The Quebec Culture and Citizenship (CCQ) course is not yet officially in effect in Quebec schools, although it is already the subject of debate. Demonstrators opposed to the teaching of “gender identity” indeed found themselves facing counter-protesters denouncing hatred against LGBTQ+ people. Several political figures, including Justin Trudeau and Valérie Plante, also tweeted for example that: “The demonstration of hatred that we saw during the anti-LGBTQ+ demonstration in Montreal is shocking and unacceptable.”
Those who remember the debates relating to the Ethics and Religious Culture (ECR) course in 2008 surely remember that they were no less lively, but to my knowledge, we did not see a confrontation such as that observed in and around the recent demonstration. Have people become more radical? I do not believe. In 2008, there were certainly moralistic, sexist and demagogic arguments, but most of the speakers continued to talk about the same thing: religion at school. However, today, a difference seems striking to me: we do not speak the same language nor do we use the same registers of “truths” as starting points.
Despite the calls to order from Justin Trudeau and Valérie Plante, the demonstrators and others, more silent, will continue to question or feel unease with regard to the content offered in sex education in CCQ. Is it not at this level that it would be interesting to situate the discussion, a bit like we would do within the framework of the CCQ course itself?
First, by clarifying what we are really talking about. No slogan seen on the signs really targeted a theme or notion of the CCQ program. If we were to refer to its content, we would first see that the notions regarding sex education are significantly different from primary to secondary, and that they are probably more consensual in terms of the terms used in primary (e.g. conscience of oneself and identity construction; relationships between humans), while respecting parental sensitivities and the development of children.
Then, in secondary school, we would discover that among the compulsory notions of sexuality education, only one particular concept (“gender socialization”) explicitly addresses the exploration of new norms in matters of sexuality, in particular to criticize “stereotypes and gender norms” as well as “sexual and gender roles”. It is not a question here of imposing on students the “discovery” of their genre, but rather of being made aware of this new social reality.
Starting from the hypothesis that the debate on sex education is a conflict of truths rather than an a priori place of violence (which does not exclude the fact that certain hateful incidents have taken place), we could perhaps- be better understood in the manner of a “mapping of controversies” by putting into perspective the complexity of the different perspectives at the heart of sexuality education.
This recognition of a plurality of points of view more fundamentally calls into question the horizon of critical thinking to be valued within CCQ and in matters of sexuality education, what Michel Fabre describes as “dialectics of the question”. [problématisation] and out of question [faits] “. As this philosopher of education reminds us in Education and (post)truth, doubt is important in the school context, but should not impose itself on and on everything; it must be based on certain “pivotal beliefs”, otherwise it has no real meaning.
However, it is this “background” of indisputable elements, inevitable and so important to define, which seems precisely at stake in matters of sexuality education. This also seems to me to be one of the main reasons for reframing the debate and explicitly distinguishing the basic proposals from the elements to be discussed in the program. However, in the epistemological framework of the program (outside the question), there are implicitly several references to social constructivism, as found in Gender disorders by Judith Butler, often considered “radical” for its anti-naturalist stance.
This relationship is, for example, visible in the definition of sex provided in the program glossary: “Social category which divides the population between women and men based on physiological characteristics”. Should this choice to evacuate the biological substrate of sexuality, even to criticize it, be discussed, problematized and put in relation to other perspectives on sexuality (e.g. psychoaffective, social)? In any case, it seems to me that this is an important question which perhaps illustrates the more complex scope of the current or future debate on sex education.