The Gender War in the Classroom
In 2008, Shawn Rouse and his wife, Amanda, found out they were expecting a child. The couple, who live in Quispamsis, a suburb of Saint John, New Brunswick, couldn’t decide on a name. They pored through books in search of ideas, but nothing stuck. “We must have discussed 100 options,” says Rouse. After months of intense debate, they finally settled on what they thought was a winning name for the baby girl they were expecting. It didn’t occur to either of them that, one day, their child might have thoughts of their own on the matter.
Nine years later, puberty hit hard. Their child had long seemed uneasy as a girl, but the discomfort was suddenly all-encompassing. “Each physical change came with depression and terror,” says Rouse. The kid would only wear baggy clothes, eager to hide every curve. When their child came out to the family—first at age 10 as nonbinary, then months later as a trans male—the family had confirmation of what they’d suspected. A year later, in 2021, their child came home with a test for his parents to sign. The name at the top, Levi Rouse, was unfamiliar. “I asked him, ‘Who’s Levi?’ ” says Rouse. “He said, ‘That’s what I go by now.’ ”
Rouse was surprised. The name he and Andrea had worked so hard to find had been summarily cast aside. He couldn’t help but feel as if Levi, only 12 years old, had left him out of a huge life decision. He had also kept the name change secret.
In time, Rouse came to understand Levi’s secrecy not as insubordination or fear, but as prudence. He hadn’t wanted to burden his parents with a half-baked decision, so he’d tested it out in a social context first. “Once you come out to your family, you make the choice official,” Rouse says. “You want to ensure you get things right. Young people need a zone of privacy to figure themselves out.”
At the time, in 2021, that zone of privacy was protected by the province of New Brunswick. Under Policy 713—a directive from the Department of Education covering gender and sexuality in schools—teachers were to respect students’ chosen names and pronouns. Nor were they allowed to notify parents of a name or pronoun change without a student’s consent. But in June of 2023, the policy was overhauled.
Under the new rules, if a student under 16 changed their name—and if the change was connected to a change in gender identity—teachers would be forbidden from using it without consent from the parents. If an Aidan simply decided he wanted to be an Ethan, however, parental consent wasn’t needed. And if a student worried that being outed to their family could endanger them at home, teachers could refer them to a social worker or a therapist to come up with a safe disclosure plan—but disclosure was mandatory. Blaine Higgs, the premier of New Brunswick, described his government’s actions as a defence of parental rights: that parents, as heads of their households, are entitled to know what their kids are doing at school, and teachers shouldn’t withhold information.
The about-face seemed to come out of nowhere. Even members of Higgs’s own caucus were baffled. His government had introduced Policy 713 in 2018, and it was in line with Canadian educational norms. This revised version made New Brunswick an outlier. No other province had introduced parents’ rights legislation targeting gender identity—though some U.S. states had. In April of 2022, Alabama passed a similar law; Arkansas, Florida and several other Republican-governed states followed suit. But New Brunswick is not particularly conservative. The province’s politics have long oscillated around a pragmatic middle, and there had been no apparent public outcry that might explain the government’s move.
Shawn Rouse was surprised too—and angry. The revised policy, he believed, would deprive trans kids of the kind of freedom Levi had needed to figure himself out at his own pace. It would also incentivize kids to stay in the closet, which can have devastating consequences. So he began speaking out—on social media, in local media and on national radio and TV. He was wading into a tense debate, but he didn’t realize how ugly things would get.
Soon, the dispute over Policy 713— a departmental directive from Canada’s eighth-largest province—became a national firestorm. In the months that followed, the furor helped empower a new cohort of activists who’d emerge as conservative power brokers nationwide. It led to a showdown between the province and one of its largest school districts. And it had a domino effect across the country. Saskatchewan passed similar legislation last year, and Alberta is likely to do so this fall. Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has tested the parental-rights waters, decrying “radical ideology” in schools. All this comes even as Policy 713 itself faces multiple Charter challenges, which could determine whether it survives. Proponents of parental disclosure say that the rules protect commonsensical family values; opponents say they violate the Constitution.
It’s tempting to write the conflict off as yet another inane culture-war crack-up. But the truth is more complicated. On one side of this dispute are people like Rouse, who oppose a policy they view as discriminatory. But the other side is too complex to sum up easily: a mix of far-right activists, moderate conservatives, members of religious and ethnic communities who feel ignored by public school systems, and parents who simply want a stake in their children’s lives. The parental rights lobby draws its energy from the fringes, but it derives legitimacy from the centre. The anxieties it inflames are experienced by every parent, every day: about how much freedom young people should enjoy, and how much control adults should have.
