Danielle Smith's bigoted hate law will hurt trans kids. She's fully okay with that.
Using the Notwithstanding Clause to force queer people back into the closet.
Premier Smith has felt left out the past few years, as her Republican friends down to the south have waged an extremist hate campaign to erase queer people from society. Bathroom bans, and sports bans, and book bans, and employment bans, and every other kind of Nuremberg Law these fascists feel like trying again this century.
Danielle’s decided it’s time for her to be a vile hatemonger too, and now Alberta’s queer community is about to be plunged neck-deep into a pool of the Premier’s fresh-cooked bile. She may not have Project 2025, but she’s selling her own knockoff at Dollarama, and she’s making record profits.
Friends, things in Canada are not going well for the queer community. But rest assured, Danielle Smith has come to us in our time of need, so that she can make our lives even worse!
Let’s unwrap this proposed legislation, because even all the way over here in Ontario we can smell the bigotry, and it’s rancid. In the modern era, massive sweeping laws are no longer first introduced in the Legislative Assembly; instead, Premier Smith gives Twitter a free sneak preview of every horror and plague she is about to visit upon the innocent people of Alberta.
Firstly, Smith claims she will ban licensed doctors from performing gender-affirming surgeries on anyone under 18. Let’s be explicitly clear that bottom surgery is virtually never performed on any minor, and top surgery only after the age of 16 for those few trans patients with an extensive history of care. This is a proposal meant to fearmonger about something that simply does not happen.
Next, Smith claims she will also ban both puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy for anyone under the age of 16. Considering that puberty blockers are a temporary, reversible measure which are solely useful before puberty, limiting their use until after puberty is transparently bad-faith. Indeed, puberty blockers have been used safely for decades, and not merely for gender-affirming care. They are necessary and vital medication, which by design must be used before the onset of puberty.
The Premier’s fearmongering about irreversible medical procedures on children is a gross and blatant lie outside the realm of facts. The official peer-reviewed journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, which collects submissions from over 60 nations, reports that the regret rate for gender-affirming surgeries is quite literally so low, it is only 1%.
But there is a surgical procedure, justified on a cultural basis, performed on very young children without their consent, which many of those children grow up to resent and regret. That procedure is male circumcision, and yet I don’t see any serious political movement to ban minors from being circumcised until they’re legal adults.
There is a far more robust set of standards for patient consent with gender-affirming care, aligned with modern medical guidance. It is absurd that Danielle Smith would consider this tightly regulated set of medical treatments problematic, and yet have zero problem with the wildly lax regime of elective neonatal circumcision. Her bias against trans people is blatantly self-evident.
And yet, blocking trans children from receiving medical care is only the beginning of the shittiness Premier Smith plans to inflict upon them. Any trans individual who was AMAB will be “prohibited from competing against women and girls in competitive sport.” This seems explicitly intended not just for schools and youth leagues, but an attempt to regulate professional and semi-professional sports leagues as well.
It is an attempt to erase trans people from the field of sports. Mind you, trans athletes have been eligible to compete in the Olympic Games since 2004. In that time, extremely few trans athletes have competed, and only Quinn, a nonbinary player for Canada’s women’s national soccer team, has won a medal in any Olympic event. Clearly, trans people do not have any significant advantage in competitive sport; on aggregate, they typically perform like the average cis athlete in their category.
But for children, the point of playing sports isn’t to earn medals, or to get paid a salary, or even merely for the purpose of health and exercise. Playing team sports with your peers builds friendships, and understanding; all of us growing up knew the lonely kid in the schoolyard, who didn’t play any sports or games with the other kids because they were excluded.
The attempt to exclude trans kids from sports in schools means one thing, and one thing only: An attempt to separate trans kids from their peers, and to tell the other children: “This person is not like you, and should not be allowed to do the same things as you.” Let us call out this nastiness for exactly what it is, without pretense. It is bigotry, it is hatred, it is wrong.
But even this is not enough to satisfy Premier Smith’s ultimate bigoted goals; ultimately, for bigots, there never really is a line of satisfaction. She has proposed one final set of policies in this package of previewed legislation, which would go even further than the above.
Beyond blocking trans kids from medicine, and sports, Premier Smith will stretch her slimy tendrils into the classroom itself, and attempt to erase the very idea of queer people entirely. Parents will be required to opt-in for “each instance a teacher wishes to discuss gender identity, sexual orientation, or human sexuality.”
What this means, very simply, is that any queer teacher will be subjected to a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy where they can be fired for mentioning their own identity. A straight teacher could talk about their spouse (as many of my schoolteachers did), while a gay teacher would be banned from doing so. Any books that mention the mere existence of queerness, or queer people, would be banned literature.
This is combined with a policy where teachers will be mandated to notify a parent before referring to a student by a different name, or different pronouns. If the student is 15 or younger, they will not merely need to notify the parents, but gain parental consent. In any case, regardless of whether it’s safe for the student to be out of the closet to their parents, the teacher will forcibly out them.
Parental notification is a horrifically bad idea, which is unfortunately frequently supported by so-called progressives who innocently think it would be helpful to them in supporting their own children. What I have told those progressives, is that they only think this because they are good parents who love their children. The reality, however, is that many parents are awful people, who hate their children and will hurt them.
Up to 40% of homeless youth in Canada are queer, which is wildly disproportionate to their share of the population. They are not homeless because their parents loved them and supported them. They are homeless because their parents were so bigoted and hateful they kicked out their own child and made them live on the street.
It’s extremely obvious how badly it can go wrong if you forcibly out a child to their parents. What happens when the teacher outs a student to their parents, and the next day the student comes to school with a black eye and bruises on their arms? What happens when the student is forcibly outed to their parents, and then they don’t come back to school, and nobody ever sees them again?
Protecting what queer kids tell you in confidence has nothing to do with good parents who care about their children. It has everything to do with protecting them from abusive parents who will do horrible things to their children. And there is no way for any teacher to tell which parent is which, until it’s too late.
Premier Smith’s hate law will erase trans people from public life. It will place significant barriers blocking trans kids from accessing medical care, from learning about the existence of other trans and queer people, and from even expressing their own trans identity in public.
Whether Premier Smith has good intentions or not is completely immaterial; policies like these, implemented already in the United States, have caused an increase in trans suicide rates of up to 72%. I fundamentally believe that regardless of any stated intentions by the creator of a system, the purpose of a system is ultimately what that system does.
Danielle Smith is proposing to create a system which will isolate and alienate trans children, and push them into committing suicide. She has been told this by journalists, by opposing politicians, and by the Federal government; nevertheless, she carries on with a system that will do these things.
The purpose of a system is what it does, and Premier Smith is creating a system which will hurt vulnerable children. The queer community does not owe her, or the people who support her, civility. Premier Smith is an existential threat to the queer community, seeking to erase us from public life. She will pass further enabling acts after this one, to strip even more rights from queer people, and it will not stop until she has gotten rid of all of us.
We must take every measure within our power to sabotage the implementation of these unjust laws. If you are a teacher, and you are told that you must forcibly out your students, you have a moral obligation to protect that child and refuse to out them against their will. Even if that comes at the risk of losing your job, you have a duty of care to protect your students, their privacy, and their safety.
Danielle Smith has issued a declaration of war against queer Canadians, and there is no neutrality in a struggle for our right to exist. Queer Canadians have been here for centuries; we have fought hard for our right to be ourselves, and we will die before we let anyone force us back into the closet. We have only one thing to say to Premier Smith, and the bigoted mongrels standing behind her:
We are here, and we are queer. And if you don’t like it, fuck off.