Some thoughts on Pride, May 2025 (Long Read)
From the McBride’s Calendar
Local, local, local. When we choose fundraisers at McBride’s, I look for local impact. I look for things that moms care about, because moms are everything here. I try to choose projects that will benefit dozens or hundreds of people, rather than, say, a single sports team, choir or club. And I have a strong bias toward helping schools, elementaries most of all.
This school year alone, our customers have contributed over $14,000 for five schools in Medicine Hat, four of them elementaries. Give yourselves a hand, people.
Schools are key to supporting Pride. Always have been, always will be, although I’m sure they don’t want the attention, the conflict, the focus. I’m sure there isn’t a Principal anywhere who wants their washrooms to be the center of local controversy, or to have to explain in detail the latest Final Version of their school’s pronoun policy.
While ideologues on all sides spit fire in Forever Wars on the internet, schools day by day try to implement the only real policy that matters - supporting our children.
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I was introduced to Crescent Heights High School’s drama productions a few years ago, when a parent asked me to make something to feed the cast and crew during their run of Sponge Bob. I’ve seen several plays since then, and believe that CHHS has a solid system for producing high-quality musical theatre.
Bob was kinda fabulous, and that tracks with my memories of high school drama. Mean Girls, like the movie, had a queer kid among the oddball friendgroup of the lead character Cady. The most impressive show (from a Pride perspective) was Head Over Heels, which started out pretty gay and just got gayer as it went on, until it peaked with two girls in center spotlight singing a love song crescendo to each other while fifty classmates danced around them in celebration.
I watched that performance and thought about the sheer number of decisions involved. How many adults - parents, musicians, teachers, admins - had to get on board with how gay that play was, and decide to go ahead with it. Then later, how many more parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and others had to face it straight on: if I want to see my nephew, my niece, my daughter, my son, my grandchild in this play, if I’m going to watch and clap afterwards and tell them I loved it and they did a great job and share in their pride and excitement at being part of something so wonderful - then I’m going to have to expose myself for one night to some live theatre that is gay AF.
That’s one example of “doing the work”, and there is work being done in our schools, and I’m proud of it. I hope you are too.
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I have since seen quite a few drama productions by middle and high school kids, and there is queer culture throughout. While Head Over Heels was explicitly a story about gay love, in other cases the stories merely had queer characters in them. I’ve seen boys playing girls, I’ve seen girls playing boys, I’ve seen presumably straight kids playing queer kids. A couple weeks ago I saw a girl playing a gay man who was pretending to be a straight man, in a play that was not even about queerness in any important way. That same girl’s English class had just finished The Marrow Thieves, a Canadian novel that features a native guy searching for his abducted husband.
You probably noticed that the last paragraph contained a lot of assumptions. Like when I wrote “I’ve seen boys playing girls…” how did I know they were boys? There was one Grade 11 production that had a crewcut kid playing a boy so convincingly that it wasn’t until the lights came on that I realized it was a girl I had known for years. Does it matter? Do I need to know? Do I have a right to know? Why would I even care, when it would be creepy to even care?
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That question of right-to-know is central to how I think about Alberta’s queer issues today. Among their recent batch of anti-queer laws was a requirement for parental opt-in for any instruction about sex, sexuality, and gender identity. The Marrow Thieves isn’t about gay people, it’s about colonizers hunting and killing aboriginal people for a unique bone marrow component that grants immunity to disease. The book also happens to contain a gay character: does that mean parents should be consulted before their kids can read it? To me, this question is really asking whether parents have to right to push gay people out of perceived existence.
Naturally, this is impossible. Your kids know this too, because they go to school. You can persecute somebody, but you can’t disappear them.
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Let’s say you and your wife have just been seated at Earl’s place. You’re about to enjoy a lovely dinner in a nice restaurant with your favorite person. The waitress greets you warmly, tells you the specials, takes your drink order and says she’ll be back in a moment to see how you’re doing with the menu.
“She seems nice,” you remark to your wife, who responds with an odd look.
