Toby Goes to Catholic School: Gender Expression Human Rights, and Ontario Catholic School Board Policy

Abstract

In this article, we share findings from an analysis of Ontario Catholic school board policy documents (N = 179) containing Canada’s newest human rights grounds: gender expression and gender identity. Our major finding may be unsurprising—that Ontario Catholic boards are generally not responding to Toby’s Act (passed in 2012) at the level of policy, as few boards have added these grounds in a way that enacts the spirit of that legislation. While this finding is likely unsurprising, our study also yielded findings that unsettle any facile binary of “Catholic boards/bad” and “public secular boards/good” in relation to gender diversity. We also leverage our findings to suggest a striking possibility for a vigorous and doctrinally-compatible embrace of gender expression protections in Catholic schools, if not gender identity protections. We argue that fear of gender expression protections may stem from an erroneous conflation of “gender expression” with “gender identity” when these are in fact separate grounds—a conflation that is also endemic within secular Ontario school board policy; this doubles as a conflation of gender expression with “transgender,” as the latter is unfailingly linked with gender identity human rights. We make a series of recommendations for policy, and a case for Catholic schools embracing their legal duty to provide a learning environment free from gender expression discrimination without doctrinal conflict and arguably with ample doctrinal support, so that students of all gender expressions can flourish regardless of whether they are or will come to know they are transgender.

Scaling Gender and Sexual Diversity Policies in K-12 Schools

“…The propensity of Illinois school boards to adopt the exact language of intermediary agencies in guidance documents runs counter to the findings from a Canadian document analysis of 2017 school board documents concerning gender identity and expression. (Airton et al, 2019; Kirkup et al, 2020). Kirkup et al (2020) report only two local documents used the exact language from the government entity mandating more inclusive educational approaches, the Ontario Human Rights Commission.…”

“…Similarly, discrimination and bullying based on gender expression rely on gender expectations and the subsequent actions when students violate gender norms. As Airton et al (2019) and Kirkup et al (2020) have noted in the Canadian education system, protections from discrimination based on gender expression presumably apply to all students, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation. Explicitly naming protected classes of students can (but do not always) provide a signal from the district about the gender values.…”

LGBTQ+-Inclusive Professional Development in Elementary Schools: Does It Matter to Schoolwide Discipline?

“…The authors explain how these legal protections could extend beyond the protection of transgender and gender nonconforming people, since all people have a gender expression. Airton et al (2019) and McQuillan (2022) expand this argument further in their descriptions of administrative guidance documents concerning transgender students in Canada and the United States, respectively. The authors illustrate how policymakers provide more nuanced understandings of gender to educators that also extend to all students' gender nonconforming expression, although protecting transgender students is the stated goal of the policy implementation documents.…”

“…Our results indicated lower disciplinary rates among all students in schools that adopted the IPD program, not just lower disciplinary actions for LGBTQ + students. Educational scholars and activists alike have called upon school leaders to incorporate a more nuanced understanding of gender into school reforms (Airton et al, 2019;Butler, 2004;Kirkup et al, 2020;Mayo, 2017). Mayo (2017) pushes educational researchers to consider the complex nature of how gender has been understood across contexts and time.…”

Boys, girls, and everyone else: Ontario public school board responses to gender diversity

“…In 2012, the Ontario Human Rights Commission added “gender identity” and “gender expression” as prohibited grounds for discrimination. This addition to the Ontario Human Rights Code (The Code) was the result of the passing of Toby's Act , a tri‐partisan bill supported by Ontario's three leading political parties (Airton et al., 2019; Martino et al., 2019). Toby's Act was the consequence of ongoing activism led by Ontario's trans and nonbinary communities (Airton et al., 2019; also see Iskander & Shabtay, 2018).…”