The Rise of Queer Marxism in Canada

From Anti-Oppressive Education to Affirmative Education

Jornal da USP

By

James Pew

“...education has been stolen right out from under us and from our children. This theft of education has a purpose; it enables a counterfeit to replace it. The mechanism and description of this gigantic educational ripoff can be summarized in a single sentence: Our kids go to Paulo Freire’s schools”¹ 

In January of this year Canadians learned of a new federally-funded initiative aimed at indoctrinating teachers into the tenets of gender affirming care, called The Trans Affirming Tool-Kit. From journalist, Jamie Sarkonak:

“Schools are a provincial matter, but that doesn’t mean the federal government won’t stick its fingers in where it can to drive a social agenda in the classroom. The latest instance? A new, federally-funded, ‘Trans-Affirming Toolkit’ for teachers loaded with poor scholarship and ideological preaching.”

Here is the Trans-Affirming Toolkit.

A new Lighthouse Think Tank series, published in these pages, aims to examine more closely the “poor scholarship and ideological preaching,” of the Trans-Affirming Tool Kit and other programs of Critical Social Justice educators (aka Cultural Marxists), such as the recently retracted controversial antiracism document Facilitating Critical Conversations produced by the TDSB - see Letter to Member of Provincial Parliament  for more information.

This is not the first time we have discussed the Trans-affirming Tool Kit, and it is unlikely to be the last. A week ago I published The Radical Canadians who made Education "Critical"  which includes an additional video analysis from Melanie Bennet of the Canadian Gender Wars Report. Both Melanie and I offer examinations of the influence of Canadian critical pedagogue, Peter McLaren, who is one of three Canadian pedagogues most responsible for transforming Canadian schools into “Paulo Freire’s schools.” Melanie’s analysis of McLaren illustrates the influence his scholarship had on the development of modern abominations, such as the Trans-Affirming Tool Kit. 

A new video analysis from Melanie, on today’s topic of Queer Marxism, can be found at the bottom of this post.

Anti-Oppressive Education to Affirmative Education

“Anti-oppressive education (Marxism) merged with Queer Theory and now we have affirmative education via the Trans Affirming Toolkit.” - Melanie Bennet

Let’s consider first, how do you create an anti-oppressive learning environment? The University of British Columbia tells us it’s not easy, however, it is a “commitment that faculty across disciplines at UBC are seeking to fulfill by adopting strategies of anti-oppression and anti-racism.” UBC administration realizes that instructors are “active participants in creating classroom climate,” which means not only are they responsible for sniffing out any oppressive “microaggressions” committed by their students, but they themselves can be “guilty of perpetuating” them.²

Dr. David Gaertner’s approach involves creating “spaces that decenter white students and that create opportunities for students of colour and Indigenous students.” He feels that UBC has “relations in the classroom that we have to be respectful of.” To illustrate this he cites Robin Di Angelo and Özlem Sensoy’s essay Calling In: Strategies for Cultivating Humility and Critical Thinking in Antiracism Education, where the authors explain the importance of denying “equal time to all narratives in [their] classrooms…(by) turning down the volume” on students who are “closest to the dominant norm.” This way, they reason,  “instructors are better able to support the learning objectives of all students in the room.”³ However, it is not explained how it is a benefit to white students who are deliberately “decentered” and diminished.

In June of 2023, the Peel District School Board (PDSB) published their “Four-year Equity Strategy and Action Plan.” In that document the PDSB administrators express their “commitment to equity, antiracism, anti-oppression, and anti-colonialism” and explain that it “is woven throughout all the work that we do.”⁴ And furthermore, that “equity, anti-racism, anti-oppression and decolonizing practices are foundational to all aspects of the work happening across the system in PDSB.”⁵

Just so we know that they are really serious about equity, the plan then informs us that “all schools must have a School Improvement and Equity Plan (SIEP), that is designed to ensure focused efforts on the part of school leaders and staff to ensure equitable outcomes for students historically underserved.” Woke Watch Canada contributor, and Canadian educator, Igor Stravinsky, has written in these pages many times about the pressure on teachers to ensure equitable outcomes. Oftentimes this simply amounts to passing an “equity deserving” student when they deserve to fail, or waving away punishable behaviours when an “equity deserver,” deserves to be suspended. The class environment becomes less oppressive for the worst-behaving, most violent, and for students who under-achieve academically, essentially creating far more oppressive conditions for non-violent students who are serious about academics. 

