Show caption ‘For parents to refuse their teenaged children the autonomy to safely understand themselves is only a hair’s breadth from abuse.’ Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters Forcibly outing LGBT children to their parents is monstrous Drew Brown A proposal in Alberta, which would require schools to inform parents if their teenagers join gay-friendly groups, shows how fragile social progress is – even in Canada

Thu 10 May 2018 11.00 BST Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

Share via Email 2 years old

How much control does a parent have over the inner life of their adolescent child?

This thorny philosophical issue has come to a head in Canada, where the conservative party in Alberta has endorsed a policy that would require schools to inform parents if their children enroll in “extracurricular activities of a religious or sexual nature”.

It might sound as if they’re casting a wide net, but the policy is really laser-focused on one target: the Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) popping up at local high schools. For the uninitiated, GSAs are student-run clubs that offer a welcoming space where LGBT students and their straight friends work to make schools more inclusive. They originated around San Francisco Bay in the late 1980s, and have since spread across the continent. The membership of the United Conservative party (UCP) is effectively demanding that schools immediately report any LGBT-friendly behaviour by students to their parents.

Progressive critics have been quick to cry out that forcibly outing LGBT children is monstrous, especially given homelessness and violence disproportionately affect queer youth. The UCP’s leadership went so far as to beg its members not to adopt the policy: overt homophobia has burned Alberta conservatives before, most famously after a candidate’s outburst about homosexuals being destined for the “lake of fire”.

Although the argument is framed around the rights of parents, what’s really at stake are the rights of the child

Supporters of the policy successfully countered that the real monstrosity is a godless public school system, trampling parents’ rights to raise their children in accordance with whatever values they see fit. The organisation Parents for Choice in Education said: “If Albertans don’t speak up for parents’ freedom, politicians will take us even further towards a ‘one size fits all’ education system, step by gradual step, collecting taxes and returning the money to parents for education only on the condition that parents raise their children in the way chosen by the state.”

Although they’ve framed that argument around the rights of parents, what’s really at stake are the rights of the child. The UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (articles 13 through 16) is pretty clear: kids have the right to freedom of thought, expression, association, and a reasonable expectation of personal privacy (so long as there’s no threat to public safety).

The family, as the alpha and omega of human society, is a thoroughly political institution: every aspect of the household, from cohabitation to the distribution of domestic labour, is a medium and method of exercising, expanding, or limiting power.

In this light, parenting itself is best understood as a kind of suzerainty. Taking 18 years or so to develop adult faculties in children requires the stewardship of their parents and, as they say, the rest of the village. Parents exercise the most total control in infancy, and gradually slacken the reins until their kids reach equal legal standing.

The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, at a pride parade in Toronto. Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images

So it is strange to hear this argument for schoolyard surveillance from people otherwise obsessed with the idea of individual self-responsibility against statist oppression. They would save us from secularism’s sinister invitation to know thyself by imposing a tyrannical dominance over the minds and bodies of their children. One side of their mouth rages against coddled college students, shut up in “safe spaces” to escape from reality; the other side screams that children are property until the age of 18.

But autonomy is not a switch that flicks from “off” to “on” at 18. Self-possession is a muscle. It has to be trained. Comfortably navigating adolescent sexuality is an excruciating experience even for those of us with majority vanilla tastes, let alone for anyone with the audacity to be “different”. The first rule of childhood is that divergence from the norm is proportionally punished by your peers. For parents to refuse their teenage children the autonomy to safely understand and ground themselves in the world, on the teenager’s own terms, is only a hair’s breadth from abuse.

Teach your children whatever you want at home. Teach them that God’s biggest concern about the state of the world in 2018 is that two 15-year-old boys in Red Deer might kiss. But no one is forcing teenagers into Gay-Straight Alliances: they exist because students want to support other students. There is no need or reason for a school to “out” anybody. Any child in a healthy family, regardless of their parents’ feelings about the LGBTQ+ “lifestyle”, will eventually feel free and secure enough to discuss it with them – or choose not to – on their own terms. And any parent at home seething with rage about whether their child is fraternising with the dreaded homosexual almost certainly does not deserve to know about it.

Whether or not the UCP actually runs on this platform (its leader, Jason Kenney, has suggested he might ignore any distasteful policies passed by its membership, despite campaigning on the opposite), the party is still widely expected to win the next provincial election in 2019. There is a lot more to fear from this kind of evangelicalism than “merely” an uptick in brutalised queer youth. Every political victory for minority communities, no matter how resounding or well-established, is always fragile. There is no magic threshold of social progress beyond which the troglodytes can’t drag us back, even in the self-styled liberal utopia of Canada.