One of the wokest school boards in Ontario outdid itself recently at report card time. A select number of Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) report cards were sent out with comments removing the he/she pronouns and replacing those pronouns with they/their/them.
Some of the teachers who chose to do it actually had to cut and paste to doctor their remarks with the woke pronouns.
One used “her” well-being in part of the description and later switched to “their.” Another started with “she” and switched to “their.”
Yet another appeared to white out the student’s real pronoun to use “them.”
The three report cards seen by True North were from the elementary and secondary panels. The teachers who opted for the genderless pronouns, did it for all students, whether trans or not.
The board’s policy on accommodating students who are transgender in its report cards is (perhaps deliberately) ambiguous. In fact on page 6, the policy says there may be times when the trans child’s legal name will be used such as on “report cards”.
But on page 7, the policy states that “intentionally addressing a student who identifies as transgender by the incorrect name or pronoun will be considered a form of discrimination and harassment.”
The latter has no doubt put a chill into some teachers.
Waterloo parent and former trustee candidate Cristina Bairos Fernandes says an inclusivity workshop was recently held within the board encouraging teachers to use genderless pronouns so as not to misgender students and to keep things neutral.
When Bairos Fernandes posted about the practice on Twitter, she received many responses, several of them agreeing that this was lunacy and confuses and dehumanizes kids.
It’s akin, in my view, to dumbing down the curriculum to ensure that every student gets a victory ribbon.
Some of the respondents, many of them woke teachers, provided comments bordering on abusive.
Bairos Fernandes says she can’t believe the tone of some of the respondents. She says it’s as if they were toddlers having a temper tantrum.
“When challenged with common sense, the tone changes to ‘stop making an issue about a non-issue’,” she says. “It’s only a report card…it’s only pronouns.”
Bairos Fernandes says while some might see “genderless” pronouns as a means of including individuals whose gender identity falls outside of the traditional binary categories of male and female, there is a “growing valid criticism of this trend.”
Not only does it disregard most people’s identity, it’s being sold as “politically correct” and how education officials “do better.”
“When faced with opposition that is too rational to deny, some proponents of ‘identity-less’ pronouns resort to gaslighting, insisting that those who oppose the trend are simply overreacting or promoting a farm-fear-far-right-Christian-nationalism agenda,” she said.
“Being forced to use genderless pronouns is dismissive, erasing and frankly, dehumanizing.”
Once again this is woke ideology gone wild. It’s yet another step down a very slippery slope.
Yet again parents are shut out until the report card ends up in their laps.