Dominic Cardy may have been more surprised than anyone by the government’s abrupt change of course on Policy 713. As Higgs’s first education minister, Cardy knew that the original version had been carefully developed over nearly a decade, under several premiers, through consultations with experts and educators. When Higgs’s Progressive Conservative Party took power in 2018 with a minority mandate, much of the work was already done. It simply fell to Cardy to review the files his predecessor had left and finalize the official text—which to his mind was uncontentious. It said that school bathrooms would be available to students based on their chosen gender identity, and all schools should have at least one gender-neutral bathroom. On the question of whether trans youth should be allowed to play team sports, schools were to defer to the New Brunswick Interscholastic Athletic Association, which allows trans and nonbinary students to play sports in accordance with their gender identity.
The section on name changes and gender pronouns struck Cardy as especially innocuous. It effectively said that teachers should honour students’ requests and move on with their lives. “Why would teachers care,” Cardy asks, “whether a student goes by Alexander, Alexandra, Alex, or Aloysius?” He didn’t think the policy would kick up much fuss.
As minister, Cardy had the right to officialize the document with his signature. But in early 2019, he sent it to Higgs’s office as a courtesy. Then he waited. And waited. And waited. In August of 2020, Higgs, riding high in the polls, called a snap election. Cardy grew anxious. The PCs were likely to be re-elected, but he couldn’t know for sure. If the government lost power, his work would go to waste. So, the same day the writ dropped, Cardy signed off on the original Policy 713.
A few months later, Higgs, re-elected and emboldened with a majority, called Cardy into his office. He was apoplectic. “He accused me of having sneaked the policy through behind his back,” Cardy recalls. “I said, ‘Premier, I did no such thing.’ ” Cardy pointed out that a draft had languished in Higgs’s office for over a year. The premier seemed put off both by Cardy’s supposed duplicity and by the content of the policy. He even asked his caucus to review Policy 713, but not much came of the exercise. The caucus, basically, decided that the document was fine. For a time, the issue seemed to die.
But Cardy had noticed a changing dynamic within the government. The premier was distancing himself from his more centrist colleagues. Traditionally, the New Brunswick PCs have been a Red Tory party—fiscally prudent and socially liberal—with a pragmatic governing style befitting a province founded by mild-mannered United Empire Loyalists. But Higgs, an observant Baptist from the sparsely populated rural west of the province, who had spent more than three decades working for Irving Oil, seemed to represent a different strain of New Brunswick conservatism. He started out politically in the province’s anglophone-rights movement. Nearly one-third of New Brunswickers claim French as their mother tongue, and it is Canada’s only officially bilingual province—yet animosity over bilingualism and linguistic accommodations runs deep. In 1989, Higgs ran for leadership of the Confederation of Regions Party, known for its strident opposition to bilingualism.
In 2010, he became minister of finance for the PCs. He boasted about his private-sector bona fides, which put him outside the political establishment, and questioned conventional political wisdom. In 2014, he publicly opposed expanding access to abortion, suggesting that women might seek it out because raising a child is “inconvenient.”
So in 2016, when he sought the leadership of the comparatively secular, centrist PCs, he seemed like an odd fit, and some MLAs were wary of his candidacy. At the end of his first term, he presided over a thoughtful, largely successful response to COVID-19, and his approval ratings soared. But after his big 2020 win, he seemed to chafe against the constraints of centrism. He used his legislative majority to knock down an opposition motion that the province fund Clinic 554—the only facility in the province that provided out-of-hospital abortions. In 2021, he announced a policy forbidding government employees from performing land acknowledgements. A year after that, he brought the sole two MLAs representing the People’s Alliance—a party that was further to the right and which sought to remove protections enjoyed by francophones—into the PC fold. Then he announced a plan to gut French immersion. Dominic Cardy resigned, in part due to that decision. He’d come to see Higgs as a sleeper agent for social conservatism.
Then, in early 2023, École Sainte- Bernadette, a francophone primary school in Moncton, hosted a drag-queen storytime for students. Bill Hogan, Cardy’s successor as education minister, received a flurry of angry emails, some of which were darkly conspiratorial. “You need to step up and stop allowing our children to be groomed by pedophiles,” one email said.
