Wokism Is Alive And Well In Alberta Schools

As demonstrated by a mandatory "2SLGBTQ+ Inclusive Education" workshop for public school teachers in Medicine Hat, AB.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know I regularly post about what’s going on in Canadian schools with respect to “social justice” activism. I am referring here to the kind of activism that focuses obsessively on “identity traits” like race, sexuality and gender, and eagerly discards time-honoured principles such as colourblindness, free expression, equality, and merit, as these pillars for a free society are rather inconvenient to ideologues who wish — idiotically, and I can’t stress that enough — to bring about a cultural revolution in the West.

Parents and teachers sometimes reach out to me with something they want me to expose, but I usually just do my own digging online, where examples of indoctrination in local school boards abound.

You see, while there is a significant portion of teachers who have come to the realization that something is “off” in our schools nowadays — in that the focus has clearly shifted from academics to activism, and they aren’t on board with it — many aren’t disturbed by the biased politics at all. They might actually think it’s all wonderfully progressive. And when teachers become convinced that indoctrinating the youth to become activists for their cause is a vital part of their work, you can bet your bottom dollar many of them will take to social media to show the world they are doing a really good job of it.

Here’s an example from an elementary school in Whitby, Ontario, this June. The teacher in question had taken to Twitter to announce that she had organized a “pride party” at lunch that day, where she had elementary students colouring printouts with affirmations such as “my body is the gender and sex I say it is” and “I can change exactly how I am referred to by the people in my life and this can change at any time and for any reason.”

…What do you think, parents?

I taught at a high school in Barrie (near Toronto) for a few years, and I currently live in Ottawa, so most of my posts highlight the woke activism taking place in schools in Ontario. When I’ve come across examples of indoctrination in other provinces, the culprits have usually been British-Columbia, Nova Scotia or New-Brunswick.

I haven’t personally paid close attention to what was going on in Alberta public schools, and for a while I just hoped no news was good news, at least relatively speaking. I imagined Canada’s most conservative province might have some amount of success keeping the ever-imposing forces of woke ideology at bay.

As it turns out, that would be the same kind of wishful thinking I see in parents who think they can protect their child from the brainwashing by switching them from public to catholic school.

You will see what I mean a bit further down.

Albertans are lucky in that Premier Danielle Smith, at the very least, is not ignorant. Back in 2019, she wrote an article in the Calgary Herald titled “Indoctrination in Alberta’s classrooms must stop.” The article shows images of a grade 10 Social Studies unit test which she said is “chock-a-block full of Marxist themes and anti-oilsands rhetoric.” She suggested these kind of teachers should be fired, and rightfully so.

Then again, she has been the Premier of the province since October 2022, and she has yet to address indoctrination in Alberta schools in any meaningful way.

I connected with an exasperated teacher in Medicine Hat a couple months back, and her story was essentially indistinguishable from that of a typical Ontario teacher who has resisted the pull to becoming radicalized over the last 6-7 years or so. She explained that she has had “a lonely few years,” and that she is “unable to live as [she has] been any longer in the chaos of wokeness.” Like the others I’ve spoken to, the job she used to enjoy is now a soul-crushing nightmare.

I remember the feeling so well. Showing up to professional development (PD) sessions — back in 2021 — looking around, listening, the whole time desperately wondering whether any of my colleagues were seeing what I was seeing.

The pressure to conform is no joke. One slight misstep and your reputation at work is done, you know it. You will be ostracized and you could very well lose your livelihood, too. You want to speak up so badly, but how? What will you say, and when? How will you feed your children?

Premier Smith recently wrote a mandate letter to Alberta’s new Minister of Education, Hon. Demetrios Nicolaides. Issued on July 25th, the letter speaks of promoting school choice and parental input in “school policies and learning options,” improving supports for children with autism or severe mental illness, and “promoting career pathways,” but there is no mention at all about ensuring teachers are providing quality education rather than brainwashing kids.

Further, there is nothing there to suggest that the Minister of Education should ensure staff PD sessions focus on academics, not ideology, or that he should consider putting an end to “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” initiatives, given that they are increasingly known to create a toxic school environment for both students and staff. That would be a start, no?

Getting to the point here, a few days ago the Alberta teacher I mentioned above sent me the material from a “2SLGBTQ+ Inclusive Education” workshop that all staff at the Medicine Hat Public School Division - including EAs, admin and clerical staff - were forced to attend this spring (see “mandatory” in the subject line of the email below).

As seen in the email, teachers were told to fill out the following questionnaire before the session. Apparently this was to “help [them] get the most out of the day.” Among other questions, they were asked whether they knew what the terms “two-spirit,” “transgender,” “asexual,” “cisgender,” and “gender non-binary” meant, and whether they would “be comfortable explaining [each one] to a student.”

