Alberta’s War on Kids and Classrooms

When Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, a 1985 novel depicting a totalitarian, patriarchal society, she wasn’t inventing a nightmare. She was cataloguing patterns of control over girls and women that had already happened somewhere, sometime, in the real world.

Now, Alberta’s government seems intent on staging its own Atwood adaptation. Recent school policies read like the stuff of dystopian fiction. The policies target young girls, queer and trans kids, and all youth who dare to imagine futures with greater gender equity.

As of Monday, Alberta’s Education Amendment Act is in effect. This means that Alberta children under 16 can no longer ask teachers to use their chosen name or pronouns without parental permission. And parents now need to opt in for their children to receive education on issues such as gender identity, sexual orientation and sex.

As kids and families got ready to start the new school year, Edmonton Public Schools — one of Alberta’s largest school districts — made headlines for its plans to pull books from library shelves, including Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and more than 200 other restricted books that grapple with ideas related to gender, sexuality and power.

The district said it was responding to the provincial government’s new rules requiring school libraries to remove books with sexual content.

The policy was set to take effect Oct. 1. But on Tuesday, the Alberta education minister paused efforts to implement the book restrictions.

Regardless of what happens next, the effects of such efforts are chilling.

The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a world where girls and women are stripped of their names, their autonomy crushed, and all people’s lives are lived “under his eye.”

In Alberta schools, it’s now “under her eye,” with Premier Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party and school officials as the overseers.

The situation in Alberta isn’t as extreme as in The Handmaid’s Tale, of course, but the parallels are close enough to sting.

Far-reaching impacts

School policy changes in Alberta might look as if they target only queer and trans kids, but the reach is far wider. Whenever governments try to restrict what young people can read, learn or say about their bodies and overall personhood, all kids are affected.

Alberta’s recent government and education crackdown is part of a broader North American trend that includes U.S. abortion bans, rollbacks of sex ed and the steady narrowing of reproductive rights, often paired with laws targeting LGBTQ2S+ people. The common thread seems to be aimed at keeping young people, especially girls and queer and trans youth, under the eye of authority and letting it dictate how they should live.

School policies in Alberta aren’t simply about defending “parental rights,” the UCP’s chosen catchphrase.

It is about using state power to restrict the most intimate aspects of young people’s lives and, in the process, chipping away at basic freedoms for everyone.

The harm will ripple widely. For some queer and trans kids, school is the only place they can safely be themselves. Forcing teachers to “out” students under the new Education Amendment Act risks exposing them to rejection, violence and homelessness.

For girls and young women, the chill runs deep as well. If schools become places of surveillance and control, will students feel safe seeking sexual health information, reporting harassment or disclosing abuse?

Already, kids face enormous pressure to stay silent on issues surrounding sexuality. In Alberta schools, the pressure is now set to increase.

Here in BC, we can’t afford to look away

British Columbians should care deeply about what’s unfolding next door. The push to gut inclusive education is already being felt here.

Protests against B.C.’s SOGI 123, the provincial initiative to help schools address sexual orientation and gender identity, have made headlines. Book challenges are part of the political groundwater. Local organizations hostile to sex education and abortion rights view Alberta’s policies as proof of concept.

This should be a wake-up call to us all.

And the stakes are very real. Research shows that affirming a young person’s gender — something as simple as using the right name for them — has dramatic mental health gains. Sex education grounded in evidence and open and honest conversations can protect against unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections and sexual violence.

And literature that pushes young people to think critically about power is beneficial for everyone.

In short, the school policies we’re seeing in Alberta will do more to control than to protect kids.

There is another way forward. Schools can be places where all kids are trusted to explore who they are, where they can read books that spark questions and critical thinking. Where their access to sexual health education is treated as a right, not a privilege. Ensuring this happens requires vigilance, not just for people in Alberta, as we are currently seeing, but across Canada.

The Alberta government is offering us a warning. “The eye” may have been trained on queer and trans kids as of late, but the gaze is broader, sweeping across all kids as they return to school.

In B.C., we would be wise to keep both eyes open, and to defend inclusive education and kids’ rights before the chill crosses the Rockies.

Because once rights are stripped away — whether to read, to learn, to choose or to exist — getting them back is far harder.

Atwood knew that. Let’s ensure her fiction doesn’t become our reality.