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On September 1, Alberta’s Fairness and Safety in Sport Act came into force, marking a decisive step in a global debate over equity in athletics. The law—formerly Bill 29—requires athletes aged 12 and older to compete in categories aligned with their sex as recorded at birth. Out-of-province visitors remain exempt, and younger children are unaffected. The aim is not blanket exclusion, but to preserve a level playing field for female competitors.
The rationale rests on clear evidence: even after hormone therapy, biological males often retain advantages in strength, speed, and endurance. A 2021 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that transgender women maintained a measurable edge in running times even after two years of testosterone suppression. High-profile cases—from swimmer Lia Thomas in the NCAA to weightlifter Laurel Hubbard at the Olympics—have underscored how even rare instances can shape competition outcomes and displace female athletes.
Opposition has been swift. Groups like Egale and Skipping Stone argue the Act is discriminatory, casting it as a rollback of human rights protections. Their concern is not trivial: trans youth already face higher rates of marginalization, and exclusion from sport can exacerbate social isolation. For activists, the law sends a stigmatizing signal that identity is secondary to biology, undermining inclusion.
But here the clash of principles becomes unavoidable. Protecting the integrity of women’s sports means acknowledging physiological differences that identity alone cannot erase. Alberta’s law draws that boundary: co-ed and male divisions remain open to all, while female categories are safeguarded for those born female. Critics frame this as erasure; supporters see it as necessary equity.
The deeper problem lies in public discourse. Too often, debate polarizes into caricatures—claims of “rights apocalypse” on one side, or blanket dismissal of trans athletes on the other. Alberta’s legislation is imperfect but pragmatic: it carves out space for participation without sacrificing fairness. Future court challenges will test whether the balance holds, but the principle is clear. True progress in sport must protect all athletes’ opportunities, not just the loudest voices in the debate.
Picture a library, its shelves stripped of Orwell and Atwood, replaced by outrage: this is the activist’s trap. Critical social constructivism—commonly branded as “woke ideology”—does not depend on truth-seeking but on the imposition of narrative, luring well-meaning observers into excusing captured institutions as merely inept (Kincheloe, 2005). To extend such charity is to enable agendas that corrode trust in public institutions and divide communities.
The Edmonton Public School Board’s (EPSB) recent book removal controversy exemplifies this dynamic. In late August 2025, a leaked list of more than 200 titles slated for removal from K–12 school libraries ignited national outrage. The list included canonical works such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Media coverage swiftly framed the list as a right-wing purge: a literary witch-hunt torching academic freedom and signaling Alberta’s dystopian slide.
Yet this spectacle obscures the actual policy. In July 2025, Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides issued a directive requiring school boards to remove sexually explicit materials by October 1, 2025, to ensure age-appropriate resources in K–12 libraries (Alberta Ministry of Education, 2025). The directive does not ban classics nor prohibit parents from providing controversial works privately. Its scope is limited: public schools, funded by taxpayers, must not circulate sexually explicit material to children.
Seen in this light, the EPSB’s list appears less a bureaucratic stumble than a narrative maneuver. By placing revered classics alongside contested titles such as Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer—which contains explicit illustrations of sexual acts—and Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, which describes sexual encounters between minors, the Board ensured the reaction would focus on “censorship” rather than explicit content. The outrage generated by the supposed “banning” of Atwood and Huxley distracts from the substantive question: whether K–12 libraries should carry graphic sexual material at all.
To be fair, some argue this was an honest misstep. Officials under pressure may have over-applied vague guidelines, fearing punishment if they erred on the side of permissiveness. From this perspective, the inflated list reflects incompetence, not ideology. This interpretation has surface plausibility—and acknowledging it is crucial. Yet it falters when weighed against the broader intellectual context.
The precise inclusion of classics alongside sexually explicit texts mirrors the rhetorical tactics of queer pedagogy, which openly embraces provocation as a teaching tool. In their influential article Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood, Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess (2021) describe initiatives such as Drag Queen Story Hour as “strategic defiance” designed to “disrupt normative understandings of childhood” (p. 433). Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), they frame queerness as a “future-oriented ideality” (p. 1), using performance and play to challenge authority, destabilize binary categories, and cultivate “embodied kinship” rather than passive empathy (Keenan & Lil Miss Hot Mess, 2021, pp. 434–436).