“What?” you ask. “That wasn’t a she,” says your wife.
Your server returns, and you pay close attention this time. You order appetizers, mains, ask a couple questions and choose your sides, order another drink. Through the whole thing your server is a delight - professional, friendly, competent. They finally leave, and you watch their ass as they walk away, gathering some final evidence before turning to your wife and saying “There’s no way that’s a man.”
Your wife rolls her eyes. “Fine. Have it your way. Let’s enjoy our dinner.”
The point of the story is this: You don’t know, and you can’t ask, so you’ll never know for sure. And what exactly is it you want to know? Do you need to know if your server is “really a man”? What does that mean? In order to enjoy your dinner, must you know whether your server was born with a penis?
Can you accept that you will never know, and that you don’t have a right to know? Can you live with this discomfort; even better, can you find a place emotionally where you have no discomfort?
If you were to sit in the lobby of any school in Medicine Hat during class change, and guess the (binary) gender of every kid who walked past you, you would be wrong sometimes, and this is ok. You do not have the right to instantly know whether every person you see is a male or female according to your definition. What the anti-queer legislation is about, in my opinion, is gender performance, but before I explain what I mean by that, let’s just be clear:
It’s not about preventing sex-change operations on children. Nobody is performing sex change operations on children. It’s not about kitty litter boxes. There are no litter boxes in any school, anywhere, and there never have been.
What the anti-queer legislation (what MLA Justin Wright would call “parental rights”) is about is the insistence that every child be immediately identifiable as “male” or “female”; that is, cis-male and cis-female. Furthermore, no schoolchild should ever learn that people beyond the school might not wish to be called the “man” or “woman” you at first want to call them, or to act like you think a man or woman should act. For the sake of the children, the parental rights position is that everyone must perform Man, or perform Woman, in their assigned role.
There is no obvious reason for this demand , other than the discomfort of some cis-het grownups, since the kids and their teachers are almost universally fine with gender ambiguity. Seriously, you’re probably grown up enough to get through a meal at Earl’s without knowing whether your server has a penis, right? Do you need to know what all your children’s classmates look like naked? Cuz that’s kinda creepy.
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I will admit that, in my current thinking, the pronoun thing may have gone too far, too fast in the past few years, and I’m thinking mainly here not about kids but rather adults working in larger companies or organizations.
My little bakery only has a dozen people working in it, and the only person responsible for setting the tone here is me, so I personally had all the time I wanted to form opinions and make decisions about pronouns and whatnot.
Where I’m at now is I think a good chunk of the pronoun thing was a fad, and, whatever, there’s lots of fads. I was in school in Calgary in the 80s, and we had some fads. Boys with long permed hair and pink spandex (glam rock), rumours that if you played some records backwards you’d become a Satanist (death metal, Eagles, Zeppelin, many more), boys with eye liner and lipstick (Culture Club, Wham! countless others), and girls with jeans so tight they couldn’t sit down, all sprinkled liberally with fancy feathered roach clips and pot leaf accessories.
Not every boomer was happy seeing their sons dressed like David Lee Roth or Boy George. Not every dad got through his first exposure to camel toe with perfect composure. But the schools got through it, as they always do, because kids are kids and teens, especially, are always going to push boundaries, and teachers know this. There wasn’t any grand conspiracy between Flock of Seagulls and the UN to turn Generation X into homosexuals, or to turn Sabbath fans into bat-eating sadists. It was just part of growing up.
I have been lucky, in my privileged position, to take my time and place my organization where I want it (a safe space). I know that a lot of people were not given that opportunity, that they were very suddenly told they had to modify their email tags to include their pronouns, that they had to sign into Zoom meetings with preferred pronouns, that they had to inquire and use preferred pronouns in every professional encounter, every conference, every tradeshow, every sign-in, every handshake, every nametag, every email, every time - or else.
From where I am now, in 2025, I can see that it went too far, too fast. I’m sorry that it came across as tyrannical to so many. It was, to some significant degree, a bit of a fad among the youth, and it somehow got picked up and turned into a cudgel for progressives to terrorize adults with.
