“It’s intolerant,” whines Catholic school board of their critics

And you know what? They’re damn right. I am intolerant of bronze age morality that teaches you it is okay to psychologically torture somebody because of who they are. What now? You were expecting me to deny it? No. Catholics: Eat a shit sandwich and get the fuck out of public school.

Last August, Wells and Public Interest Alberta issued a “report card” analyzing how well four of those policies complied with laws passed in 2015. They concluded Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools’ policy failed to protect students, and gave Grande Prairie Catholic Schools’ policy a D grade. The school districts refuted Wells’ findings.

Last September, the superintendents of both school districts, the then-president of the Council of Catholic School Superintendents of Alberta and the president of the Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association wrote letters to Turpin and university chancellor Douglas Stollery calling Wells’ statements “inaccurate and intolerant.”

They took issue with Wells’ comments that teaching students chastity is “embarrassing and inappropriate in 2016.”

“Is Dr. Wells lecturing his U of A education students to promote their grade school students being sexually active?” state letters from both the Grande Prairie Catholic school board and the Catholic superintendents’ group.

YES. YOU FUCKING IDIOT. IT’S CALLED “SEX EDUCATION.”

-Shiv

Sadistic Catch-22s

The legalities of gender variance in its most benign form can be a matter of tedium. This is what I have to cope with–an initial not insubstantial cost to request my first legal change to my name, and from there, just a long series of much smaller requests with much smaller fees. For the most part, my difficulty is discovering the sheer number of databases in which I exist–and in which I must request changes.

Compare that to this trans teacher in Wisconsin. State employees recently had a policy change instituted seemingly without warning on gender designation changes, and now it has suddenly erected onerous bureaucratic barriers that needlessly involve courts and doctors. Perhaps the most insidious requirement is “proof” of gender change–in this case, surgery.

Remember that the Affordable Care Act prevented discrimination from insurers against trans people, and that the provision was removed by a Trump order. Having had no direction to include trans people within their coverage, the State of Wisconsins’s health insurer reinstated the ban on transition-related surgeries. Now trans people have to pay between $15,000-$25,000 out of pocket to get bottom surgery, assuming they even want it in the first place (which most don’t).

On top of that, after yanking out coverage for surgery, Wisconsin is now implementing a requirement for the surgery they just denied coverage to in order to change your documents. Talk about sadistic!

Before I get to discussing the additional demands ETF is making, let me point out a very broad problem, and that is the idea that agents of the state can change one’s legal status retroactively at any time. Imagine, for example, if the state decided that it wished to make it harder for people to get married, and so it imposed a new requirement–that in order to have a marriage recognized, residents would have to provide DNA evidence proving they and their spouse are not related (an expensive prospect). Then imagine that all married state employees were informed that their status had been reverted to single in employment databases and systems, because they had not complied with the DNA test requirement when documenting their marriages. That’s not the way regulatory changes, mundane or shocking, operate–they are applied going forward, but not retroactively.

Now, as for the new procedures for gender transitioning, there are three requirements listed by ETF. The first is that the employee must notify ETF directly, providing their old and new names, old and new gender markers, ETF ID number, and a declaration that they are gender transitioning. Previously, employees notified HR at their place of employment, and employer HR staff changed the gender marker directly in the benefits system. But now ETF will centralize control over implementing transitions, and maintain a database of gender transitioners. In essence, we are being required to register with the state. As a Jewish person who lost extended family in the Holocaust, I find this extremely creepy.

The second thing trans people are required to do is provide “proof of identity,” such as a driver’s license or military ID showing the new name and gender marker. That’s what we had to do in the past, and my wife and I can easily produce our Wisconsin driver’s licenses showing our names and most correct binary gender markers. But now ETF is demanding more.

We are now being required to produce a third item, “proof of gender.” This is very strange, because a driver’s license already provides state-recognized proof of one’s gender. Requiring more serves no purpose other than to make it harder for people to get their identified genders recognized. And the new “proof of gender” items are difficult and intrusive items to get.

Let’s look at the options. One is a court order of gender change. To get one of these is difficult, expensive, and in many states, like Wisconsin, requires a doctor to testify that one has had surgical sex reassignment. Now, some people cannot have such surgery for medical reasons. Others do not want it–they desire social recognition of their identified genders, not a program of body modifications. And nonbinary gender transitioners often find they are denied access to surgeries. But let me underline that in any case, the very surgeries that ETF is making necessary in order to have one’s transition recognized it has also categorically excluded from insurance coverage. My wife and I have been waiting for years to access some surgical interventions that would make our lives easier on many levels, one of which is being able to access things like a court order of gender change. But we can’t afford them without insurance coverage. It’s a Catch-22, and seems deliberately cruel.

