SOGI...or Multiculturalism?

Protests in 2023 over public school curricula and library books regarding gender reveal that a fundamental Canadian value may be under stress.

“Hundreds Rally in BC for Parental Rights, Protesting the Sexualization of Children in Schools” Rebel News  https://tinyurl.com/y7tc7j87. Reproduced with permission 

Introduction: The Interfaith Backlash Against SOGI

On September 20^th 2023, Canada saw the nationwide “1 Million March 4 Children” protests. Organized by Ottawa-based Muslim businessman and community leader Kamel El-Cheikh, the marches united people of many different faiths (as well as secular gender critical Canadians) under the slogan “Hands off our kids,” and were aimed, according to organizers, at standing up for their rights as Muslim families to their own beliefs (within a multicultural society) regarding gender and sexuality, in the face of mandatory curricula promoting gender identity ideology. This was no impromptu event on the part of Muslim community leaders: the issue of gender and sexuality education has in recent years been at the forefront of concerns among Canadian Muslims. In May of 2023, the Muslim Association of Canada and the Canadian Council of Imams issued a statement, “Navigating Differences: Clarifying Sexual and Gender Ethics in Islam” which stated,

there is an increasing push to promote LGBTQ-centric values among children through legislation and regulations, disregarding parental consent and denying both parents and children the opportunity to express conscientious objection. Such policies subvert the agency of Muslim parents to teach their children their religiously grounded sexual ethics, violate their constitutional right to freely practice their religion, and contribute to an atmosphere of intolerance toward faith communities...As a religious minority that frequently experiences bigotry and exclusion, we reject the notion that moral disagreement amounts to intolerance or incitement of violence. We affirm our right to express our beliefs while simultaneously recognizing our constitutional obligation to exist peacefully with those whose beliefs differ from ours.

September 20^th of last year also saw the launch of a long-term protest encampment at an intersection in Abbotsford B.C. set up by Kanwaljit Singh and other members of Abbotsford’s Sikh community—a protest which went mostly ignored by the mainstream media despite lasting for more than 100 days. According to Lindsay Shepherd’s reportage for True North,

Singh said that upwards of 100-200 people protest at the camp at different points throughout the day, with many of the supporters being local teachers who feel stifled within the education system, as well as Christians and Eastern Europeans. However, the core group of protesters are Punjabi.

Such protests are not unique to Canada: in the United States, Muslims and Ethiopian Christians in the state of Maryland have been leading protests against their county school board’s decision to make it mandatory that their children be exposed to “LGBTQ-inclusive texts approved for instructional use”, which led to at least one school being “inundated with complaints from other Muslim families.” They ultimately formed a lobbying group called Family Rights for Religious Freedom, specifically demanding a parental opt-out on such books. And in Michigan, Muslims and Christians similarly rallied in 2022 against this literature in their children’s schools.

These protests were just the most public manifestation of the burgeoning controversy regarding what is commonly referred to as “SOGI,” or the curriculum discussing Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. In the Canadian province of British Columbia it goes by the moniker SOGI 123, but has been widely adopted as an umbrella term by the United Nations, governments, public education and various professions. First introduced at a 2006 conference of human rights groups in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, SOGI has earned widespread support among public and school librarians; indeed there is an assumption in the library profession  that it is an unalloyed good to be promoted, giving rise to the equally widely-held belief that those opposed to SOGI are not just bigoted but associated with the far right.

I should stress that of course these organizations protesting against the SOGI curriculum don’t necessarily represent the views of all members in their communities, and that there will be diversity of perspectives on these issues among them. However, the fact remains that these mass protest movements led by Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and other people of faith present a challenge to the progressive, “inclusive” narrative surrounding SOGI. As Siraj Hashmi points out in the pages of Newsweek, this controversy has

scrambled the intersectional mindset that rules the woke Left, in which minorities like Arab and Muslim Americans are due special deference due to the marginalization they suffer at the hands of a white supremacist state. But what happens when a minority community—one that is solidly Democratic—feels aggrieved by another identity group of the intersectional Left?