The email also suggests staff members show up to the “event” in their board-provided “Pride apparel.” What better than a tax-payer funded “pride” hoodie and sweatshirt to single out those pesky dissident teachers who don’t see the need to categorize others based on their “gender identity” and/or sexuality at all, and would like to keep their conscience somewhat intact?

A man by the name of Alexandra “Alex” Marshall, who identifies as a woman, ran the session. Serving as the “Education Coordinator” at the Fyrefly Institute for Gender and Sexual Diversity (University of Alberta), he is listed as the contact for people located outside of Edmonton or Calgary who are interested in a workshop.

According to the Fyrefly’s annual reports, the organization has been providing student workshops for years. The 2014/2015 report claims they provided 144 school workshops that year in Edmonton and Calgary alone. In their most recent report, for the 2021/2022 school year, they write that they have “expanded [their] reach beyond Alberta and across Canada” and now offer professional development workshops for teachers in Ontario, too.

I am not going to show every slide from the all-day session in this article: the full slideshow is a whopping 193 pages long. Instead, I will give a quick rundown of the workshop, highlighting slides here and there, and I will put a link to the entire document at the bottom of this article for anyone who wants to see it in full.

After an introduction by Alex and a customary land acknowledgement, the session guidelines (which treat staff like toddlers) and the day’s learning objectives are presented:

Attempting to make this workshop seem relevant, I imagine, Alex shares statistics from online surveys to demonstrate the prevalence of “2SLGBTQ+ youth,” followed by a picture of a sign that says “Open up the closet door. Don’t assume your kids are straight.”

I wonder if the Fyrefly representative mentioned that the “at least 13% of Canadians are LGBT+” statistic from the Jasmin Roy Foundation comes from a 15 minute online survey completed by 800 “heterosexual cisgender individuals” and “1897 LGBT people,” including 15- to 17-year-old “followers of LGBT organizations” recruited via targeted ads on Facebook.

Staff members are then told that “LGBTQ youth face 14x risk of suicide & substance abuse” (see above). Apparently this figure is from the “CMHO,” which should say “CMHA” — the Canadian Mental Health Association — and Alex and/or the Fyrefly Institute is unable to provide a date for the reference.

Upon further investigation, the CMHA’s “14x” statistic cites a 1989 paper titled “Gay male and lesbian youth suicide,” and it turns out the article says no such thing. What the 34-year-old article says, right in the introduction, is that “gay youth are 2 to 3 times more likely to attempt suicide than other young people.”

Perhaps it’s time the Fyrefly staff revise their website’s claim that “all of [their] programs are evidence-informed and research-based.”

The next statistic says “more than 60% of LGBTQ+ students, or those with LGBTQ+ parents, surveyed felt unsafe at school.” That is not accurate, either. The citation on the slide links to an Egale report, and what it actually says in that document is that “when all reasons for feeling unsafe are considered, 60% of students with one or more 2SLGBTQ parents reported feeling unsafe at school.” There is no finding that “60% of LGBTQ+ students” feel unsafe, and it is unclear where they got the “more than” bit.

Beyond those details, how does Egale define and measure “feeling unsafe” in the first place? What were the students asked?

What about the rates for actually being unsafe, as opposed to subjectively feeling that way? How do the non-LGBTQ+ survey results compare? Has the presenter ever considered that perhaps teaching kids that their sexual orientation (or that of their parents) makes them “oppressed” is contributing to them “feeling unsafe” at school?

Next we have the good old attempt to explain away the sky-rocketing numbers of trans-identifying youth with a comparison to a 5 to 12% jump in rate of left-handedness among Americans over 110 years. (This represents a 140% increase over more than a century, by the way.)

For context, in the UK, the number of youth referred to gender clinics increased from under 100 in 2009 to over 2,500 in 2017-2018, which is an over 4000% increase in less than a decade. Were the teachers at Medicine Hat Public School Division provided that context? Not a chance.

Oh, and being left-handed is not a diagnosis that leads one to disassociate from their body, and seek to remove body parts and/or undergo hormone therapy.

Ignoring basic common sense and the emerging evidence to the contrary, attendees are told — seemingly based on this article in the “International Journal of Transgenderism” — that the “medical consensus” is clear: “youth who are supported in their social transition have mental and physical health outcomes [that] are drastically better than those who are not supported.”

The reality is that teachers who help students with their social transition — meaning they go along with a child’s new self-declared name and pronouns — are actively encouraging the child’s self-rejection, helping to lock in their new, false “identity,” and leading them on the pathway toward irreversible harm via medical transition.

As Canadian activist Chris Elston (also known as Billboard Chris) has stated over and over again:

• The body positive message we should be sending children is that they are beautiful just as they are;

• There is no right way to be a boy or girl;

• Children are never born “in the wrong body.”

It’s not hateful and it’s not complicated. Going along with a child’s delusional beliefs about being born “wrong” is a very bad idea, and you don’t need any kind of PhD or Masters degree to know it. It’s called using your brain. Are we not the adults, here?

