Alberta Education Minister David Eggen dropped the D-word a couple of times Wednesday — that’s D as in dissolution of school boards.

Eggen wasn’t threatening, exactly, but he did say that word in the fraught context of new government guidelines for respecting the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender kids in schools.

There’s bound to be turmoil over this, especially in smaller boards where some officials and trustees still believe there couldn’t possibly be a gay student within a 50-kilometre radius.

These rules are the furthest extension yet of Alberta’s very fast-moving, and long-overdue, gender rights movement. They reach into areas that weren’t touched by the historic uproar over Bill 10, which passed last March. 

That debate was almost entirely about whether students had the right to form gay-straight alliances for mutual support. It was a limited and reasonable goal — and still, the emotional fallout almost turned the province on its head.

Since then, the Alberta Bill of Rights and Alberta Human Rights Act have been amended to include not just a person’s sexual orientation, but also gender identity and gender expression.

The NDP’s impulse in pushing this is entirely admirable. There is a deep sensitivity here to the hell that gay and transgender kids go through, their intense anguish over bullying, the existential loneliness of feeling there’s never anywhere to belong.

Six other provinces and one territory already have those gender identity provisions, so it’s nothing new. Now the NDP is saying how these rights will work. The result is as activist as you’d expect.

Transgender and gay kids will have to be accommodated in the school washrooms and change rooms, on the sports teams, and in the general fabric of school life.

“If sports teams are divided by gender,” the guidelines say, “students are given the opportunity to participate on the team that reflects their gender identity and expression … Students are able to access washrooms that are congruent with their gender identity.”

The guidelines grapple mightily with the washroom problem. The edu-speak around this is sometimes comical, but anybody who keeps laughing should remember that there was a day when the legislature itself only had a couple of washrooms for women.

The solution was pretty simple — more washrooms. It’s the same here.

The guidelines call for schools to “provide a non-gendered, single-stall washroom for use by any student who desires increased privacy regardless of the reason (medical, religious, cultural, gender identity, gender expression, etc.).”

When a school doesn’t have such a washroom, according to Eggen, a boy who self-identifies as female should be able to use the girls’ washroom.

In sports and phys-ed, the guidelines call for “all students to have access to change-room facilities that meet their individual privacy concerns.” This could include “a private area within a change-room (a stall with a door, or a curtained area) or a nearby washroom.”

As for what students wear, the effort to accommodate gender expression could lead to further loosening of standards that have been relaxed for decades.

“A flexible and gender-inclusive dress code recognizes that all students and staff have the right to dress in a manner consistent with their gender identity and gender expression,” say the guidelines.

Rules should “apply equally and fairly to all students and are not gender-exclusive, such as implying that a certain type of clothing, such as skirts, will be worn by one gender only.”

Eggen is quite careful to say that these are guidelines, not orders, intended to help school boards craft their own policies by the March 31 deadline.

Boards are expected to comply voluntarily. And many already are, especially in the cities.

But there is that D-word thing. A school board that becomes dysfunctional or refuses to comply with provincial policy can be disbanded and directly run by a provincial appointee. It’s been done before.

Would the New Democrats level a local board over denial of rights for students who say they are, in the lexicon of these rules, “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, two-spirit, queer, questioning and/or gender diverse?”

You bet they would.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald

dbraid@calgaryherald.com
Calgary Herald