“Are We Trying to Teach Promotion?”: Reactionary Politics and the Anti–Gender-Inclusive Education Movement in New Brunswick, Canada

Abstract

Context: Conservative incursions toward gender and sexuality education across Canada have increased in recent years. Education systems are attending to the spread of an anti–gender-inclusive education movement seeking to push a national crusade against so-called gender ideology. What lit the fuse in New Brunswick, Canada, was the former Conservative government’s decision to amend the province’s school-based 2SLGBTQIA+ inclusion policy (named Policy 713) in 2023, mandating that teachers disclose to parents if students changed their names and pronouns connected to their gender. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the discursive strategies used by the former New Brunswick government to justify the amendments to Policy 713. This study aims not only to contribute to ongoing discussions about reactionary policymaking in Canada and elsewhere but also to interrogate how school systems and state actors construct, constrain, and deny the humanity of queer and trans youth. Research Design: This study employs a critical document and policy analysis on a sampling of local media coverage released throughout the Policy 713 amendment process. It focuses on how the former government’s policy justifications aligned with broader anti–gender-inclusive education movements. Data were organized thematically around three central tactics identified in the media and policy discourse. Conclusions: In making queer and trans youth and the teachers who support them a major space for mobilization, the anti–gender-inclusive education movement gave conservative politicians in New Brunswick the narrative and political cover to roll back a policy that supported 2SLGBTQIA+ students in schools. A complex debate was reduced to a polarizing conflict over parental rights and 2SLGBTQIA+ rights, and failed to confront the related currents of transphobia, heteronormativity, and enduring deficit constructs of queer and trans youth in the province’s schools. To create transformative schooling spaces for queer and trans youth, educational communities must scrutinize not only the overt playbooks of politicians but also the enduring structural harms that frame queerness and transness as threatening and unwanted in schools—an engagement that moves beyond reactive policy tweaks and toward meaningful transformations that honor queerness and transness in the spaces of education.