The next sentence of the report is activist code letting teachers know they will be fired if they don’t do whatever it takes to engineer “equitable outcomes.” It reads, “SIEPs support schools to engage in corrective actions to address disproportionate outcomes, by identifying and removing barriers necessary for the development of inclusive schools and classrooms.”⁶ 

In Melanie’s latest deep dive video analysis of the cultural Marxism manifesting in Canadian education, she examines the term “equity,” and uncovers what it really is: communism. 

When it comes to anti-oppressive education, it is “designed to inject Marxism throughout the entire educational experience.”⁷ Whereas equity is a code for communism, anti-oppressive is code for Marxism.

Most readers understand that Marxism involves the bourgeois and the proletariat, the owners of the means of production and the working class who are exploited for their labour by the capitalist owners. However, Marxism can be considered as a way of viewing the world. From an academic perspective, it is a mode of analysis, a method for examining society. According to critics, like American scholar James Lindsay, because of its working assumptions about the nature of man and society, Marxism more closely resembles a theology than a philosophy (as it is commonly described). And because of the emphasis on capitalism, Marxism is often misunderstood as simply an economic theory. 

Marxism can be considered the praxis of communism (equity). That is, the ideology guiding  society's radical transformation to an equitable communism. In the modern form, neo-Marxism, or Cultural Marxism, a process of proletarianization of identities from minority race, sex and gender categories, occurs at the margins of society. The radicals know they only need a small percentage of conscientized activists in order to exert political power, which of course is necessary when one is engaged in revolution, so they sift through the distant fringe looking to foment disaffection among visible minorities and other sex and gender identities found at the furthest extremes of the demographic distribution curve. The historically marginalized: visible minorities, lesbian, gay, trans, and “queer folx.”

This explains the politicization of sexual degenerates (Queer Marxism) in the name of queer liberation. The Queer Marxists have even theorized a new and improved (according to them) pedophile identity they call MAPs: Minor Attracted Person. 

Years of theorizing the various ways in which marginal identity categories are oppressed culminated into the intersectional framework. This is where the postmodernism of Queer Theory meets the neo-Marxism of Critical Theory, giving us “Queer Marxism.”

When we survey the Critical Social Justice literature of the Cultural Marxists we see that even though the emphasis has shifted away from the economic liberation of the working class to the cultural liberation of marginal identities, the overthrow of capitalism is still very much the end goal of the radical revolutionaries.

As Melanie explains, capitalism can be viewed as private property ownership. According to Marxists, to abolish capitalism is to abolish private property. However, in the cultural Marxist sense, property expands to include cultural property in the form of normative privilege. The cultural capital in which the Marxist’s wish to abolish is the privilege they attach to the dominant ethnic (whiteness), and to normative structures that pervade the majority, like the nuclear family and the gender binary - which they view as structures that reproduce capitalism. When these things are abolished, and the means of cultural production seized, the culture the activists plan to produce will be Marxist and Queer (oppositional to normativity and majority ethnicity). It will be communism with equitable outcomes and no private property. You will own nothing, and be happy.

The far left aim to control the dominant mode of cultural re-production, so that they can produce the culture that they want (too bad for traditional people). The steps required to get there are many. However, incremental stages can be identified through the initiatives, programs and literature of the activists. In the Trans-Affirming Tool Kit, we see an emphasis on affirmative education, which is positioned as a sort of successor stage to inclusion (See below). 

