Ontario school district teaches children they choose to be boys or girls

The Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) in Ontario encourages its teachers to tell kindergarten to Grade 1 students that they get to decide whether they are boys or girls.

Former teacher with the WRDSB, Carolyn Burjoski, delivered a speech Tuesday night during which she shared a resource titled The Early Years Document, which was distributed to WRDSB educators for Transgender Week of Awareness in November 2021.



The document advises teachers not to teach the young children in their care facts such as “boys have penises” and “girls have vaginas,” but rather to fill their young impressionable minds with ideas such as: “Many boys have penises, and some others do too…Many girls have vaginas and vulvas, some don’t.”

Then teachers are encouraged to tell children that grownups merely guess the sex of babies and that “you get to decide if you’re a boy, girl, both, or something else,” because the “child has agency.”

Burjoski’s speech, titled Exposing Age-Inappropriate Learning Materials in our Public Schools, was part of an event called Education at the Crossroads organized by the Waterloo chapter of FAIR, the Foundation Against Racism and Intolerance.

In January 2021, Burjoski attempted to raise concerns at a board of trustees meeting about the age-appropriateness of certain books in the WRDSB’s new “diverse” library. She began her presentation by reading excerpts from two books on the shelves of the board's elementary schools, but didn’t even make it four minutes into her speech before she was stopped by Board Chair Scott Piatkowski, accused of violating the Ontario Human Rights Code, and ejected from the meeting. She was immediately suspended and forbidden from contacting any of her students. She has since retired and is taking legal action against the board.

In her speech on Tuesday, Burjoski told the story of an eleven-year-old girl who attended a presentation about gender given by an outside group at the girl’s WRDSB middle school. After the presentation, the girl told her friend: “I didn’t realize until today that I could be a boy.” 

It’s important to note that this student had never questioned her girlness until she attended school that day,” said Burjoski.

“It is my view that telling all children that they can choose if they are a boy or a girl is a radical and unscientific message that is likely to confuse them,” Burjoski continued. “I’m worried that, in an attempt to support a small group of gender-questioning students, we might be destabilizing the identities of many students who would never have questioned their identities as boys or girls.”

“Within the last decade, there has been a meteoric increase of young people rejecting their bodies and identifying as the opposite sex,” Burjoski went on, quoting from a recent Newsweek article. “The vast majority of these youths are female. If this astronomical rise in gender dysphoria were due to greater awareness and acceptance of people who feel distressed by their sex, we would see similar increases across all demographics, including middle-aged women. But that is not happening. We therefore need to seriously consider what if gender dysphoria, particularly among impressionable young girls, is increasing due to social reasons.”

A recent WRDSB Student Census clearly demonstrates this meteoric increase. It found that 24% of participating Grade 7-12 students identified “with at least one 2SLGBTQIA+ orientation.”

Justin Buhr, who writes for the govenment-funded thought police Canadian Anti-Hate Network,  and whose Twitter bio reads "Learning to do good, pursue justice, and correct the oppressor. He/him" tuned in to what he called "a local far-right meeting," reported wildly inaccurate interpretations of what the speakers said, and did some detective work to uncover the location of the event which he revealed hours after it was over. 

Noting the "almost 400 online viewers and about 70 in person," he then made his one accurate statement of thread saying: "Folks, this movement isn't going to disappear anytime soon."