Few of the letters mentioned Policy 713 directly, but they landed the issues of gender, sexuality and schools back on Higgs’s desk. Finally, he took a stand with a frontal attack on the policy, even though it had been introduced by his own government. That’s when the document went through its radical makeover. Higgs and Hogan even spoke about it in a way that seemed dissociated from its actual content. In a media scrum in May of 2023, Higgs asked, “Should kids in elementary school and kindergarten be exposed to drag-queen reading time?” (Policy 713 never mentions drag.) In an interview with CBC, Hogan spoke about indoctrination in the classroom: “Children are coming home saying, ‘I like to hang out with my hockey buddies. Does that mean I’m gay, Dad?’ ” The statements seem illogical, but they make tactical sense if Higgs and Hogan were using the policy to signal to anti-drag, anti-sex-ed voters that the government was on their side.
Opponents of the changes quickly rallied. Kristin Cavoukian is a member of the District Education Council—the equivalent of a board of trustees—for Anglophone East, a large school district covering the Moncton area. She says that requiring parental consent only when students change their name due to a change in gender identity is blatantly discriminatory. Her district refused to comply. “We felt that we simply couldn’t work with the new policy,” she says. The DEC urged the province to revert to the original guidelines, but to no avail. In July, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in: “Trans kids need to feel safe, not targeted by politicians. We have to stand against this.”
That same month, the New Brunswick Liberals introduced a motion to have the new version of Policy 713 reviewed by Kelly Lamrock, the province’s child, youth and seniors’ advocate. It requested that Lamrock consult stakeholders, including teachers, parents and students, and report on the new policy’s impacts. Despite the PC majority in the legislature, the motion passed. Two backbenchers and four ministers from Higgs’s own caucus broke ranks and sided with the opposition. One of them was Dorothy Shephard, who as health minister had helped steer the government’s COVID response. She approached the premier after the vote with a handwritten resignation letter; later, she spoke teary-eyed to reporters. Another minister who’d voted for the review resigned a week later, and Higgs shuffled out the remaining two. His 25-person caucus was in disarray, and talk emerged of a leadership review.
In September, pro-Higgs voters paraded in front of the New Brunswick legislature with signs reading “Leave our kids alone” and “Safe adults don’t ask children to keep secrets from parents.” Across the street, about 100 counterprotesters held up placards denouncing hate. Higgs showed up to greet supporters, but didn’t venture to the other side of the road. It had become a battle line, demarcating opposing sides in a conflict that had barely existed months before.
Higgs’s most zealous supporters are a paranoid bunch—people who muse about pedophile Satanists and groomers in drag. Kelly Lamrock, the provincial advocate tasked by the legislature to review the policy, heard these voices when he began his work. “There were some who argued, ‘Gender dysphoria is fake and all this should be shut down,’ ” he says. But there were also people who were simply uncomfortable with the topic and with not knowing what was happening to their children outside the home. These parents aren’t necessarily anti-trans bigots but ordinary people struggling with the often bewildering task of bringing up kids in a complex world.
The battle they’re fighting, over what role a parent should play in public education, is as old as the Dominion itself. And so is the right of parents to direct, to some degree, what happens in classrooms. The nation’s founding document, the British North America Act, states that parents must have the choice to send their children to either Protestant or Catholic schools. In the 1890s, when the premier of Manitoba opted to remove Catholic instruction in public schools, members of the province’s francophone minority were furious: they felt they were being forced to acquiesce to Protestant education. A century later, in the 1970s and ’80s, agrarian hippies and conservative Christians both fought to normalize homeschooling. Thanks to their advocacy, homeschooling is now legal nationwide. And in 1988, three plaintiffs—a Jew, a Muslim and an atheist—argued in front of the Ontario Court of Appeal that the Lord’s Prayer should not be recited in public schools. The court’s ruling effectively ended the practice, creating the secular norms of the public system today.
The contemporary debate is a new iteration of these age-old Canadian disputes, and today’s activists are just as ideologically diverse as their predecessors. They’re often supported by a patchwork of small non-profits advocating for their causes—some rabidly partisan, some less so. Many activists want to see more funding for independent, alternative or religious schools. They might find support from Parents Choice in Education, which supports charter schools, home schools and micro-schools, which are run by small consortiums of parents. Others are opposed to sex education in the classroom. Their cause is championed by groups like Campaign Life Coalition, a pro-life organization. Some parents worry about a decline in core competencies like literacy and numeracy, and others claim that curricula are steeped in social-justice doctrine.