All of this contributes to a very roundabout “unpersonhood” of trans people. The retroactive editing of legitimately modified documents is un-fucking-believable and nothing less than a directed attack against us.

-Shiv

“Cut the wage of public workers” crowd strangely silent after NDP’s executive pay cut

The Progressive Conservatives would have you believe that Alberta’s budget is going to turn into a Greece situation tomorrow. Often they have union busted, or at least union bruised, in the public sector, calling for hiring and wage freezes for front-line workers. But it’s not the nurse working 14 hour shifts who is bringing home the big bucks, and freezing those wages often nets the province a meagre amount compared to the budget. If the current government did that now, they’d net about $8 million.

So at first I was surprised to hear that the New Democratic Party has announced cuts themselves. But this time it came with a twist: They were targeting the executives.

Now here’s the really weird part–despite finding almost twice as much room in the budget as a result of these cuts ($16 million)–the “slash, cut and burn” crowd are nowhere to be seen.

You’d think this would have pleased the opposition. After all, just three weeks ago they were screaming that the NDP Government of Premier Rachel Notley must freeze the pay of front-line nurses, health care workers, teachers and civil servants who will be negotiating new collective agreements this year.

Back then, in an official statement, the Wildrose Party called a mediator’s recommendation of raises ranging for 29 cents to 88 cents an hour for 14,000 health care aides and licensed practical nurses represented by the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees “a slap in the face to struggling Albertans.”

Some of those health care workers are currently being paid less than $20 an hour. Freezing their salaries for 2016 as the Wildrosers demanded would have saved the provincial treasury about $8 million.

By contrast, on Friday, the cuts made to the sometimes outrageous pay and perks of only about 270 ABC Sector executives – a hangover from the days when the ABCs served in part as a lush pasture for old Tory warhorses – will save taxpayers roughly double that.

Now, it would be entirely consistent for the Opposition to say, “good step, but not far enough.” Or even, “it was about time they stopped the gravy train!” Instead? Pretty much crickets.

There was nary a quote from the PCs (who are responsible for most of the executive pay rates to which Mr. Ceci took his axe), the Wildrosers (who are after all the Official Opposition) or the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (Canada’s self-described and routinely quoted tax watchdog) in any mainstream media report I noticed.

At any rate, tonight’s beer is dedicated to the NDP. Thanks for cutting the absurd salaries of the schleps who can afford it for once.

-Shiv

 

Conservative Senator wants you to find the silver lining of genocide

I’m not joking.

Conservative Senator Lynn Beyak mounted a defence of the residential school system for Aboriginal children in the Red Chamber Tuesday, lamenting that the “good deeds” accomplished by “well-intentioned” religious teachers have been overshadowed by negative reports documented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Let us consult the report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: (emphasis mine)

“[Residential school] was a very harsh environment. They, they treated us like criminals.… You, you had to, it’s like a prison. But we were small kids, and we didn’t understand. We didn’t understand harsh discipline. We, we understood love from our, our parents. But the harsh discipline was hard to take, and that happened to everybody, not only me.”

Children exposed to strict and regimented discipline in the schools sometimes found it difficult to become loving parents. Genine Paul-Dimitracopoulos’s mother was placed in the Shubenacadie residential school in Nova Scotia at a very early age. Paul-Dimitracopoulos told the Commission that knowing this, and what the school was like, helped her understand “how we grew up because my mom never really showed us love when we were kids coming up. She, when I was hurt or cried, she was never there to console you or to hug you. If I hurt myself she would never give me a hug and tell me it would be okay. I didn’t understand why.”4 Alma Scott of Winnipeg told the Commission that as “a direct result of those residential schools because I was a dysfunctional mother.… I spent over twenty years of my life stuck in a bottle in an addiction where I didn’t want to feel any emotions so I numbed out with drugs and with alcohol…. That’s how I raised my children, that’s what my children saw, and that’s what I saw.

Residential schools, as acknowledged by the prime minister’s own admission in his 2008 official apology from Canada, were an attack on Aboriginal children and families. They were based on racist attitudes that considered Aboriginal families as being frequently unfit to care for their children. By removing children from their communities and by subjecting them to strict discipline, religious indoctrination, and a regimented life more akin to life in a prison than a family, residential schools often harmed the subsequent ability of the students to be caring parents.

Your conservative “family values,” everyone.

*spit*

-Shiv

 

Meet the new Bishop

Same as the old Bishop.