It should also be noted before proceeding that there is an inherent tension in the very acronym SOGI, in that GI has nothing whatever to do with SO, and indeed the ideology concerning the former term works to deny the ontological stability of the latter. This has resulted in grave concerns being expressed by a growing number of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals that prioritizing gender identity ideology over sexual orientation risks fomenting a backlash against gays and lesbians—that it amounts to “woke homophobia” and comes at the expense of their hard-won rights as same-sex attracted people.

However, my main interest here lies elsewhere: given that  the protests against SOGI were largely organized and attended by many in Canada’s Muslim and Sikh communities, what I believe is almost entirely missing from the mainstream and professional discourses in education and librarianship about this controversy is any recognition that there might be a tension between a mandatory (i.e., no opting-out) SOGI curriculum and the interests of a multicultural society.

Regardless of how committed and dedicated one may be as a library or educational professional to the promotion of SOGI, however concerned we all are over the well-being of young people who may be questioning their own sexuality or sense of gender —and believe they are owed our compassion—the nature and extent of the protests against it suggests that we are dealing with the inescapable political reality that the SOGI program (as presently formulated and implemented at any rate) is deeply unpopular with many ethno-religious communities and new Canadians.

To understand why this might be the case, we need to revisit what is meant by multiculturalism in the Canadian context, why Rawlsian notions of political liberalism are essential for it to succeed, and why any significant reforms to school curricula represent a particularly potent—but often unrecognized—“wicked problem” in public policy.

Theory: Wicked Problems and Comprehensive Doctrines

In their classic 1973 paper, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” authors Horst W. J. Rittel & Melvin M. Webber first introduced the idea of “wicked problems,” or those highly complex social policy issues faced by pluralist societies for which no clear definition, solution or test is known to exist. The article, which appeared in the pages of the journal Policy Sciences—and as of this writing has been cited in excess of 25,000 times—argues that, in contrast to the decisions involved in the Industrial Revolution which were dominated by a concern for efficiency and progress, those required in the late 20^th Century were not so straightforward. They wrote,

[w]e have come to think about the planning task in very different ways in recent years. We have been learning to ask whether what we are doing is the right thing to do. That is to say, we have been learning to ask questions about the outputs of actions and to pose problem statements in valuative frameworks. We have been learning to see social processes as the links tying open systems into large and interconnected networks of systems, such that outputs from one become inputs to others. In that structural framework it has become less apparent where problem centers lie, and less apparent where and how we should intervene even if we do happen to know what aims we seek. We are now sensitized to the waves of repercussions generated by a problem-solving action directed to any one node in the network, and we are no longer surprised to find it inducing problems of greater severity at some other node (159).

Those “valuative frameworks” and “social processes” were, in their view, fundamentally tied to the increasingly pluralist societies in which planning decisions were made—the health of which depends on such decisions. They observed that, “[t]he seeming consensus, that might once have allowed distributional problems to be dealt with, is being eroded by the growing awareness of the nation's pluralism and of the differentiation of values that accompanies differentiation of publics” (156), such that a “plurality of objectives held by pluralities of politics makes it impossible to pursue unitary aims” (160). In other words, in a diverse society, there will be—as American philosopher John Rawls put it in his 1993 book Political Liberalism—many different “conceptions of the good” such that single, universal “comprehensive doctrines” can never satisfy all such conceptions and so must not, in a liberal society, be imposed. When universal solutions or “unitary aims” have been imposed without due regard to these competing conceptions, Rittel and Webber noted,

[o]ur restive clients have been telling us that they don't like the educational programs that schoolmen have been offering, the redevelopment projects urban renewal agencies have been proposing, the law-enforcement styles of the police, the administrative behavior of the welfare agencies, the locations of the highways, and so on. In the courts, the streets, and the political campaigns, we've been hearing ever-louder public protests against the professions' diagnoses of the clients' problems, against professionally designed governmental programs, against professionally certified standards for the public services (155).

In the view of Rittel and Webber, this ever-growing public dissatisfaction was owed to the fact that public policy makers and urban planners had failed to take into account the “wickedness” of the problems with which they were tasked with solving—by which they meant problems that resist simple formulations, may be merely symptoms of other problems, and for which every implemented intervention unleashes waves of unpredictable repercussions for which the planner is ultimately held accountable. Because of this, every possible solution to a wicked problem “counts,” not only because of downstream consequences, but because it changes the underlying conditions. As well, in a pluralist society, there will not be “true” or “false” choices regarding social problems, but rather those that are viewed by constituencies as being better or worse. 

