacy, don’t want anything to do with the union. They just pay their mandatory dues of about $2000 per year and keep their heads down. It falls to our elected leaders to step in and restore the academic nature of the ministry of education, school boards, and the Ontario College of Teachers. The unions, as always, would follow. But governments are afraid of the activists too. They are well organized, and elections often turn on a few percentage points.

Meanwhile polls show that tolerance and acceptance of gay people have been declining. That is really shocking when you think about it. This kind of reversal is really unprecedented. But I’d say it’s pretty clear why this is happening: In their zeal to advance gender ideology, the gender activists have run roughshod over women’s and children’s rights and people are fed up with it.

Even though most gay people don’t support affirmative care, want a more nuanced approach, and don’t want men who identify as women in women’ s private spaces like prisons or rape crisis centers, they have become collateral damage in the culture wars as the T was grafted to the LGB.

Even trans people themselves are divided when it comes to gender dysphoric youth. Check out this podcast hosted by trans man Buck Angle.

There is a very strong consensus among Canadians that drugging up kids and cutting off their healthy body parts is wrong, but you’d never know that attending union meetings or by reading any of their social media posts. You just hear about kids and their parents “celebrating who they really are”.

Far from supporting teachers to present a nuanced and balanced picture of the contentious issues of our time and teaching kids how to have difficult conversations, the unions, like the school boards, are demanding adherence to a series of prescribed doctrines. Shame on them.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Ontario Teacher Training to be Cut to One Year from Two

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