School Board’s Refusal to Fly Pride Flags Represents a Rejection of Gender Ideology, Not Gay and Transgender People

Comment from a Canadian educator

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

By Igor Stravinsky: Teacher/Education Commentator

Media reports over the decision by the Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board cast it as homo/transphobic and fail to acknowledge that the flag now carries ideological baggage.

Most people still see the pride flag, in whatever version (there are now many), as a symbol of gay rights- rights which the vast majority of Canadians support and are guaranteed under the Canadian constitution and human rights codes. So it is not surprising that the decision by the BHNCDSB not to fly Pride flags this month, which is “Pride Month” has been met with a firestorm of criticism accusing the board of homo/transphobia along with predictable calls for the defunding of Catholic Schools. 

There are many reasons why a government might consider defunding the Catholic School system in favour of a single public system, but the refusal to fly these flags is surely not a valid one. Indeed, there is a good argument that no public school should be flying these flags. That’s because the pride flag now represents far more than the demand for acceptance and equal rights by gay and trans people. If that were all it signified, there would be no issue at all. The fact is that gay and trans people already have those rights. 

But the meaning of the flag, along with its appearance, have undergone a kind of metamorphosis. It has metastasized into the symbol of a new age belief system. As such, it stands in opposition to the views of the Catholic Church and for that matter most Canadians.

Ever more complex Pride flags now include just about every possible identity. As such, the flag represents identity politics itself.  

You need not be a Catholic to appreciate the suppression of the right to hold religious views this represents. Indeed, we are starting to see other faith groups, as well as secular organizations, stand in opposition to the forced entrenchment of this postmodern ideology taking place in our institutions, the schools being of most urgent concern since children are among our most vulnerable when it comes to ideological indoctrination. 

So what is the ideology behind the activists pushing these expanded pride flags? First it is clear that the ever more complex flags we are seeing represent the entrenchment of Critical Theory- the belief that our society is a kind of caste system made up of a hierarchy of identity based groups. Your intersectional identity supposedly dictates your place in this dystopian country we are said to inhabit. We are told it is our duty to break this oppressive system down! But don’t ask for actual empirical evidence that this hierarchy exists (do believe any anecdotal evidence, though) and don’t ask too many questions about what the system that is going to replace the current one will look like.

Trans activists claim their place at the zenith of the oppression hierarchy (most oppressed) and thus portray any opposition to their gender ideology- a belief system holds that a person's gender is some kind of ethereal essence, akin to a soul, which is untethered to the biological sex of a person’s body- as transphobia. Their goal is to win maximum public acceptance of this belief system. The key to entrenching any ideology is of course the indoctrinaiton of youth. Thus the battle rages in our schools. Youth, who are confused in general as they are learning about the ever more complex world in which they find themselves, are exceptionally vulnerable. The gender activists know that, which is why they try to keep potentially recalcitrant parents in the dark as long as possible.

Since this “sexed soul” concept is a rather hard sell among rationally minded people, activists have another front on their attack which is to deny the biological sex binary even exists. These denials usually come from social scientists rather than biologists but are nevertheless often effective in conflating biological sex with gender identity (a person’s internal feeling as to the sex to which they belong) among the general public, most of whom are not well versed when it comes to reproductive biology. 

Given all the above, you can see why people generally, and devoutly religious people especially, would object to the indoctrination into gender ideology taking place in Ontario schools. For the gender ideology activists, it is convenient to point to the many truly homo and transphobic people out there and then paint all opposed to gender ideology with one brush, but that does not change the fact that there are plenty of people who accept and support the rights of gay and trans people yet do not accept gender ideology. Many such people are in fact gay or trans themselves!

In a free and democratic society, no schools should be indoctrinating kids into any kind of ideology. Students should be taught what we currently understand to be scientific fact, along with the understanding that what is believed to be true today may be proved false tomorrow. Knowledge is not socially constructed, as the Critical Theory proponents would have you believe, but rather acquired by making observations, formulating hypotheses, and then testing those hypotheses through carefully controlled experiments. 

The idea that sex is anything other than the body’s intended reproductive strategy has no scientific validity at all. Of course gender identity, on the other hand, is a personal matter. But it should be pointed out that without a clear definition of biological sex, it would be impossible to associate behaviours, attitudes, feelings, etc. as male or female. Thus gender identity rests on the sex binary (which holds notwithstanding the tiny number of intersex people). This is an example of the kind of nuance kids need to be able to understand before making permanent and life-altering decisions like drug regimens and surgeries. 

Gender ideology has gained a great deal of traction in the Western world. It has captured many of our institutions. Given the egregious history of oppression gay and trans people have faced, the lure to want to be “on the right side of history” and accept the ideology is understandable. But anyone who ever embraced any ideology always believed that they were right, and looking back at the 20th century we see the human misery in the wake of many fervently held ideologies, all of which employed the strategy of state indoctrination of youth. 

Thus, while it is appropriate that students should learn about Critical Theory and gender ideology in school when they are old enough to understand them, it is equally important that they not be indoctrinated into these belief systems. 

Sadly, the pride flag, which once simply represented a basic call for acceptance and human dignity for gay people, has been appropriated by gender ideologues who would tell young kids that they may have been “born in the wrong body”. People who, in the interest of promoting their personal ideology, are ready to shepherd our youth down an irreversible path of drugs and surgeries based on nothing more than the coerced say-so of kids as young as 4 years old. Decades of studies, as related in the excellent BBC video Transgender Kids, exist to show that most gender dysphoria-suffering kids eventually grow to accept their bodies and go on to be relatively well adjusted adults. 

Many parents are realizing that kids are being indoctrinated into gender ideology in schools, and they know that is wrong. By saying no to the pride flag, the BHNCDSB is not saying no to gay and trans rights, it is saying no to the indoctrination of kids into an un-Christian ideology. But the fact is no Canadian kid should be subjected to such an indoctrination.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Equal Treatment will Never Placate Critical Theory Activists

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