A few quick examples of the activist jargon employed in the Trans-Affirming Tool Kit (bolding of key terms is mine) : 

“The term inclusive is commonly used to describe the school climate that we strive to create. However, a commitment to inclusion often translates into celebrating and representing diversity without necessarily addressing the root causes of systemic oppression and specifically trans marginalization. It often means that cisnormativity, cisgenderism, cissexism and transphobia go unchallenged.

An affirming as opposed to an inclusive approach is about dismantling the cissexist notion that the cisgender experience is the ‘normal’ way of being and that anyone who isn’t cisgender wishes to fit in or pass as cisgender. It is about creating environments where certain identities are not seen as the norm or standard against which all others are compared. Such environments lead to othering, which results in trans students being seen as exceptional; an affirming approach sees all gender identities as equally valid. It supports an ethic of self-determination and acknowledges every person’s capacity and responsibility to examine and be curious about their gender identity - to articulate their own understanding of their identity and to choose the language to self-identify in the way that is most meaningful to them.”

It’s worth pointing out that the terms “dismantling” or “disrupting,” always refer to Marxist praxis. What they are dismantling are the structures that produce capitalism (with its inexorably attached hegemonic culture). Another configuration of this activist language, used by Melanie: normal must be disrupted to create equity.

Also from the Trans-Affirming Tool Kit:

“The way that gender identity is conceptualized is still very whitewashed, meaning that the definitions that are taken up as true and right in schools privilege colonial, linear understandings of gender that reflect a Eurocentric conceptualization. Look to activists and community-led initiatives to learn about how communities are decolonizing and challenging normative understandings of gender identity and claiming language for their own.”

They are not shy about instructing teachers to “look to activists,” who are usually the ones also coordinating the “community-led initiatives,” in most cases, in order to “decolonize normative understandings.” Unfortunately, there are reams of these types of documents in Canadian education which employ radical leftist lingo to describe activist programs aimed at transforming society through Marxist revolution. 

Radical school educators and administrators have been formalizing and enacting the Marxist program for years. It's not just that they are dividing kids by race, or pushing age-inappropriate sexual topics, or teaching unscientific gender ideology - although they are doing those things - it is that by doing so they are seizing the means of cultural production and intend to utterly transform everything by abolishing whiteness (the cultural heritage attached to the white majority), sexual normativity, the gender binary, and the nuclear family. 

Only then, after the most precious things in the world have been thoroughly destroyed, will the insane and degenerate cultural Marxists begin to turn on each other, and ultimately destroy themselves. Let us stop them long before it goes that far. Shall we?

As promised here his Melanie Bennet’s latest video analysis, Queer Marxism in School Part 1:

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The cruel hand of a patriot

BREAKING NEWS:

1. A new long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

2. James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

There are now two ways to support Woke Watch Canada through donations:

1) By subscribing to the paid version of the Woke Watch Canada Newsletter for - $7 Cdn/month or $70 Cdn/year

2) By making a contribution to the Investigating Wokeism In Canada Initiative, which raises the funds necessary to maintain and expand Woke Watch Canada’s research and investigation into Dysfunctional Canadian School Boards, Education, Indigenous Issues, Free Speech, and other areas of Illiberal Subversion and the Canadian Culture Wars.

1. The Marxification of Education by James Lindsay

2. https://intheclass.arts.ubc.ca/renewed-project/discussion-topics-prompts/discussion-prompts-anti-oppressive-learning-environments/

3. https://intheclass.arts.ubc.ca/renewed-project/discussion-topics-prompts/discussion-prompts-anti-oppressive-learning-environments/

4. Directive 14 - Comprehensive Four-Year Equity Strategy and Action Plan (pg 4)

5. Directive 14 - Comprehensive Four-Year Equity Strategy and Action Plan (pg 5)

6. Directive 14 - Comprehensive Four-Year Equity Strategy and Action Plan(Pg - 4)

7. The Trans Affirming Toolkit is Queer Marxism: Part 1, Why Parents Rights aren't a thing (youtube.com)