“(Bishop Fred Henry) was a very bold bishop in terms of his statements. I’m sure that he has created controversy. I don’t think it’s for that purpose. I think he wants to be provocative, he wants to sort of allow people to understand the truth that might be at stake in some of these social issues,” said William McGrattan, 60.

Coming from Peterborough, McGrattan will be installed as Calgary’s eighth bishop at a mass Monday at St. Mary’s Cathedral, attended by 30 Canadian bishops, local priests and an expected crowd of about 1,000. He is taking the helm of a diocese that covers 79 parishes and missions, 317 Catholic schools and more than 400,000 parishioners who have been guided by the same faith leader for almost two decades.

Bishop Henry was a polarizing figure. Lauded for his work with the poor and on climate change, his conservative positions on same-sex marriage and gender identity were often at odds with those outside, and sometimes inside, the church. He spoke against students receiving the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine, encouraged the Catholic School District to abandon casinos as fundraisers and closed three aging churches in Lethbridge in favour of a 1,200-seat mega-church. 

Right, so the Catholic church’s previous representative in Calgary was a science denialist piece of shit who openly flouted Alberta’s human rights laws for the entirety of his tenure. And, as we’ve previously discussed, the current government has the unenviable position of discovering the extent of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Catholic church in this province and now has to deal with the prospect of reining them in or joining the Progressive Conservative’s legacy of tolerating the abuses.

None of this is surprising, particularly to Queer Catholic and ex-Catholic Albertans. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss:

“With regard to gay-straight alliance, even that very terminology creates a sense of what I would say not an agenda but is promoting a certain lifestyle. In Ontario, we call that respecting differences so that we allow young people to know there are differences and that we need to respect those without labelling them with those particular terms.”

Perhaps the most controversial issue in Alberta schools of late is the NDP government’s new guidelines to protect the rights of gay and transgender students and teachers.

Although new to the province, McGrattan did not sidestep the issue.

“I have found them to be a little more strident, a little more directive in terms of how they’re trying to promote this particular theory. And I refer back to that terminology. It is gender theory, it’s not truth and therefore I think we begin to organize our society and establish relationships based on a theory.”

“It’s not truth”?

And it makes you hope they’ll think the same thing about gravity, because then maybe they’ll just… float the fuck away.

–Tim Minchin

-Shiv

That’s not how any of this works

Sophie Trudeau, the Prime Minister’s wife, has a message for us on International Women’s Day:

Are you ready to ignite change? This week, as we mark International Women’s Day, let’s celebrate the boys and men in our lives who encourage us to be who we truly are, who treat girls & women with respect, and who aren’t afraid to speak up in front of others. Take a picture holding hands with your male ally & share it on social media using the hashtag #TomorrowInHand. Together, we can create a movement that inspires more men to join the fight to build a better tomorrow with equal rights & opportunities for everyone… because #EqualityMatters.

To which I say:

No. Men have cooties.

-Shiv

 

We need your support

As much as I wish I had enough time in the world to commit to nothing but the slow, careful consideration of long-form rationalistic writing, my current economic circumstances won’t allow it to happen. I need stability at this time in my life, and the only way I can know for sure what will be in my bank account at the end of the month is my predictable 9-5 day job. But with the commute and the meal prep included, that’s ~12 of my 16 waking hours gone already. Factor in the volatile climate which one must study to be a political writer, and we need to set aside another time block to maintain our sanity. Trying to build up a career in these constraints, a full-time self motivated “job,” is close to impossible. Most of the in-between content on this blog is just signal boosting, even as I do pour my heart (and brain) out to produce work that I stand by as examples of my Serious Business writing.

To that end, I achieved something that was a pretty big milestone in my pursuit of this career. I got published in a bonafide paper, paid in real cash muneh for my work. I earned more in that one piece than I have in all my time at FTB.

I didn’t really blow this up or promote with as much fanfare as I now think I should have. It is a remarkable transition from “blogger” to “writer.” I can put this on my CV now. I have.

But there’s a problem. I could get published on The Establishment precisely because its editorial guidelines has written into its code a willingness to challenge, rather than placate, existing power structures. That in itself limits my publishing prospects. Most big papers aren’t willing to publish something as radical as “trans people are human.” (I’m only being half-facetious here.) But all the money for sustainable publications remains isolated in a relatively small sphere of media outlets–and where the money goes, the radical voices, no matter how carefully evidenced and reasoned, are pushed out. One consequence is that advocates are often volunteering huge portions of their time for this work for other publications that don’t compensate their writers at all.