But the loudest and most visible are focused on what they call gender ideology. Though they span the ideological spectrum, all these activists and groups see themselves as underdogs—ordinary people buffeted by large, impersonal forces. While reporting this piece, I spoke to numerous parental rights activists and noticed two types of complaints. The first are what might be called substantive grievances—a desire to change curricula or ban drag storytime, for example. Others are emotional grievances, rooted in frustration. (Out of fear of reprisals from peers or co-workers, most asked that I withhold their names.)
One of these is a man I’ll call Ahmed, an immigrant to New Brunswick from the Middle East. When he attended protests against police brutality and the invasion of Ukraine, his Canadian-born peers were thrilled to see him participating in civic life. But when he, along with two dozen other Muslims, went to the demonstration in favour of the new Policy 713, the mood soured. One counterprotester complained that Arab demonstrators were “not even from this country.” An op-ed in the Edmonton Journal suggested that Muslims like him who support the cause are mere dupes of the far right. Some of Ahmed’s friends no longer speak to him. The experience left him disillusioned with white progressives in Canada, whose tolerance, he says, is conditional. “I’m allowed into their club,” he adds, “if I think like they do.”
Carrie (also a pseudonym) came to Canada from South America as a child. She is a supporter of the Alberta Parents’ Union, which advocates for choice in the education system. She grew up in a secular, sometimes violently abusive home. In her thirties she became pregnant, but ended the relationship with the father. She then turned to Catholicism. She says God helps her avoid self-destructive tendencies. The sacraments are grounding for her; the catechism is a textbook for life. She is raising her teenage son in the faith, which, for her, means sexual abstinence and a complementarian view of gender—a belief that God made two discrete sexes, with distinct roles in civic and family life. But ideas she opposes kept cropping up in her son’s classes. For example, in a Grade 7 social studies course, a teacher brought in a CBC article about Anthony Johnson and James Makokis, a two-spirit couple who had competed on the reality show The Amazing Race Canada. And her son’s sex-ed curriculum didn’t prioritize abstinence.
When she attempted to voice concerns, she was rebuffed. The school council didn’t put her items on an agenda until she showed up in person to insist, and she says her son’s teacher refused requests for a meeting until she approached a human-resources superintendent. She doesn’t understand why she has to fight to be heard, particularly at a school that pledges in its charter to respect marginalized voices. Carrie now believes there’s an invisible asterisk beside that phrase. “It doesn’t apply to people like me,” she says.
But if mainstream educators, journalists and centrist politicians won’t listen to parental rights proponents, others will—and they’ll reap the political rewards. Consider Faytene Grasseschi, a controversial New Brunswicker who has gone from arriviste to political power broker in a dizzyingly short time. Grasseschi was raised in Alberta, and in her memoir, Marked, she wrote about her wayward youth, which ended when she got serious about her Christian faith in 1995. “The things I had been running to for fulfillment—immoral relationships, earthly success, alcohol and so forth—fell off me as I received the washing of the Holy Spirit.” She discarded her old life and became a Christian activist, which included opposition to gay marriage and abortion.
In 2020, Grasseschi moved to New Brunswick and settled in Quispamsis—the same community Blaine Higgs represents as an MLA. There, she began hosting a Christian-themed talk show, Faytene TV. In 2023, as chatter persisted about Higgs’s possible leadership review, Grasseschi launched the Don’t Delete Parents campaign, an online petition supporting the premier. A pro-life organization called RightNow, based in Ottawa, launched a similar drive.
Grasseschi says her petition got tens of thousands of signatures; signees pledged to buy PC memberships and back Higgs. She characterizes her petition as evidence of a silent majority finding its voice. “The premier took a stand that the majority held: loving parents should never be deleted from the lives of their children by the government,” she wrote to me by email. The campaign to oust the premier ultimately fizzled, but had it gone ahead, Higgs may well have prevailed thanks to a new groundswell of rank-and-file support.
The petitions send an implicit message to politicians: you don’t have to placate centrist colleagues in order to back up parental rights. It’s an idea Grasseschi is likely to bring to the legislature in this fall’s provincial election. Last December, she won the PC nomination for the riding of Hampton-Fundy-St. Martins, after her opponent said he would not run due to “misalignment of my beliefs and values with the current structure of the party.” Higgs attended Grasseschi’s nomination meeting.
The parental rights movement is also spreading outside New Brunswick. In the fall of 2023, Scott Moe, the premier of Saskatchewan, passed Bill 137, legislation that closely resembles Higgs’s revised policy. Groups like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association swiftly denounced the law. Moe in turn denounced the critics as “out-of-province interest groups” and pledged to not back down.
