'Leave Our Kids Alone.' School Under Fire for Cancelling Transgender Play for 5-Year-Olds
A Catholic school district is facing backlash for canceling a play about gender identity aimed at 5- to 10-year-olds.
The play is called "Boys, Girls and Other Mythological Creatures" and it's the newest controversy in an ongoing saga surrounding gender identity and transgenderism.
The show was booked for five elementary schools in the Niagara Catholic School District in Ontario, Canada until school officials raised concerns and canceled the showings.
"I fear these cancellations may be based on misinformation, grown out of fear, intolerance, transphobia, homophobia and misogyny," wrote Jessica Carmichael, the artistic director of the Carousel Playhouse.
Produced by the St. Catharines-based Carousel Playhouse, the play centers on an 8-year-old boy named Simon who believes he's really a girl named Simone.
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"In the play, Simon(e) feels boxed in by the restrains of gender," Carmichael wrote in a letter posted on the playhouse website.
Simon dresses like a girl and plays with Barbie Dolls in the show, something the Catholic school district believes is not appropriate, especially for children as young as five-years-old.
The school district released a statement claiming that the play "was not originally presented as a play about gender identity."
However, LGBT activists defend the play, saying it meets Canada's Ministry of Education's guidelines regarding sex education for elementary school children.
The curriculum states: "It is also critical to student success to create an atmosphere in which students of all body shapes and sizes, abilities, gender identities and sexual orientations, and ethnocultural, racial and religious backgrounds feel accepted, comfortable and free from harassment."
Clinton Somerton of Campaign Life Coalition praised the Catholic board for its actions.
"Pope Francis condemned attempts to indoctrinate children into gender ideology, expressing outrage over such sexual propaganda by saying, 'Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex … And this is terrible!'" Somerton told LifeSiteNews.
"So the Niagara Catholic District School Board was wisely following the Holy Father's guidance by protecting its students from the psycho-sexual molestation of this theatre group's propaganda-in-a-play."
Some parents are upset that schools are now facilitating conversations about gender and sex that should be left between parents and their children.
"What other new ways will people come up with to force this propaganda on our kids? Enough is enough," says Tanya Granic Allen, mother of four and executive director of the Ontario-based parents' rights group Parents As First Educator. "Leave our kids alone."
