Counterprotesters showed up in force to oppose a parental rights protest outside of the Durham District School Board headquarters in Whitby, Ont. causing police to break up an altercation between the two groups.
A parental rights protest group called DDSB Concerned parents organized a One Million March for Children protest Friday outside of the school board headquarters to ask the government to give parents more of a say about what’s being taught in publicly funded schools.
The group asked attendees to sign two petitions, one intended for the House of Commons, which can be accessed online, and the other for the provincial government of Ontario, which was hand-signed by attendees.
The petition asked the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to conduct an audit of the education system to ensure “neutrality” of the curriculum by ensuring that “ideological theories are not presented as undisputed facts.”
The group also demanded that teachers who are not licensed professionals not deliver psychological services to children and that parents be fully informed of any changes that affect their children in the curriculum or health-related issues.
As documented regularly by Chanel Pfahl on X, children in the DDSB have been made to identify various sexuality flags, how to use prefered pronouns in French, and writing affirmations such as “My body is the gender and sex I say it is.”
“Education is supposed to prepare young people for success in life,” a spokesperson for Back2Basics Durham, a group participating in the protests, told True North. “Ideologies are for adults to play around with, not to expose children at the most vulnerable time of their lives when they’re away from the care and protection of their parents. It should not be happening in schools.”
Police broke up an altercation arising after LGBT counter-protesters attempted to take parental rights activists’ signs as the event was wrapping up.
LGBTQ activist Matthew Katarincic, 29, spoke for the counterprotesters. Katarincic claimed that without sexual orientation and gender idealogy education in schools, youth who identify as trans’ lives are at risk.
“(The protesters) are completely erasing the existence of queer identities within schools. I am not for parents not being involved in the decisions being made in their children’s lives, but the protection of the children needs to come first,” Katarincic said. “And what we have to acknowledge is that the number of families, especially with the intersectionality of this movement, disenfranchised families, specifically indigenous and black queer people, they go to homes that are not safe for them.”
Katarincic argued that by keeping parents in the dark, schools are shielding children from potentially abusive families.
Lisa Robinson, Pickering City Councilor, was in attendance and believes that while in some cases children need to be protected from their families, parents generally need to be involved in life-changing decisions made with their children.
“To sit there and try and go behind the parent’s back and keep secrets, saying ‘your parents are not going to understand,’ I think a lot of that is a complete lie in a policy,” Robinson said. “We don’t need to be teaching our children in Junior Kindergarten to Grade 5 about somebody’s sexuality. There’s no reason why an adult should be involved in a child’s sexuality.”
Robinson argued that both sides just want to protect children but have different ways of going about it, and the status quote is not the way to do it.
Katarincic believes that it’s the entire “community’s” responsibility to ensure that children are “protected, safe and being their authentic selves,” but not the role of parents alone.
A DDSB student spoke at the rally and claimed she was told to keep her gender identity change secret by the school, a gender identity change she later turned back on, saying it was just a phase.
“I ended up completely ruining my relationship with my mother. And then I decided, okay, well, actually, I am a female, so I’m gonna go back to using those pronouns. And I’m so glad I didn’t switch over, because I feel like if I was in this school generation, they would have switched me over immediately. I wouldn’t have been able to go back on my decision,” she said.
The student now believes that gender transitioning should be limited to consenting adults. Another student agreed and shared an anecdote of her cousin feeling pressured by social media to change gender identities.
Michelle Goodwin, a transgender person and activist, said that if a child says they want to keep their gender identity from their parents, that should be enough for Canadians to know that those children are in danger.
Goodwin said that being trans is not affected by social environment and that trans people are born transgender. Goodwin said if parents are concerned about what’s being taught in schools, they should send their kids to a private school.
In a story True North reported on in September, the York Catholic District School Board concealed that a girl was changing her gender identity at school parents in 2022. In 2023 she de-transitioned saying she was swept up in a “social fad.”
Counter-protesters such as Goodwin and Katarincic believe that gender is a spectrum and fluid and see no issue with not disclosing to parents about a child’s gender idealogy even if the child decides later that they were never transgender.