Last winter, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith promised to introduce a raft of new rules pertaining to sex and gender identity. These include restrictions on gender care (children under 16 won’t be able to access puberty blockers), a ban on trans women participating in women’s sports and a rule forcing teachers to disclose name and pronoun changes for students under 18. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has also weighed in. “It’s not up to the school boards to indoctrinate our kids,” he said last fall. And, in an interview last December with the National Post, federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre responded to Justin Trudeau’s condemnation of Policy 713, saying that Trudeau “believes that he should be able to impose his radical ideology on other people’s kids.”
Some of the stiffest opposition to this wave of policy-making will happen in the courts. In April of this year, the Anglophone East District Education Council approved its own set of guidelines, called Policy 1.7, stipulating that schools should not release a student’s personal information without their consent. Education Minister Bill Hogan ordered the DEC to change its policy; when it didn’t, Hogan stepped in and repealed it himself. So the DEC enacted Policy 1.8, which was identical to the one he quashed. The council also filed a lawsuit, alleging the province was forcing it to violate students’ Charter rights by discriminating on the basis of gender identity. In July, a judge ruled that the DEC lacks standing, since Policy 713 doesn’t directly implicate the council, which plays a governance role. The council is appealing, and Hogan has moved to dissolve the organization.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has filed a legal challenge against the New Brunswick government, and another group, UR Pride, has initiated one against Saskatchewan. The Alberta legislation will likely face similar challenges this fall. The details of the various cases are different, but they all focus on the same basic argument: parental disclosure rules discriminate against trans and nonbinary students and violate privacy rights.
New Brunswick and Saskatchewan parents have told CCLA advocates that they’ve seen an uptick in bullying and harassment directed at their queer kids. Shawn Rouse says he’s seen it too. When Levi came out, says Rouse, he was accepted by almost all of his peers. But a week after the Policy 713 dispute broke out in the news, a student cornered Levi at school and told him to kill himself. A few weeks later, Levi was swarmed by a larger group. The kids taunted him by debating the best suicide method: hanging, poison, jumping off a roof.
Rouse himself has faced harassment online. “People call me an abuser, a groomer and a pedophile,” he says. He’s beefed up his home security system and, despite living in a peaceful neighbourhood, he rarely lets Levi walk around alone. Occasionally, he says, he sees cars idling in the street in front of his house. He wonders who the person inside is, and what they intend.
What are the courts likely to say about the Charter challenges being brought to them? The person best positioned to answer that question is surely Kelly Lamrock, the province’s child and youth advocate. To prepare his review of Policy 713, Lamrock consulted roughly 500 educators, parents, mental-health professionals and legal scholars.
He’s concluded that, while the legal landscape is complex, parental rights do exist in Canadian law. According to the courts, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees that parents can teach their values to their children and even make decisions that seem contrary to the child’s interests. What parents don’t have is the right to control a child’s interaction with the state, provided the child has the capacity to do so by themselves.
Lamrock focused on a key Supreme Court Case, A.C. v. Manitoba, from 2009, in which a critically ill 14-year-old girl sought to refuse a life-saving blood transfusion in accordance with her Jehovah’s Witness faith. The province’s director of child and family services applied for a court order to overrule her. Ultimately, the court decided against the girl, but it recognized that her feelings were relevant. Justice Rosalie Abella ruled that in certain instances—in which the child is a bit more mature, or the stakes less extreme—the medical system might instead defer to their choice.
Under the Charter, children are not mere wards of their parents; they have rights. What they don’t always have is the mental competence to exercise those rights. That comes with age. Lamrock determined, based on his consultations with psychologists, gender-care providers and policy experts, that by Grade 6, or about age 12, a young person would normally have the capacity to make decisions about names and pronouns. These choices aren’t hugely consequential—you can easily reverse a name change—and if children are allowed under Canadian law to make big decisions about medical interventions by age 15 or 16, then surely lower-stakes decisions must come earlier.
“You have an absolute right to pass on your values, religion and culture to your children in the home,” he says. “You do not have the right to a state surveillance operation to make sure the child lives by those when they’re an older teenager. I am certainly allowed to tell my children that I think Donald Trump is a dangerous and extreme person. I do not have the right to call the school and say, ‘If my kid wears a Trump hat, I want you to tell me and take that off his head.’ ”
This outlook, Lamrock adds, is consistent with other education practices. “If as a teacher you know that two students in your class are dating, or that a Jewish student ate a cheeseburger for lunch, you’re not supposed to snitch,” he says. And given that the Supreme Court has recognized young people’s capacity when making life-and-death medical decisions, Lamrock suspects it will be hard to argue they can’t choose for themselves what name or pronoun to use at school.