The presenter then defines a whole pile of “LGBTQ+ terms,” beginning with the term “sex assigned at birth” which teachers are taught is “not binary,” and “a spectrum.” Is there consensus among the medical experts on that one, too?

The graph below — which shows height distributions for males and females — was inserted in the slideshow directly after the “is a spectrum” bullet point, which suggests the consultant has taken the overlapping distributions (i.e. the fact that women can be taller than men, despite being shorter, on average) as evidence that sex is not binary.

So, there are two clearly defined distributions for human height — one “female,” one “male” — but sex is a spectrum because both males and females can be very tall and and very short? Can you help me out, Alex? This makes no sense.

Let’s take a look at some more “definitions”:

Inserted after the “gender non-binary” bullet point above are the slides below, which take the made-up idea that some people are (or feel like they are) neither male nor female a step further, exploring some of the sub-varieties of “non-binary” genders. All very scientific, of course!

The consultant then displays a pronoun chart with so-called “pronouns” like “ze” and “hir/zir.” As you can see below, employees learn that pronouns are “not discernible based on appearance” before discussing the crime of topic of “misgendering.” (In other words, referring to a woman as “she,” and a man as “he,” like all those hateful people used to do in the olden days, remember?)

In terms of washrooms, the Fyrefly institute recommends “labelling facilities based on hardware available rather than gender.” For example, “this washroom has urinals and stalls.”

For the staff members who might have some silly discomfort with the idea of gender neutral washrooms, they write: “We all have used a gender neutral washroom before. Just think of the washroom in your home.”

Along with sharing information on how to create a GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) club — often called Gender Sexuality Alliance or Queer Straight Alliance clubs these days — and sharing ideas for activities to do with the club, Fyrefly reminds staff that “school’s [sic] cannot disclose student’s [sic] membership in any inclusion group.”

Further displaying their utmost respect for parental authority, they even have a slide titled “dealing with parents/caregivers.”

Next, the presenter brings up 311 so-called “anti-LGBTQ” bills in the U.S.

On top of having nothing to do with Canada, these bills are not “anti-LGBTQ” in the slightest, at least not as far as I’ve seen. Anyone can go to the ACLU’s tracker website and have a look.

The first bill listed there is Alabama’s HB 261, which states:

This bill would require all public two-year and four-year institutions of higher education to prohibit biological males from participating on an athletic team or sport designated for females and prohibit biological females from participating on an athletic team or sport designated for males.

Nobody is being prohibited from playing a sport. People simply need to compete in the category for their sex, because that is what is reasonable and fair. Men and women aren’t made the same.

The second bill, Alabama’s HB 401, is about protecting kids from harmful, obscene material. The third, HB 405, would define the terms “man, woman, boy, girl, father, mother, male, female, and sex” according to reality, not fiction, and “require the state or political subdivisions that collect vital statistics […] to identify each individual as either male or female at birth.”

The fourth bill, HB 354, states: “classroom instruction or discussions related to gender identity or sexual orientation may not be provided to public school students in kindergarten through eighth grade or to public school students in a manner that is not age or developmentally appropriate.”

Is it really anti-LGBTQ to want “gender identity” and sexuality to be discussed in a manner that is developmentally appropriate, or is that just common sense?

After recommending a long list of LGBT books, films/videos, instagram accounts, podcasts, and websites to check out, and telling staff to “invite in queer guest speakers,” the workshop ends with a case studies activity, where scenarios are presented for staff to discuss.

Here’s an example:

Another example describes parents who are “very fearful that their child has come out as trans” because “they’re worried about what their neighbours think,” and they don’t use the child’s self-declared name and pronouns because they “think the youth is just confused and this is a phase.”

Of course, being critical of anything that was just taught in the workshop is off limits. Alex is the expert here, and he has “lived experience” identifying as transgender, not you.

You can’t point out that the comment about “being afraid of what the neighbours think” is total nonsense. You can’t chime in and say “well, maybe the parents are right, maybe it is just a phase — after all, they know their kid way better than we do!” or “of course their kid is confused, boys are boys and girls and girls!” Good luck with that. I shall leave it to you to imagine how these discussions might go…

To end off, staff members are asked to make their own scenarios “related to sexual orientation/gender identity,” and made to reflect on “who is most vulnerable in [the] situation?” and “what can be done to centre the experience of the person most vulnerable, and ensure they have the best possible outcomes[?]”

Here’s a hint: the most vulnerable person is always the one identifying out of their sex, or who is not heterosexual. And the answer is always to unquestioningly affirm whatever they say, keep secrets from their parents, etc., because kids always know best, and reality is not real. Teachers know the drill.

As promised, here is the full presentation. If you are a Canadian teacher and you want to get in touch with me, please email me at chanelpfahl@gmail.com.

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