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Some children are genuinely vulnerable, atypical, or distressed, and they deserve careful support.

That should be easy to say. It should also be the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.

The problem starts when a narrow duty of care is expanded into a broad teaching mandate. Support for a small number of children becomes a reason to saturate schools, children’s media, and online spaces with contested identity frameworks. What begins as accommodation becomes doctrine. What begins as care becomes a general lens for everyone.

That is the central move.

It is usually framed in soft language: inclusion, visibility, affirmation, making room. Sometimes that language is fair. But it can also hide a scope change. A real minority need is used to justify population-level exposure. The existence of some children who need unusual support does not, by itself, justify turning child-facing institutions into delivery systems for anti-normative identity scripts many children are not developmentally ready to evaluate.

Put simply: support is not the same thing as saturation.

A useful heuristic is the inoculation model. The implicit argument often sounds like this: expose everyone early and often to the framework so harm is prevented later. But that assumes the framework is age-appropriate, conceptually clear, and socially harmless when applied at scale. Those assumptions are usually asserted, not argued.

You can see the pattern in school frameworks like SOGI 123. SOGI 123 describes itself as an initiative to help educators make schools safer and more inclusive for students of all sexual orientations and gender identities, with tools spanning policy, school culture, and teaching resources. In British Columbia, SOGI 123 has been broadly integrated through educator networks and district participation structures. In Alberta, similar SOGI 123 resources and supports exist and are used, but public acceptance and implementation have been more contested and uneven. (Your local framing here is fine; if you want, we can add a specific Alberta anchor in the next pass.)

The point is not that every teacher using these materials has radical intentions. Most likely do not. The point is structural. A framework introduced in the name of protecting a minority of vulnerable students can become a general lens for shaping the environment of all students. That is exactly where support turns into saturation.

None of this requires pretending there are no benefits. Anti-bullying frameworks and school supports can reduce harassment and improve school climate for vulnerable students, and in some cases for other students as well. Recent SOGI 123 evaluation reporting in B.C. has explicitly claimed reductions in some forms of bullying and sexual-orientation discrimination, including effects observed for heterosexual students in studied schools. But that is a different question from whether a framework is well-bounded, developmentally fitted, and appropriate as a general lens for all children. A program can produce some good outcomes and still be overextended in scope.

This is also where ordinary parents often feel morally cornered. They are told the framework is simply about kindness and safety. Then they discover it also carries contested claims about identity, norms, and development. When they raise questions about age, fit, or timing, the objection is treated as hostility rather than prudence.

That rhetorical move matters. It is how debate gets shut down.

Some activist frameworks are not just asking for tolerance or non-harassment. They are more ambitious. They treat ordinary social norms as presumptively suspect—or as things to be actively challenged—rather than mostly inherited and refined. Adults can debate that in adult spaces. The problem is when those frameworks are translated into child guidance and presented as common sense before children are developmentally ready to sort through the concepts.

You do not need a graduate seminar to see the issue. Children imitate. Children seek belonging. Children absorb prestige cues. Children are shaped by what trusted adults celebrate. That is not bigotry. That is basic reality.

This is why developmental fit matters. Children do not process abstract identity questions the way adults do. Identity formation is gradual. Social context matters. Timing matters. Adult authority matters. Age appropriateness is not a slogan; it shifts across developmental stages, and what may be discussable at 16 is not automatically suitable at 6. When institutions present contested frameworks in a celebratory register first and a cautionary register later (or never), adults should worry.

The usual public binary is false. The choice is not between cruelty and total affirmation. It is not between neglect and ideological immersion. A sane society can do both things at once: provide targeted support for the children who truly need it, while refusing to reorganize the symbolic environment of all children around contested anti-normative frameworks.

That is not repression. It is proportion.

And proportion is exactly what gets lost when every concern is moralized and every request for limits is treated as harm.

We should be able to say, plainly, that some children need exceptional care without turning exceptional cases into the template for everyone else. We should be able to protect the vulnerable few without swamping the many. We should be able to teach kindness without requiring ideological inoculation.

If we cannot make those distinctions, then we are not practicing compassion. We are practicing scope creep with moral language.

Support for vulnerable students is necessary. But targeted care is not the same as saturating schools with contested identity frameworks for all children.

References

1. SOGI 123 / SOGI Education. “SOGI 123 | Making Schools Safer and More Inclusive for All Students.”
   https://www.sogieducation.org/ (SOGI 123)
2. SOGI Education. “What Is SOGI 123?”
   https://www.sogieducation.org/question/what-is-sogi-123/
   (official explainer page)
3. SOGI Education. “British Columbia.”
   https://www.sogieducation.org/our-work/where-we-support/british-columbia/
   (B.C. implementation / network context)
4. ARC Foundation. “UBC Evaluation of SOGI 123 (October 2024).”
   https://www.arcfoundation.ca/ubc-evaluation-sogi-123-october-2024
   (evaluation / outcomes framing from SOGI-supportive side)
5. Alberta Teachers’ Association. “What is SOGI 123?”
   https://teachers.ab.ca/news/what-sogi-123 (teachers.ab.ca)
6. Keenan, H., and Lil Miss Hot Mess. “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood.” Curriculum Inquiry 51, no. 5 (2021): 578–594.
   https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2020.1864621
7. Gender Report (opinion/critical perspective). “We need to take ideological gender rhetoric out of education.” (Jan. 28, 2021).
   https://genderreport.ca/sogi-gender-curriculum-queer-theory/ (CANADIAN GENDER REPORT)
8. Global News. “Duelling protests held in Edmonton over sexual orientation and gender identity policies in schools” (Sept. 20, 2024).
   https://globalnews.ca/news/10766483/edmonton-gender-identity-sexual-orientation-alberta-schools/ (Global News)