Among such wicked problems included in their view “nearly all public policy issues-whether the question concerns the location of a freeway, the adjustment of a tax rate, the modification of school curricula, or the confrontation of crime” (160, italics added). The nature of changes to public education constituted a significantly wicked problem because, as they pointed out,

[m]any people's lives will have been irreversibly influenced, and large amounts of money will have been spent [in an] irreversible act…The effects of an experimental curriculum will follow the pupils into their adult lives (163).

Rawls was similarly concerned with the effect of comprehensive doctrines on public decision-making. In a politically liberal society, he wrote, groups of people are entitled to their own comprehensive doctrines which they believe to be true—comprising as they do religious faith or metaphysical beliefs and corresponding guidance concerning morality and proper social conduct—but these cannot be imposed on others. He wrote,

it is unreasonable to enforce a doctrine, while we may reject that doctrine as incorrect, we do not necessarily do so. Quite the contrary: it is vital to the idea of political liberalism that we may with perfect consistency hold that it would be unreasonable to use political power to enforce our own comprehensive view, which we must, of course, affirm as either reasonable or true (138).

Instead, he argued, we are guided by our “thin” theories of political liberalism on which all can agree, such as individual liberalism, freedom of speech and expression and so on, all of which allow diverse groups to share society together. Summarizing Rawls’ conditions for political liberalism in their 2009 book, Dialogical Planning in a Fragmented Society, authors Thomas Harper and Stanley Stein state that the religious and philosophical comprehensive doctrines held by cultural groups are both populist and permanent, and this pluralism can only be overcome through the oppressive use of state power. They further add,

[t]o develop a consensus regarding basic social institutions, [Rawls believed] it is important to put aside or bracket certain controversial (though not unimportant) issues among these differences between various philosophical and religious perspectives...The reason why some controversial issues must be put aside is that they are unresolvable—there is no universal forum (with objective criteria that all would accept) where these debates could be resolved. These controversial issues are placed in the private realm. The private realm is defined as “that which one does as an individual pursuing what one takes to be the truth, such as theology, moral theorizing, metaphysics” (Hampton 1989, 806). In the public realm, we are concerned not with whether an idea is true or false (arriving at the “truth of the matter”) but with whether the idea can command consensual support as providing a reasonable basis for public policy in a democratic society (98).

Harper and Stein further note of Rawls that he

recognizes that a pluralistic liberal society (e.g., Canada, the United States, or Great Britain) needs to accommodate very diverse viewpoints and values. He traces our society's ability to accommodate diverse viewpoints to the Western European experience with clashes between different substantive, religious and moral conceptions of the “good” (which Rawls calls “thick theories of the good”). A conception of society was developed that tolerated different thick theories of the good within a framework of basic democratic political values, many of which are procedural. He refers to this conception of society as a “thin theory of the good.” But he argues that even a pluralistic liberal democratic society like ours requires an overlapping consensus that supports such democratic political values as tolerance (p. 97, Emphasis in the original).

To summarize (or synthesize) Rawls, as well as Rittel and Webber: public decision-making in a politically liberal and pluralist democracy is only made possible through an emphasis on the processes (thin theories) that seek an overlapping consensus regarding public problems—problems which are often wicked in nature, originating as they do in multiple causes and therefore definable in many different ways depending on the values of the diverse stakeholder groups involved. Because any intervention in addressing these wicked problems will affect peoples’ lives and might unleash unpredictable downstream consequences—especially where they concern the education of young people, which will follow them throughout their lives—any measures must be made incrementally, incorporating the needs and values of multiple publics. Given the pluralism of modern liberal multicultural societies, public decision makers should therefore specifically and deliberately avoid implementing any policy aimed at imposing a comprehensive doctrine (or a thick theory) which might concern metaphysics, religion or philosophy and for which no overlapping consensus is possible; such doctrines can only reside in the private realm, and be left to the conscience and belief systems of individuals, families, and cultural groups. However, should policy makers attempt such an imposition—especially where it involves children—public protests and unrest will inevitably follow.   