The Establishment was my best option… but its finances are running thin. It needs reader support. Frankly, all the writers you read regularly need your support, especially if you want to see more of their higher quality content.

Please, given that The Establishment is one of the very rare papers out there willing to both publish the voices of progressives and pay them for that work, please consider supporting them with one of these options.

-Shiv

Torturing kids and tearing families apart, how very Christian of you

I’ve mentioned in passing before on this blag that children’s services and family court often collude to produce a living hell for trans people. We have yet another example of this in Illinois.

The parents of a young trans girl sought out medical care for their child’s type 1 diabetes and epilepsy at a faith-funded clinic called Advocate Hope Children Hospital. While both conditions have been confirmed by experts, the AHCH took it upon themselves to accuse the parents of child abuse because they were affirming their child’s gender. And, once again, it fucking worked–at least so far.

A lawyer representing the family told LGBTQ Nation this all started last month, with the parents trying to get medical help for their daughter, who has type 1 diabetes and epilepsy. Although they agreed to something called a “therapeutic separation,” the attorney confirmed the parents never signed any documents surrendering their parental rights or authorizing any treatment of her gender identity, and in fact have attempted to have her moved to another hospital.

But last week, the Illinois Department of Children and Families reversed an earlier decision to not get involved. DCFS took protective custody of Stevie on Monday, according to the family’s attorney, Rina Infelise. She told LGBTQ Nation in a phone interview Sunday evening that this kind of move requires a legal hearing, and so both the parents and DCFS are due in court this week to face a judge, who will decide Stevie’s fate.

A religious hospital fucking kidnaps a patient, and it’s the parents who are the abusive ones? Are you fucking kidding me?

I just wilt with impotent rage at these circumstances. Time and time again the experts have said that allowing children to explore and express their gender facilitates their health. Time and time again the courts have mandated gender policing despite its iatrogenic effects. When are these fucking dinosaurs in court going to catch the fuck up? How many god damn perfectly health and happy families are they going to torpedo while we wait for reality to sink in to these fuckers?

I hope the parents win their case. It’s days like these where I wish a just god did exist to smite these self-righteous assholes that do this to healthy families. I can’t fucking stand it. It’s scientifically illiterate, morally bankrupt, and all around a giant clusterfuck of wrong.

-Shiv

“Unexpected legal implications”?

Well slap my side and roast me for dinner. Those two Baptist schools that are defying Bill 10, a law which compels all schools to form a Gay-Straight or Queer-Straight Alliance if the students request one, have given the Education Minister David Eggen some “unexpected legal implications.”

For more than two months, Education Minister David Eggen has had a copy of a report and recommendations from inquirer Dan Scott, whom Eggen hired to investigate two Edmonton-area private schools.

“Yes, we are working with it, but it’s more complicated than we had originally foreseen,” Eggen said Wednesday.

Gee, you’re just now figuring out the finer details of entrusting a god damn cult with the public education of our children?! Fuck me, Minister, it’s a little early in 2017 to be awarding Understatement of the Year, but you are off to a smashing start!

In response, Eggen demanded a written promise from Coldwell to comply with laws unanimously approved by the legislature in 2015 that protect gender identity and expression as grounds for protection from discrimination, and compelling schools to help students organize a support group for LGBTQ students when they ask for one.

Eggen then received a letter from the school board’s lawyer that the minister won’t discuss.

The minister appointed Scott, a lawyer, to study the schools’ policies, documents and handbooks, and interview students, staff and families, to see if they are in line with the law.

Although he’s had the report in hand since December, Eggen would not divulge its conclusions or recommendations.

“It extends past just the individual case. The legal complexities that have come to light with this particular case have to have larger implications, so that’s about as far as I want to say about it right now,” Eggen said. “We’re working hard, because I want to make sure we get it right, and we want to make sure that we’re sending a safe and caring message right across every school.”

The “legal complexities” are thus:

  • Alberta’s federation with Canada back in the good ol’ days enshrined Catholic participation in government as a means of warding off Protestant persecution of Catholics.
  • We’ve since matured and developed a human rights code that says you can’t be a piece of shit to people just because they’re Queer.
  • Catholics continue to be pieces of shit to people just because they’re Queer.

Funnily enough, the United Nations awarded Canada a failing grade on separation of church and state, pointing to our numerous publicly funded religious schools.

In other words, David Eggen is wandering into a minefield that secular and queer Canadians have been pointing out for fracking decades: Our human rights codes and our tolerance of oppressive religious beliefs contradict each other, and at some point one has to be ruled subordinate to another.

-Shiv