Making Sense of Parent and Children’s Rights

With the 1 Million March for Children having just recently concluded all across Canada, the debate around gender ideology in Canadian schools has exploded, especially in PEI. All over social media Islanders are finally debating and discussing what is happening in Island schools. This is welcome news, for far too long it seemed that debate and discussions around gender ideology in schools was impossible. As we saw with the group of concerned parents that spread flyers in Charlottetown in early June, anyone that spoke against the beliefs of trans activists was ruthlessly attacked, bullied, and slandered.

For trans-activists and their allies, this intimidation tactic has been effective for many years. Thankfully, it now seems that the efficacy of such tactics has greatly diminished. It’s like the boy who cried wolf too many times; when they call someone hateful, hardly anybody seems to believe them anymore.

Even though the rhetoric is still inflammatory and many discussions quickly devolve into shouting matches, some supporters of the gender guidelines in PEI are providing arguments in support of them and it’s these arguments that I wish to examine with this article.

Children’s Privacy Rights

As far as I am aware, Brenda Picard from the PEI Human Rights Commission is the first person in PEI to use the idea of children’s privacy rights as justification to keep any identity and pronoun changes a secret from a child’s parents.

This idea has quickly disseminated through the public service apparatus down to the activists themselves. I have seen this expression used more than once in discussions, “A parent’s rights end where the rights of the child begin.” The idea being that there is no such thing as parent’s rights, that children are autonomous beings and looking after their rights is the primary concern. I must concede that the argument has a strange appeal to it, who after all is is not for defending the rights of children?

Trying to demarcate the boundaries between a parent and child’s rights was looking like an arduous task, until I remembered I had read on essay from professor Rothbard dealing with this very subject many years ago. What I present next is a simple paraphrasing of his work. I encourage the reader to read the essay for themselves if they have time.

Parent Rights

Compared to most other mammals, the offspring of our species are particularly vulnerable. For many years after their birth, they require constant attention and resources to ensure their survival. In order to preserve our species, someone must be in charge of each new born baby; and not surprisingly, as a society we have decided that the individuals involved in the conception of the baby are the ones responsible for it’s upbringing.

Parents then have jurisdiction over the baby and can claim quasi ownership of it. It’s important to state that this ownership is not absolute. Parents cannot kill, maim, abuse or otherwise aggress against their child. Rothbard believed that instead parents could claim a “trustee-owner” or “guardian” rights over their child, but not any right to aggress.

Therefore, despite the attempts of trans-activists to gaslight parents, it’s perfectly normal and acceptable to view your child as an extension of yourself that you have a responsibility to protect. Parents do have guardian rights over their children and I would argue a moral obligation to protect them from any nefarious activities that might be occurring in their schools.

As long as children accept the food, shelter, guidance and other benefits from their guardians, they must also agree to abide by any regulations set forth by their parents. If one of those regulations is to let them know of any identity or pronoun changes, then children and teachers must respect that wish.

Until children’s brains develop and they gain full use of their faculties, they cannot fully understand the consequences of their actions. This is why children do not enjoy the full rights of an adult. For instance, even the most ardent 2nd amendment activist in the US would struggle to argue for a child’s right to own a machine gun. As guardians, parents are the arbiters that decide how much freedom a child should enjoy, and they do this for the welfare of the child.

So to be plain, children do not have privacy rights until the parents say they do.

I have yet to hear a satisfactory argument as to how children do indeed have privacy rights. What Brenda Picard, Marvin Bernstein— who is the child advocate for PEI— and the gender guidelines point to is rights established by the United Nations for children. So essentially what their argument for a child’s privacy right boils down to is an appeal to authority. The privacy right exists because the United Nations say that it exists and people should just accept their judgement. Not so fast though, the people of PEI did not vote for any members of the United Nations to make decisions for them, so quite frankly appealing to their authority is meaningless.

Parents vs. the State

It’s my opinion that with these new gender guidelines that bureaucrats have vastly overstepped in their roles. They are public servants, the key word here being servants. They should not be dictating policy, but merely follow policy dictated by parents via their elected officials. The problem in PEI is that currently this is backwards, it seems like people in the Public Schools Branch are dictating the policy and elected officials are on stand-by just rubber stamping whatever comes out.

What trans-activists seem to want is more control over people’s children. The PEI Trangender Network posted this reply to their Instagram that makes their their beliefs quite clear.

It seems that parents do not have the “qualifications” necessary to determine what their children should or should not learn in school. This is a strange argument to be making while at the same time admitting that they want to change the school curriculum despite they themselves having no qualifications that I am aware of.

It’s likely that this message was written by Lucky Fusca, who appears to be the main spokesperson for the PEITN. Recently they have expressed the belief that parental rights and transphobia is tied to white supremacy. Again this is a strange argument to be making considering the number of Muslims and Indians that showed up to the march. Considering how split and inflamed the Island is over this issue, why would you add more fuel to the fire by adding race on top of it?

And according to the gender guidelines released, people like Fusca in the PEITN were major “contributors” in creating the new gender guidelines. All I will say is this: I weep for PEI if these are the people most responsible for crafting policy affecting children.