This framework is not hypothetical. It explicitly advocates the use of aesthetics, provocation, and imaginative unruliness to reshape children’s perceptions. In their words, “Drag pedagogy embraces an unruly vision of childhood as a site of potentiality” (p. 437). Texts like Gender Queer or Lawn Boy, with their focus on sexual exploration and destabilization of normative boundaries, can be read as curricular extensions of this agenda. Their presence in K–12 libraries is not incidental but reflects a coherent intellectual project to prioritize queer cultural forms over developmental appropriateness.
From this perspective, the EPSB’s list functions as a narrative cudgel. By spotlighting Orwell and Atwood, defenders can recast the government’s directive as authoritarian censorship while obscuring the ideological drive to embed queer pedagogy in public institutions. The effect is the same whether activists deliberately curated the list or whether bureaucrats, steeped in activist frameworks, reproduced them unconsciously: outrage is amplified, and the debate is reframed on activist terms.
This is the trap of charitable interpretation. To dismiss the list as simple incompetence is to ignore its functional alignment with queer pedagogy’s playbook: provoke, inflate, and obscure. Even if intent cannot be definitively proven, the effect is unmistakable—a shift of public discourse away from the legitimate question of protecting children’s developmental environments and toward a defensive posture about “book banning.”
The consequences are corrosive. Communities fracture, as defenders of childhood innocence are painted as censors, and activists wield “inclusivity” as a battering ram against parental concerns. Public trust in schools erodes further. And children—the supposed beneficiaries—are caught in the crossfire of ideological contestation.
Children deserve age-appropriate materials in their school libraries—full stop. No law prevents parents from accessing contested works privately, but schools should not be battlegrounds for ideological conquest. The EPSB controversy demonstrates how critical social constructivism (woke) thrives not on truth but on narrative imposition. To resist this, we must reject the activist trap of charitable interpretation and confront directly how such narratives are engineered. Only by doing so can we restore unity, rebuild trust, and protect the integrity of public education.
“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.”
(Halperin, 1995, p. 62)
References
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Alberta Ministry of Education. (2025). Ministerial Order No. 2025-07: Age-Appropriate Resources in School Libraries. Edmonton, AB: Government of Alberta. Retrieved from https://www.alberta.ca/ministerial-orders
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Keenan, H. B., & Lil Miss Hot Mess. (2021). Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood. Curriculum Inquiry, 51(5), 433–452. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2020.1864621
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Kincheloe, J. L. (2005). Critical constructivism. New York: Peter Lang.
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Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York: NYU Press.
Because Magic, taught as fact, in the curriculum is AWESOME!
Further breaking news: The Edmonton Public School Board will also remove Soylent Green Recipe Book from the Foods curriculum.
How does feculence like this happen in my school system?
“An Edmonton teen and her mother have filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission over a high school sex education class delivered by a religious-based group. Last year, Emily Dawson, 18, took part in a two-day class delivered as part of the Career and Life Management course at McNally High School. The teenager says she was shocked by what she heard.
“Basically shaming the girls and making them gatekeepers and meanwhile making it sound like the boys had no impulse control,” she said.
The Edmonton Public School Board used the Pregnancy Care Centre to conduct the course. The centre is affiliated with Care-Net, an American based anti-abortion movement. Both groups focus on advocating abstinence from sex.
How many other little “whoopsies” does the EPSB have up its sleeve? The NRA about the value of gun control and firearm safety? Exxon on Environmental Stewardship?
What the crap?
First, lets establish what our Experts in Christian Misogyny are advocating. From Care.net –
“Care Net promotes and supports sexual abstinence until marriage among youth through its LifeWise Program. LifeWise services are available free of charge to churches, schools, and any youth-serving organizations. Care Net will also partner with parents to provide neighborhood programs in homes or at Care Net’s facility on the east side of Madison.
Care Net works to end abortion, not primarily through political action but by building a culture where every woman receives all the support she needs to welcome her child and create her own success story. By empowering women and men to make courageous, life-affirming choices, Care Net and our affiliate pregnancy centers end abortions every single day.”
Well, isn’t this just a “Grade-A” glistening block of bullshit on display. They also run Pregnancy centres to hoodwink traumatized women and baffle them with religious bullshit and obstruct them while they attempt to obtain a legal medical procedure.
What a charming bunch of folks, god bless their hearts, we are dealing with here.
So, let’s take a look at the facts of the matter just to show exactly how full of shit our christian care.net friends are and the poisonous message they brought into the Edmonton public school system.
From:
The Failure of Abstinence-only Education: minors have a right to honest talk about sex. – Published in: Sexuality and the Law Symposium, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 12-62, 2006.
