A Canadian couple has filed suit against their local school board after learning of a gender studies classroom lesson. The couple is suing the school district for traumatizing their six year-old. It all started with a teacher’s lesson and a statement-“there’s no such thing as boys and girls”.

Teacher, Janine Blouin, incorporated a video from YouTube Channel, Queer Kids’ Stuff as part of her lesson:

In the video, the host (who identifies as a “she”), states that there are “boys, girls and the rest are people“. Last time I checked, aren’t we all people? Side note, parents of young elementary schoolers, Queer Kids’ Stuff is available on TeachersPayTeachers, a very popular website lots of teachers use in planning their daily curriculum.

Blouin continued her gender identity lessons throughout the semester in January 2018. One of these lessons included a white board session where students indicated where they fell on the gender spectrum. A student, referred to as “NB”, marked herself on the furthest end of the spectrum as a girl. Ms. Blouin then stated to the class that “boys are not real and girls are not real”. This, according to NB’s parents, Jason and Pamela Buffone, who have since transferred their daughter to another school:

At the age of 6, she was just figuring out that animals are divided into boys and girls; when she met a new dog on the street, for example, she would ask ‘is it a boy or a girl?’ So she was very confused by what her teacher was saying and was struggling to understand what it meant for her as a girl.”-Pamela Buffone

Which begs the question, should gender studies be taught to children at such a young age? Are children this age able to understand these concepts without becoming confused? Should parents be allowed to opt their children out of these lessons? It all depends upon the school district and the school one’s child is enrolled at, in some cases.

“So women’s rights are being redefined away from female rights to the rights of people who identify as a stereotype. It’s a terrible message to be sending to girls or anyone, because it undermines the value and dignity we have as humans by separating what it means to be human from our biological reality.”-Pamela Buffone

According to the court documents, Ms. Blouin’s curriculum was designed to accommodate a student in the classroom who expressed an interest being other than her biological gender. In the interest of accommodating this one child, she saw it fit to diminish the feelings of another.

We live in a world where we as adults have to tiptoe around an Autistic child who likes to scream “how dare you” to adults who apparently ruined her life as a normal 16 year-old girl who should be in school. Heaven forbid we say something disparaging about this child. We have to ask people what their “pronoun” is and if they identify as “singular they”, we have to alter our language patterns to reflect this. We have parents allowing their children to change their names and genders and then threatening legal action at schools when their records do not reflect the name changes and gender changes. School districts are bending over backwards to accommodate these individuals in the names of diversity and inclusion. Their preference to be non-binary is honored while a girl like NB, who is decidedly female, is meant to feel as if she is wrong for feeling this way. In the name of human rights, human rights, according to some teachers, are only human if they identify as someone, something other than the male or female binary. After all, there are boys. There are girls. Then, the rest are people. Personhood is no longer allowed to have a binary according to some in our education systems. These are the same people telling our kids they’re “going to college” all while revising the English language, re-writing history and ignoring basic biological facts.

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