Jennifer DeLeskie is a Montreal-based writer, former lawyer, and parent of three LGBTQ+ children. She sits on the board of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, where she is involved in outreach to at-risk youth.
At my wedding 23 years ago, my father-in-law chose to read a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, and it is one you’re probably familiar with: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
Although The Prophet may strike a hackneyed note to those of us who remember the 1970s, the passage ended up shaping the way my husband and I raised our three kids. From the time they were babies, we saw our role as accompanying our children on their paths, providing them with care and support that varied according to their age and circumstances, but never seeking to control them (except perhaps in restaurants when they were toddlers). While we certainly made decisions on their behalf – often when they were young, less often as they grew older – our goal was always to foster their growth, self-knowledge and well-being, and to treat them as autonomous human beings rather than as extensions of ourselves. Our children were with us, but they did not belong to us.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Gibran’s words in the context of the so-called parental rights movement, which forms the basis of recent legislation passed in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, whereby teachers must obtain parental consent before using the preferred names and pronouns for students under the age of sixteen. Here, the parent’s right to information about their child, specifically their child’s gender, and their right to determine whether and how their child expresses their gender, is being enshrined and privileged by politicians in a way that trumps the child’s right to privacy and their right to explore and express their gender on their own terms. And it has become a growing political trend: ahead of an October election, Manitoba Progressive Conservative Leader Heather Stefanson has campaigned on expanding parents’ rights in the Public Schools Act, while Ontario Premier Doug Ford has told supporters that “it’s not up to the teachers. It’s not up to the school boards to indoctrinate our kids.”
This legislation is profoundly disturbing – and not just because it will make both school and home less safe for many trans and genderqueer kids who may be outed by this policy, or forced to keep their identity under wraps, with potential psychological consequences. There is something offensive to me about the idea that a person is owed the most intimate and private revelations of another human being simply by virtue of being their parent. Regardless of age, each person’s experience of gender and sexuality is a unique and individual phenomenon, belonging to that person alone. It should be shared or kept private as one wishes.
When, at 14, our eldest child came out to us as trans, my husband and I were relieved and grateful that she felt loved and safe enough to share this hard-won knowledge with us. We viewed her disclosure as an invitation to know her more deeply, one we gladly accepted. At no point did we feel we were entitled to this information, however; indeed, we would not have welcomed hearing it from one of her teachers against her will. That would have felt like a gross violation of her privacy, something we would have wanted no part of.
To me, it seems that the very notion of parents’ rights is backward; as parents, we should be thinking about the duties we owe our children, rather than any so-called rights we believe we are entitled to exercise over them. One such duty, in fact, is our duty to protect their rights. That includes their right to privacy, which most children will increasingly choose to exercise as they approach adolescence and beyond. That includes their right to explore their gender and sexuality on their own terms and according to their own timeline – and, crucially for LGBTQ+ kids, that includes their right to come out whenever, wherever, and to whomever they wish.
So, here is my message to those who insist on asserting the primacy of parents’ rights over children over the rights of children: These kids don’t belong to you. Stop trying to control them. Or, as Kahlil Gibran put it more eloquently: “You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. … You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backwards nor tarries with yesterday.”