Under other circumstances, former school trustee Barry Neufeld may have retired as one of your curmudgeonly, albeit amusing, elderly neighbours, equipped with a brash sense of humour, a glass of wine and a cigarette. Had he not introduced himself at a recent panel event I spoke on in Victoria, British Columbia (BC) about the harms of gender-identity ideology, I would never have pegged him as a supposed hate-monger. He seemed rather jovial, in fact. Yet the Canadian media and some of Canada’s most powerful unions see things differently. They have made Neufeld their nemesis.
Neufeld is now in his seventies. His troubles began in 2017. This was when he discovered a new gender-identity curriculum for kids coming down the pike in his school district of Chilliwack, BC. This was the year that the SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) 123 programme was implemented in public schools across the province, with the aim of making classrooms more ‘inclusive’ for LGBT-identified kids. That same year, Bill C-16 was passed by the national parliament, adding ‘gender identity’ to the list of protected characteristics under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Both pieces of legislation were introduced with little public debate and most Canadians were completely unaware of what was even happening.
But Neufeld noticed and spoke out on Facebook, criticising SOGI 123 for instructing ‘children that gender is not biologically determined, but is a social construct’. ‘At the risk of being labelled a bigoted homophobe’, he wrote, ‘I have to say that I support traditional family values and I agree with the [American College of Pediatricians] that allowing little children to choose to change gender is nothing short of child abuse’.
Hellbound and Down 