That hardly means that the parental rights cause is hopeless. Jeff Park, executive director of the Alberta Parents’ Union, argues that governments can better manage conflicts with “school choice” legislation to help parents opt out of the public system. A less centralized system might be a less politicized one, Park argues. Instead of fighting over curriculum, parents could quietly choose what’s best for them. (School choice isn’t a free-for-all. Independent schools are still subject to the Charter, Canadian law and baseline curricular standards. A Christian school can’t teach blatantly anti-trans or homophobic material.)
Jason Ellis, a professor in education at the University of British Columbia, believes that the best approach for educators is to bend when you can and hold the line when you must. School staff can’t tattle on children, nor can they erase gay or queer content from the curriculum. But they can take meetings with parents. They can listen graciously. And they can allow children to opt out of some lessons or activities. “I would be happy sending my kids to a drag show,” says Ellis. “But maybe kids whose parents object could sit the event out.” Concessions like these won’t placate hardliners, but they might cool tensions—and demonstrate a reinvigorated commitment to pluralism.
What’s needed is flexibility, which is often in short supply on both sides. Many parental rights leaders frame the issue as a matter of unbendable civil liberties. John Hilton-O’Brien, executive director of the organization Parents for Choice in Education, described the conflict to me as a clash between families and the state. “Human rights exist to protect the less powerful party against the more powerful party,” he says.
But what if, I asked him, the party without power is a young person who wishes to come out safely as trans, and the powerful party is the unsupportive parent? Shouldn’t the state—or teachers—protect the little guy? Hilton-O’Brien dismissed this as nonsensical: parents’ wishes, he suggested, are aligned with children’s best interests, regardless of what the child may think.
Shawna Sundal is founder of the Irreplaceable Parent Project, a non-profit that supports parental rights. She told me that young people have the capacity to make decisions for themselves when they become a legal adult, whether that’s at 18, 19 or 21, because as teenagers the prefrontal cortex of their brain is immature. Sundal is right that the human brain matures well into a person’s twenties, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a neuroscientist who thinks that a teenager can’t make a decision about their basic rights.
Those on the other side of the issue also sometimes espouse what seem like simplistic arguments. When I spoke to Kristopher Wells, an associate professor in the Department of Child and Youth Care at MacEwan University in Edmonton, he said, “Parental rights comes back to the dominance of the white, heterosexual nuclear family as the most privileged in society, and that all laws and policies should be designed to support the supremacy of that.” This struck me as odd, given that I’d spoken to people like Ahmed, who are neither Christian nor white.
I ran another theory by Wells: that the dispute is a clash between two competing definitions of pluralism. One says that queer and trans people should feel welcome and safe at school. Another says that people of all religious and political affiliations have a legitimate interest in their children’s education. Conflict happens because these two versions of pluralism aren’t easily reconciled. Perhaps the challenges posed by the parental rights debate—integrating diverse belief systems, balancing competing claims—are those of liberal democracy itself.
Wells had none of it. “We need to leave the job of the curriculum up to the experts, who are the educators,” he told me. His message was clear: the system is what it is. Take or leave it, but you have no business complaining.
In New Brunswick, the public will soon have a chance to weigh in on the matter. Blaine Higgs is facing an election this fall. Ten of his 25 MLAs have bowed out of the race, some in response to the government’s rightward drift. The PCs are slightly trailing the Liberals in the popular-vote projection, and if the premier pulls out a win, it will be with a mostly fresh slate of candidates—including, in all likelihood, Faytene Grasseschi.
Levi Rouse, now 15, is starting hormone therapy—a medical regimen that will enable him to develop masculine secondary-sex characteristics, like facial hair and a deeper voice. The bullying at school has subsided slightly. “Mental-health-wise,” says his father, “Levi has good days and bad days.”
Shawn Rouse is trying to take each new challenge in stride, just as he did years ago when Levi surprised the family by changing his name. “As parents, you give your kids a name and a life,” he says. “You say, ‘Those are our gifts to you. You can do what you want with them.’ ”
This story appears in the October issue of Maclean’s. You can buy the issue here, subscribe to the magazine here or send a gift subscription here.
