LILLEY: Primary school drops 'women' for 'people with a uterus'

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Our elementary schools in Ontario are now on the forefront of erasing women from our language and culture. A friend’s son, in Grade 5, was given homework this week that used terminology that five years ago would have been ridiculed widely; now it’s taught in the classroom.

Forget terms like women and girls, boys and men and embrace terms like “people with a uterus” or “people with a penis” and then split people into those with more estrogen and less estrogen.

“This is not our policy. We expect that school boards are focused on getting back-to-basics on the fundamental skills that children need, like reading, writing and math,” said Isha Chaudhuri, senior communications advisor to Education Minister Todd Smith.

Well, I’m glad that this isn’t the official policy of the Ministry of Education, but I’m still not feeling good about this. It’s yet another example of the minister’s office playing whack-a-mole with teachers and activists within the system.

The material in question appears to come from a website called School Qube which calls itself “the world’s largest marketplace of PreK-12 resources.” The material in question is even marketed as being part of Ontario’s Health and Physical Education curriculum, which it clearly is not.

The lack of textbooks and official resources has long been a problem in Ontario’s schools. My own children appeared to be taught almost entirely from printouts rather than textbooks, which was often a problem when they didn’t understand homework and the printouts offered little context for the questions they were asking.

This, however, is a matter of a teacher importing material that is not from the ministry into the classroom because it fits with their ideology.

There is a worldview that says we need to erase terms related to gender and biological sex in order to be considerate of transexual or non-binary individuals. Primarily, the attempts to change the language revolve around removing references to women rather than men.

Thus, we see terms like people with a uterus, people who menstruate, people who give birth and even in an Environment Canada heat warning this week, pregnant people. Normally, there would be one word that covers all those people, women.

Some in our society though want to erase women in the name of inclusion.

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When sex education was introduced into the school system when I was a young whippersnapper, parents were told that it was just about teaching the facts of life. As the age at which subjects were taught was lowered over the past 40 years, parents were again assured that these classes were just about teaching the basic facts.

Now, the classes are about teaching children that men and women don’t exist. There are simply people with uteruses and penises, and some people with more testosterone and others with less.

It’s not just sex ed that has been overtaken by politics, it’s the whole school system.

Earlier this year, the Toronto District School Board published and then rescinded a report which stated that education was a tool of colonialism and white supremacy.

“Education is a colonial structure that centres whiteness and Eurocentricity and therefore it must be actively decolonized,” the report stated.

“White Supremacy is a structural reality that impacts all students and must be discussed and dismantled in classrooms, schools, and communities.”

Lest you think the entire problem is in Toronto, over the past several years I’ve covered teachers in Toronto, Ottawa, Kingston, Brantford, Manitoulin Island and elsewhere pushing the idea that saying 2+2=4 is racist. There have been claims from ministry officials that math is racists and a tool of white supremacy as well.

School boards have heard that Thanksgiving Day is racist, and that being objective is racist and a form of white supremacy. In Brant County and Ottawa, school-issued decrees that police officers weren’t welcome because seeing police officers was traumatizing for school children.

Playing whack-a-mole with this craziness is getting tiring and making sane people wonder would it be better to tear down the whole education system and salt the earth below it rather than to try to salvage what little hasn’t been infected with this insanity.

It’s an open question.