Danielle Smith unveils sweeping changes to Alberta’s student gender identity, sports and surgery policies, Michelle Bellefontaine, CBC News, 2024-01-31.
Alberta will prohibit hormonal treatment, puberty blockers and gender affirming surgery for children 15 years and younger, Premier Danielle Smith announced Wednesday in a video posted to social media.
Top and bottom gender reassignment surgeries will be banned for minors aged 17, though bottom surgery is already limited to adults.
Teens aged 16 and 17 can start hormone therapy as long as they have permission from their parents, a physician and a psychologist.
Alberta parents will need to give permission before a student aged 15 and under can use a name or pronoun at school other than what they were given at birth, Smith said.
Students who are 16 or 17 won’t require permission but schools will need to let their parents know first.
[…]
Parents will have to opt students in to every lesson about sex education, sexual orientation or gender identity.
These policies are good news for the protection of minors. However, some policy changes regarding sex education are debatable.
See also:
AFT Forum
AFT on Twitter
Amis et amies de Libres penseurs athées
Atheist Alliance International (AAI)
Humanist Perspectives
Libres penseurs athées
LPA-AFT on Heylo
LPA-AFT Youtube Channel
Rassemblement pour la laïcité (RPL)
Ask yourself: what does it feel like to be a woman? What does it feel like to be a man?
If your response includes a desire to wear dresses or go hunting, then you are referencing gender and not sex.
The “transgendered” movement is another example of emotions over science, hysteria over rationality. It is analogous to the conflation of race and religion – not to mention another propagandistic abuse of language. Sex is a biologically determined state. Gender is a social construction. My body has x and y chromosomes – not even gene crisper technology can change that. That makes my sex male. I identify as the gender called “male”. In my youth I had fabulous legs. I would love to have worn one of the short skirts that were then in style to show off my legs but I never had the courage. Wearing a skirt would not have altered my sex in any way, neither would wearing make-up or nail polish. Those are socially constructructed signifiers of gender.
The majority of people suffering from gender dysphoria also have other co-morbidities such as autism or opositional defiant disorder. The medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex has monitised the exploitation of a form of mental illness. There are huge profits being made from hormone replacements, surgeries, and “therapy”. There is a large international organisation of people who call themselves health care practitioners (their definition is pretty loose) who attend conferences and provide each other with references etc.
If left alone, most gender dysphoric youth will grow out of their unease of their gender (a social construction after all) and can even be helped to learn to love and accept themselves. My mom was a woman but wanted to be like Jo in Little Women because Jo was advernturous and alowed herself to to be free to do whatever she wanted to – to be unchained from the social constaints traditionally applied to females. In our society she would be receiving gender reassignment surgery.
I grew up hating the model of manhood presented to me: violent team sports, hunting and killing animals, objectifying and bullying women, disavowing any appreciation of Art and beauty etc., but I am still a male by sex. Much as I would like to, I do not possess a womb, a cervix, or ovaries. No artificial, surgically created labia are going to change that. I will never ovulate. I am a male by sex who loves the feel of silk and the flowers in my garden. I still hate boxing.
Somehow, we must redirect the conversation to a rational place where we acknowledge the diference between sex and gender, and learn to love ourselves even if we reject the social norms applied to our sex in the form of ever more restrictive pre-determined gender roles. We are the new Victorians.