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The president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association is calling for a more respectful and collaborative discussion surrounding gender issues after new guidelines were released last week for school boards regarding transgender policies.

Mark Ramsankar welcomed the NDP’s new guidelines and said the recent “over-the-top” rhetoric about the issue is unhelpful.

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“For me and my members, whether they teach in Catholic, public or francophone schools, this is all about helping us to meet our professional and legal obligations to ensure that our classrooms are safe and caring places of learning for every student,” Ramsankar said in a news release.

He said some of the claims about the guidelines would be “laughable if they were not so hurtful.”

“We have people who are imagining the most bizarre scenarios — they seem to believe that the use of the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ will be somehow banned or that the consequence of accommodating a few transgendered students will be that teen boys will be traipsing at will through the girls’ change room (or vice versa) when the intention is clearly to support those students who face the wrenching challenges of navigating through the world when their gender identity does not match their sex,” Ramsankar said.