OTTAWA, ON (June 4, 2024):
A handful of Canadian academics lost their marbles after Alberta announced a new set of policies related to transgender youth and parental rights earlier this year. Was their outrage justified?
Alberta’s policy, titled Preserving choice for children and youth, aims to enforce parental consent for a name or gender change for children under the age of 15, restrict access to medical interventions such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children under 16, prohibit sex reassignment surgeries for persons under the age of 18, and limit the participation of biological males in girls’ sports. A measured and data-backed set of policy prescriptions if there ever was one.
Yet an Open Letter to Premier Danielle Smith, signed by 36 law professors at the University of Calgary and University of Alberta, denounced every facet of the Alberta government’s announcement and accuses it of unjustifiably infringing on the rights of transgender-identifying individuals.
In The Children’s charter: Alberta’s trans policies and legislated rights for children, Stéphane Sérafin and Geoffrey Sigalet challenge the claims of the open letter, explaining how it mischaracterizes Canadian law in suggesting that parental rights are fictional or irrelevant.
According to Sérafin and Sigalet, parents not only have the right, but also, the duty, to make decisions that are in the best interests of their children. Parents who prevent their children from drinking, smoking, or driving before they are of age are simply doing their parental duty; parents who want to be informed and involved in their children’s gender-identity related potentially life-altering decisions are doing the exact same thing.
“Children must not be caricatured as adults to fit new worlds of rights; new rights must be tailored to fit the world of children,” conclude Sérafin and Sigalet
To learn more, read the full paper here:
Stéphane Sérafin is an Assistant Professor in the Common Law Section of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa.
Geoffrey Sigalet is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
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