Transgender Policies in Alberta Schools: Alberta Goes All-In On The Very Trendiest Pseudo-Scholarly Fad

facepalm
   This is painfully stupid and alarming as hell. The recipe seems to be:
   Take some incoherent theories produced by the least-intellectually-rigorous parts of the university (the most-leftist and least-practical institution in society)--the parts that are made up almost entirely as far-left activists pretending to be scholars. Pass these ideas--which have never genuinely been challenged...because they are sacrosanct among the activist "scholars" in the relevant fields--on to graduates of ed schools...one of the other least-scholarly, least-rigorous parts of the university. (God bless teachers...but seriously, this is no secret...) Spend almost exactly no time whatsoever actually reflecting on this nonsense. In the space of a few months or years, decide to completely restructure an aspect of society that directly affects children--who are not only required by the state to attend the relevant madhouse, but are, needless to say, impressionable and vulnerable.
   Yeah...that is an absolutely fantastic idea.
   This is exactly the kind of lunatic, half-baked social engineering that Burkean conservatives object to. And in this case, they are absolutely right. This is radical social re-engineering based on crackpot theories generated by kooks.
   It's not that I don't favor a certain amount of social evolution in some of these areas... I do, and long have. It's just that I don't favor instantaneous change on the basis of the worst available thinking...
   Look, these are people who, if the article is to be believed, do not even understand the sex/gender distinction, which is basically the cornerstone of the non-crazy bits of all of this. Furthermore, " 'boys' " and " 'girls' " are not "gender-specific roles." A boy is a juvenile male human. A girl is a juvenile female human. There are some few social roles loosely associated with being a boy and being a girl...but boy and girl are not social roles. My God...you really couldn't come up with anything more confused than this if you tried...
   Then there's this:

When it comes to sports teams, in particular, the guidelines say students should be "given the opportunity to participate on the team that reflects their gender identity and expression."

Such nonsense...such utter, utter nonsense...  Look, there are only two even vaguely coherent options here: (a) divide sports teams up by sex (note: not gender); (b) don't divide them up at all. The genders are masculine and feminine (and we can also count androgynous). It makes no sense whatsoever to divide sports teams up according to whether the players are masculine or feminine. (Especially when you're talking about really young kids, who may not be either yet...) We divide teams up by sex so that more than a small percentage of females can play with some reasonable chance of having fun and standing out. You can stop that if you want--and there are some arguments for doing so. But if you stop it, just stop it. Divide people up in order to evenly distribute skill and strength...or whatever. Or divide them up into the A league and the B league. But it makes no sense to divide by "gender." Oh and: it's females who will suffer if we ditch the usual system... No other reasons seem to affect these people...perhaps the only way to reach them is to play dueling oppression points...

   One of the many striking aspects of this lunacy is that it does exactly the opposite of what even a rational leftist with respect to these matters should want to do. The only reasonable view in the vicinity of all this is that gender is not important. Stop making a big deal about it. Forget about it.  Instead, this current crop of incoherent lefty fads turns gender into one of the defining, ineliminable  aspects of human life. Of course, since they confuse sex and gender, they're really not sure what they want to do...

   And all this for about 0.01% of the population...  The rational way to deal with this problem is--for the few schools that would be affected--for the principal to get on the intercom (uh...do they use those anymore? Or do they just text everybody?) and say: Hey. One of the boys has decided that he likes to wear dresses. If any of you little barbarians hassles him, you're outta here. Don't be an asshole. That is all...

   This is like a funhouse-mirror image of even vaguely serious thinking about these topics. Of course it's also probably a move in a far-left academic/activist social re-engineering experiment masquerading as a response to a large, pressing, pre-existing problem. The liberal response would simply to encourage people (and require them in certain cases) to slightly widen the circle of actions and ways of being they tolerate. But that's not enough for the far left social engineers. Their goal is to push policies that presuppose crackpot theories, and to actually encourage certain actions and ways of being by representing them as being extremely common...just another option that everyone faces when growing up...

   Seriously...this is pretty worrisome stuff...