“Abstinence-only sex education is anything but educational. At best, it deprives students of the knowledge necessary to manage their own sexual health. At worst, it is dangerous to minors and to the public health. As the Waxman Report concluded, “[s]erious and pervasive problems with the accuracy of abstinence-only curricula may help explain why these programs have not been shown to protect adolescents from sexually transmitted diseases and why youth who pledge abstinence are significantly less likely to make informed choices about precautions when they do have sex.”18 In a society that purports to value children, the state should foster healthy, informed minors who are equipped to manage their sexual health responsibly. At the very least, the state should not encourage or support educators and programs in misleading children and promoting false, dangerous, and potentially injurious practices.”
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“In light of the potential health risks associated with these curricula, abstinence-only education cannot be justified as intending to serve any significant state interest. While the government may have an interest in encouraging abstinence in unmarried youth, its current policy is being pursued at the expense both of truth and public health. Importantly, there is no evidence that providing comprehensive sex education promotes increased sexual behavior or dilutes the message that abstinence is a preferable choice, as proponents assert.250 Furthermore, the government’s singular focus on abstinence represents an educational policy that is inconsistent with the democratic educational objective of preparing adolescents to make responsible, informed choices.”
More on efficacy of Abstinence only versus comprehensive sex education.
“Using figures from 1995-2000, Advocates for Youth (www.advocatesforyouth.org) reports that the HIV rate for Americans 15-24 is five times that of German youth of the age. The U.S. teen syphilis rate is six times higher than the Dutch; the chlamydia rate is 20 times that of French teens; and our teen gonorrhea rate is a whopping 74 times higher than the Dutch.
European programs that provide uncensored sex education and promote condom use are the reasons for this success. Contrary to what one might expect, European youth have fewer sex partners than Americans do and begin sex slightly later than Americans. What is alarming, however, is that America has the largest percentage of girls who have sex by age 15.
The U.S. also has the highest teen birth rate among 28 developed countries. According to a UNICEF study, less than 10 per 100,000 teenage girls in Korea, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden gave birth in 2001, whereas 52 American teens per 100,000 did.”
More on the failure of Abstinence Only Education – Here, Here, Here, here… Let us conclude then that our dear Christian Misogynists are the engineers of the fail-train; happily throwing more coal into the fire as they move full speed ahead and with Jesus and Ignorance at their side, they are unstoppable.
We should get back to Kelly and Emily and their experience with these professional dispensers of mendacity.
Kathy Dawson says she tried to pull her daughter Emily out of the class for the second day. But she says the school informed her that Emily had to take the class in order to pass her course. So she joined her daughter in the classroom. A single mother, Dawson said she was shocked what students were told about families like hers.
“Well, that our children are prone to depression, suicide, juvenile delinquency,” she said.
The remarks also surprised her daughter. “It’s not something that you hear every day where you’re getting bashed for being in a single-parent home.”
Kathy Dawson was also upset the class appeared to focus on values instead of science.”
See. Seeeeeeeeee?!? This is what happens when you let this sort of religious malevolent altiloquence into the secular classroom. Shaming single parent families, fuck-ya god hates you – and lets not forget about the eternally burning homosexuals…
“I have a friend that is a lesbian and she was asking what would happen if she didn’t want to stay abstinent and then the educator said, ‘We’re not here to talk about that,’” Dawson said.
Yes, telling young children that they’ll burn seems a little out of place in Canada (and the norm for secular societies), so we’ll just ignore your question instead. The nice people at Care Net are so full of love, tolerance, and compassion.
Full marks to Kathy Dawson for taking action to get these people out of the school system.
The Alberta Human Rights Commission has now accepted the Dawsons’ complaint.
“I’m training up my kids to respect science and demand science in their education,” Kathy Dawson said. “So this is a long haul, and I’m fully prepared to take it all the way.”
This is pretty much a slam dunk. Is religious bunk allowed in the classroom? Yes/No If the answer is yes, then the leaders of secular school board will have some explaining to do.
The EPSB took action –
the EPSB wrote that it had a registered nurse observe one of the presentations unannounced and found the information “met our standards and expectations on every level” but that it would still look for new presenters for the next year.
“Having said that, we’ve heard a lot of concerns expressed from the public over the last several days about guest speakers invited to present on the topic of sexual health education,” the board wrote.
“We are asking our schools in the fall to use different presenters so that we can continue this conversation, and focus on meeting the needs of students and parents.”
Well the school board doesn’t have its head entirely up its ass. Woo!
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