In a bizarre video to mark Menstrual Health Day, the education director and associate director of the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) have said they’re working to “reduce the stigma” attached to menstruators so that classrooms can be “inclusive spaces.”
Jeewan Chanicka – who writes his name all lower-case – and Lila Read appeared in what can only be described as a Saturday Night Live-esque production, saying their big priority for the day is to address “period poverty.”
Read says they’re “very proud” of the fact that they’ve put free menstrual products in their schools since 2019.
Menstrual Health Day is a global movement that takes place on May 28 and draws attention to the stigma attached to menstruation and the barriers that some have to getting proper menstrual products.
But as Ontario school boards try to out-woke each other, the menstruation agenda now includes an equally surreal gender-equity imperative.
For example, Chanicka said they don’t refer to the products as “feminine hygiene products” because not all people who menstruate are feminine.
“Identifying people who are menstruators, identifying people who have their menstruation as opposed to identifying it as a particular gender is so important,” he said
He noted that Indigenous menstruators face additional barriers but didn’t say what those barriers are.
Chanicka also said there are those who want to make students feel “ashamed” for menstruating, adding that we should all be like Indigenous people who celebrate their periods.
Read claimed that in the past, some students would choose to “stay home” because they didn’t have access to menstrual products.
“We (also) talked to students who would attend school but spend the whole day filled with anxiety because they didn’t have access to products that would support them in their menstruation,” she said.
“We want to be a system where everyone who is menstruating can be their best fullest selves,” added chanicka.
Meanwhile, WRDSB ESL teacher Kimiko Shibata – @ESL_fairy who blocked me on Twitter after I wrote about the plight of teacher Carolyn Burjoski – talks about menstrual flow in a 33-minute video called Menstrual Equity Matters. PERIOD.
Shibata, who sounds like a National Public Radio host, speaks with Grade 11 student Gaby about “people who menstruate” – calling a gender neutral term like ‘people’ “very important language to use.”
Gaby responds that it’s not just girls who menstruate but also non-binary and transgendered people who have their periods.
“Not just women menstruate…it’s kind of pushed under the rug and made more of a taboo for people who don’t identify as women,” she said.
It saddens me to think how indoctrinated (and confused about biology) poor Gaby already is in Grade 11.
Shibata smiled, saying that’s absolutely why period products would be in all washrooms – including non-gender washrooms.
It never ceases to amaze me how easily these woke school boards and their community supporters find causes that deflect from their true mission to educate kids.
But the fact that a school board director – who describes himself as an international activist and who does not capitalize his name – would spend time promoting menstrual equity in a video suggests to me that the WRDSB has truly lost its way.
Chanicka’s mandate is supposed to be to ensure the 64,000 students under his watch graduate with the necessary literacy, math and critical thinking skills to operate in the real world – period – not to be experts on non-gender-specific menstrual flow.