The backlash is unfortunate, but I think now, understandable. If progressives can go so far as to make you think we’ll fire you if you don’t sign into a conference as “he/they”, then we shouldn’t be surprised when you come back at us with Bill 27 once you get your team into office. I’m sorry it got to this point. Best of intentions and all that…
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I was talking with some teenagers recently. “What’s up with the pronoun thing at Hat High these days?” I asked.
“Nobody talks about it anymore,” they said. “I mean, if I’m talking to someone for a while, I’ll find a way to slip an inquiry in there just to make sure I’ve got it right, but basically no one’s talking about it.”
“Why not?” I asked. “They’re scared to, I think.” said the kids.
“When you look at the people around you, is there as much queerness as there was a couple years ago?”
“Yes,” said the kids. “There are still lots of queer people.”
“So, people at school are more afraid to talk about queer things, compared to a couple years ago, but they’re not yet scared to actually BE queer, is that right?”
“Yes,” said the kids, “Like, no one is getting beat up for being queer. It’s like, we all know it’s cringey those moments when the sweet librarian lady comes in and spends five minutes talking about pronouns and declaring the safe space and all that, but at least then the queer kids knew they were safe. Now the teachers never bring it up, and the queer kids know they aren’t as safe anymore.”
“Is there a GSA?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t even know who to ask. I don’t think there is.”
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I assume, from some parents’ point of view, this also means that their cis/het kids are safer from the queer mafia than they were a couple years ago. I assure you, as much as a town full of rednecks was suddenly dismayed in 2022 when all their kids suddenly started experimenting with genderqueer identities (and their teachers went along with it), it was no different in the 80s when the kids suddenly started wrapping themselves in spandex, pentagrams and pot leaves. Then, as now, it’s nothing to get worked up over. (Besides, every teenager knows that the madder you get, the more they win.)
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Pride has many hats to wear, and it’s hard to wear all of them at the same time. The issues of an established adult community like Calgary beltline or Vancouver west end are likely different from the issues of questioning teenagers in a Medicine Hat middle school. Central, always, though - is safety. As everyone who has ever been bullied at school knows, sometimes the only safety is in hiding. Other times, when you’re lucky, safety can be found in a group.
There was some attempt to in the past few years to force basically everyone to declare themselves “safe persons” for LGBTQ by the simple convenience of declaring pronouns. This wasn’t fair. It was like W Bush in 2001 saying you’re either with us or with the terrorists, when really the world is too complicated for that kind of binary.
I have a lot of faith in our schools and in our teachers and in our kids. I asked the teens whether they felt that “Pride” as a word or as a concept even related to their lives or if that word belongs to Gen Xers and Millennials, and the teens said “No way, Pride is definitely a thing.” I know that Pride doesn’t have the glamour this year that it had recently; I know that this isn’t the year to ask for a rainbow sidewalk, but I sure as heck hope that queer kids don’t have to hide at school.
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Pride in Medicine Hat has a couple of great leaders now with Kim and Jenni. They are hard-working, intelligent, organized and committed. They are worth supporting. They are not hiding.
You may have opinions about DEI and meritocracy. You may have tattooed your kid’s name on your leg and be a little upset that your kid no longer uses that name. You may wonder what happened to your right to just be normal and not have queer propaganda shoved down your throat. You may be wondering if in a separate Alberta we could just make all this go away, and we’d all be the same and think the same things and live the same way.
It’s ok, we’ve all been through a lot these past few years. Alberta is going to be ok. Your kids are going to be ok, as long as we keep taking care of their schools. You don’t have to declare your pronouns on every Zoom meeting, and you won’t get fired if your computer is missing a rainbow sticker. Your fear is real, and deserves respect. Queer people have real fears too, and they also deserve respect. Bullying is not acceptable. We can all be Canadians, we can all be Albertans, there is room here for all of us. Pride is not exclusionary. You don’t have to come in, but you are invited, you are wanted, and you are welcome.