A six-year-old Canadian girl was so traumatized by her public school’s lessons on gender that her parents have filed a complaint with their province’s human rights tribunal, reports the Montreal-based Post Millennial.
According to the complaint, filed with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario by Jason and Pamela Buffone on behalf of their daughter (referred to as “N”), until January 2018, N loved school and had no gender confusion whatsoever. Then, as part of her teacher’s lessons on gender, she was made to watch a YouTube video called He, She and They?!? — Gender: Queer Kid Stuff #2. In the video (screenshot shown), whose theme song proclaims, “Gay means happy,” children are told that “some people aren’t boys or girls” and that there are those whose don’t “feel like a ‘she’ or a ‘he’” and prefer to be called “they.”
The teacher continued to teach such lessons throughout the semester. N told her mother that the teacher said “there is no such thing as girls and boys” and “girls are not real and boys are not real.”
“By mid-March,” writes the Post Millennial, “N’s parents could see the lessons were having an impact on their daughter, as she began spontaneously and repeatedly asking them why her identity as a girl was ‘not real.’ She asked if she could ‘go to a doctor’ about the fact that she was a girl.”
The Buffones met with the teacher and discovered she was wholly supportive of the gender lessons and unconcerned about their effects on N.
A telephone call with the principal was no more productive, though the Buffones did learn that the teacher had initiated the lessons because one student in the class was experiencing some gender confusion. According to the Post Millennial, Pamela Buffone later learned that “the parents of the child did not want the issue to be addressed by lessons on gender; they merely wanted the other children to be taught to act respectfully and not to bully their child.”
Subsequent meetings with the school board and curriculum superintendent also failed to allay the Buffones’ concerns, so they enrolled N in another school, where she is happy.
Now they have filed their complaint with the human rights tribunal, alleging that the teacher, with the support of her superiors, “subjected N to ongoing discrimination on the basis of gender and gender identity, by a series of lessons that denied the existence of the female gender and biological sex and undermined the value of identifying as a female.”
They want the tribunal to order the school board to ensure that lessons do “not devalue, deny, or undermine in any way the female gender identity,” to require teachers to “inform parents when lessons on gender identity will take place or have taken place, including the teaching objectives and the materials that will be or have been used for such lessons,” and to pay the Buffones $5,000 in damages.
The school board has asked the tribunal to dismiss the complaint, arguing that “even if N was adversely affected by the teacher’s lessons, she has no grounds for redress according to the Human Rights Code,” notes the Post Millennial.
The Buffones, naturally, disagree. Pamela Buffone told the Post Millennial that a “poisoned environment,” which is what she considers N’s former class to have become as a result of the gender lessons, constitutes discrimination under the Ontario Human Rights Code.
Be that as it may, Canada’s human rights tribunals have frequently been hostile to parents’ rights; and, according to the Christian Post, the Ontario tribunal “has been taken over by the radical left.” Pamela Buffone, however, remains optimistic that her complaint will get a fair hearing, which she believes is needed since, she told the Post Millennial, “our government seems to have given teachers carte blanche in terms of how they teach this concept [of gender identity].”
Indeed, as the Everyday for Life Canada blog observes, “The government has backed legislatively, legally and politically only one side of the issue.” Doug Ford, Ontario’s Conservative premier, vowed when seeking election to scrap the gender-identity curriculum but failed to do so once in office.
“And who is paying the price for the Ford-government cowardice, and about-face?” asked Tanya Granic Allen of Toronto-based advocacy group Parents as First Educators. “The children of Ontario.”
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
