Actually, make that former coach: "I can't coach. I can't be on the bench. I can't help on the ice — Even just to help on the ice, you need this training," he explains. After having assisted on his son's hockey team for three years, the father has been removed from all positions because he questioned the necessity of a mandatory gender identity training course imposed by Hockey Eastern Ontario (formerly the Ottawa District Hockey Association) following a 2017 legal settlement involving a transgender hockey player.
The father has been interviewed by Quillette, and supplied documentation outlining his concerns and tracking his correspondence with other parties mentioned below. These concerns include the possibility that he will be taken up on accusations of transphobia merely for speaking with the media, which is why we have agreed to refer to him here as John Doe.
In part because of past abuse scandals, the coaching of children in hockey (as in most other sports) is now regulated by government and oversight bodies. And even assistant coaches who volunteer on a part-time basis often must submit to background checks. Doe himself has completed a number of mandated courses, and says he fully supports anti-discrimination efforts led by Hockey Eastern Ontario; and the Ontario Hockey Federation (OHF), which oversees the majority of minor hockey in Ontario, from players as young as six years old on up. But he balked when he saw the 33-slide module on gender that was included in his required gender diversity course. "I would be fine taking an awareness course if it [were] factual and based in science," he told Quillette. "But I felt it was too ideological."
The underlying Human Rights Tribunal case that had led to the new training requirements was brought by Jesse Thompson, a trans-identified biologically female child who complained that he'd been prevented from using a boys locker room due to his female anatomy. (At the time Thompson brought his complaint, applicable policies required players 11 years of age and older to change in rooms that accorded with their anatomical sex.) Even critics of the new gender-diversity training regimen seem to agree that Jesse's team handled the situation insensitively. In the aftermath, the OHF delegated the authorship of new training materials to an LGBT activist organization called Egale Canada.
Egale, a Toronto-based charity founded in 1986, has published materials indicating that children understand their gender identity "between the ages of three and five." And in the gender identity course that Egale produced for the OHF, it ratcheted that age down to "between 18-30 months." In 2005, Egale gave legal support to Kimberly Nixon, a trans woman who accused Vancouver Rape Relief of violating human-rights law because it would not permit a male-bodied individual to serve as a volunteer among the clinic's recovering (female) abuse victims.
A slide from the mandatory gender identity training course for peewee hockey coaches
On another slide, amid a parade of variously configured pink and blue male/female stick-people, the concept of "polygender" is introduced to define "people who identify as multiple genders simultaneously and can be several genders all at once. Or they may alternate between their varying gender identities depending on the day or the week." Coaches also get a slide on "genderqueer" individuals, who exist in an undefined extra-dimensional gender space that allows them to "reject gender altogether" — though this is not to be confused with "agender" (it gets its own slide), a label that applies to those who are merely "genderless." Later in the presentation, there are hockey-themed quizzes ("Drag and drop each puck in to the corresponding net") to test coaches' understanding of these rarified terms.
Unfortunately, Isen's response was rendered in the somewhat arcane language typical of her gender-studies background. (In a 2015 paper, Rendering a Neighbourhood Queer, Isen and co-authors sought to use "collective mental mapping and photovoice renderings [to] interpret the queering of urban space as a queer utopian impulse.") In response to Doe's question about "polygender" kids who, Egale claims, can switch genders on a daily basis, for instance, Isen replied:
"It is not outside the realm of possibility that the personal choice of what dressing room may feel the most comfortable and safest for any gender diverse person may shift over time as they navigate their own path toward affirming their identity while also navigating their own vulnerability to the possibility of transphobic harassment or bullying in those spaces."(Isen did not respond to requests for comment.)
Comment: What can one possible say after spouting such nonsense except to spout more nonsense.
"The more I looked into it [on the Internet], the more I saw that I wasn't alone," he adds. "There's a lot of people speaking out and who are unhappy with how the activists are controlling the narrative around this." Indeed, the outsourcing of such materials to Egale may be seen as a case study that illustrates how radicalized theories of gender have been mainstreamed in any number of organizations: At some point of legal or reputational crisis (in this case, corresponding to the resolution of a human-rights complaint), an organization's leadership is pressured to adopt radical policies whose effects last indefinitely. And while the policies may not reflect the community served by the organization, anyone who objects does so at risk of prompting their own human-rights investigation.
Doe says he is actually sympathetic to Hockey Eastern Ontario's position, and would be happy to see the organization fulfill its legal anti-discrimination obligations. But at the very least, he would like to see its instructional materials authored by people who are actually familiar with hockey culture, rather than academics reciting ideological boilerplate.
Unlike some of the other figures who are quoted on this subject in Quillette, Doe isn't a "gender critical feminist," or, indeed, any kind of professional cultural warrior. He's just a father who refused to sign on to a propaganda document as a condition to help his son's hockey team. And I suspect he won't be the last.
Anna Slatz is a Canadian writer. Follow her on Twitter at @YesThatAnna.
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