The Niagara Catholic District School Board is facing a media criticism and suggestions of “transphobia” for canceling performances of a play about gender identity that were booked in five elementary schools. The move came just two days after the first performance and the messaging contradicted the doctrines of the Catholic Church.

Produced by the St. Catharines-based Carousel Playhouse, which lists Pride Niagara as a community partner, the play is called Boys, Girls and Other Mythological Creatures and features an 8-year-old boy who dresses as a girl and questions his gender.

The first performance of the play in the Catholic school district, for Grades 1 to 4 students at Mary Ward School was on April 25.

Carousel Playhouse artistic director Jessica Carmichael and playwright Mark Crawford to posted open letters on the theatre website questioning the board’s motivation.

“In the play, Simon(e) feels boxed in by the restraints of gender,” wrote Carmichael. “I fear these cancellations may be based on misinformation, grown out of fear, intolerance, transphobia, homophobia and misogyny.”

Playwright Crawford, whose work includes a play about a homosexual couple setting up a bed and breakfast, was even more blunt.

“Simon is afraid of what will happen if they express who they really are,” he wrote.

“I get afraid … when the motivating factor for canceling performances of this play is a few adults’ own fear, prejudice, and hatred.”

And then Carmichael went to the press, because the board “would not speak to me,” she told LifeSiteNews.

Education director for the Niagara Catholic school board John Crucco released a statement that after the play’s first performance at Mary Ward, “it was brought to the attention of the board” the play was “not age-appropriate for a predominantly primary audience.”

The play “was not originally presented as a play about gender identity,” which required discussions with students both before and after the play to “discuss how the plays [sic] message aligns with various curriculum expectations,” he said.

In the sex-ed curriculum set by Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government, the “Grade 3 curriculum … begins to talk about cultural values, beliefs, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.,” Crocco said in the Globe report. “There were students [at the play] in Grade 1 and 2.”

Clinton Somerton of Campaign Life Coalition, which has been fighting the Liberal sex-ed curriculum, praised the Catholic board for its actions.

“Pope Francis condemned attempts to indoctrinate children into gender ideology, expressing outrage over such sexual propaganda by saying ‘Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex … And this is terrible!’” Somerton told LifeSiteNews in an email.

“So the Niagara Catholic District School Board was wisely following the Holy Father’s guidance by protecting its students from the psycho-sexual molestation of this theatre group’s propaganda-in-a-play.”

At the same time, the Catholic board “should not to be afraid of the bludgeon-words ‘homophobe,’ ‘transphobe’ and the like, that are too often used to intimidate decent people into silence and acquiescence to the mental and spiritual molestation of their children,” Somerton said.