Discussion: A Clash of Comprehensive Doctrines

In light of this theoretical framework, I suggest that what we see in the anti-SOGI protests is a clear clash of incompatible comprehensive doctrines. That so many Muslims were among the leaders and participants in the 1 Million March campaign is owed to Islam’s explicit attention to the sacredness of the distinction between males and females, especially in intimate spaces (like public washrooms) which Muslim women may not share with men to whom they are unrelated. While gender identity campaigners urge opponents to “be kind” and assert that they “just want to pee,” the real-world result for many Muslim women of “gender inclusive” policies  is, in fact, nothing less than Muslim exclusion, because (as the British Muslim news organization 5Pillars explains), “Muslim women...no longer have a private female-only space in which to perform wudu [ritual washing before prayer]. And the implications for Muslim women who will increasingly be forced to self-exclude from sports and exercise and even domestic violence shelters are far reaching.” This is also very much the case in Orthodox Judaism, in which the teachings of the halakha (rabbinical law) instruct on the sacred and different roles of men and women, and the need to separate them in some public settings.  

Heedless (or, more likely, unaware) of these concerns, most on the progressive Left in Canada nonetheless condemned the protests part of “the far right’s” “hate motivated extremism” that was “targeting 2SLGBTQIA+ children and youth,” and staged counterprotests under the banner of “no space for hate.” One of the participants in a widely-shared leaked video of a Zoom meeting between union leaders declared that the protests’ organizers were “fundamentally racist” and that the march was proof that “fascists are organizing in the streets.” Politicians also joined in to voice their disapproval: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that he “strongly condemned this hate and its manifestations”, while New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh actually joined the counter-protesters and accused the March’s organizers of “targeting marginalized communities.” Both leaders’ comments would earn a swift rebuke from the Muslim Association of Canada, which stated that

The Muslim Association of Canada strongly condemns remarks on recent protests made by certain politicians, including our Prime Minister, as well as statements from school boards, unions, and reports from some media outlets. By characterizing the peaceful protests of thousands of concerned parents as hateful, Canadian leaders and school boards are setting a dangerous precedent of using their position of influence to unjustly demonize families, and alienate countless students. The statements from Canadian leaders and school boards increase the potential for Muslim children to face increased bullying and harassment in schools, both by educators and peers, a trend that’s already distressingly escalating. Civil rights organizations and Muslim organizations across the country have documented numerous validated accounts detailing situations where children have been coerced into activities that contradict their faith, or where parents teaching religious values to their offspring have been unfairly attacked.

These protests drew an outsized presence of racialized Canadians representing minority faith groups and recent immigrant communities, the very constituencies that the progressive Left would—under any other circumstances—have embraced, championed and defended, but have instead chosen to vilify as “bigots.” I would argue that most SOGI proponents—however well-intentioned—have completely misunderstood the nature of the objections to the program as being motivated by 21^st Century right-wing politics, when they are, in fact, primarily religio-cultural in nature, and of ancient origin. As a result, the progressive Left has responded in a manner incompatible with liberal democracy—which is to say, with accusations of hatred and bigotry, rather than any willingness to hear opposing views.

All of this, I fear, is going to have extremely negative consequences for Canadian multiculturalism (as both a policy and a cultural condition), which depends upon allowing and indeed cherishing cultural differences. As Michael Adams and Amy Langstaff put it in their 2008 book, Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Multiculturalism,

Canadian multiculturalism—and by multiculturalism I mean the demographic reality as well as the policy framework—is an outgrowth of [an] increasing sense of autonomy and interdependence...Only in a place where people have by and large adopted a live-and-let-live approach to social existence can multiculturalism really flourish...Naturally, living and letting live doesn't solve everything...But the basic principle of autonomy, that individuals and communities can live as they choose, provided they can respect one another and follow the rules, is the soil in which any society that is both diverse and harmonious must plant itself (199).

In this light, we can see that diverse cultural and religious groups are protesting that they are not being allowed to live as they choose and are not being granted autonomy to hold their own beliefs and pass them on to their children.

The core of this conflict, I propose, lies in the fact that gender identity ideology is the very sort of comprehensive doctrine (or “thick” theory) that Rawls warned should not, in a liberal and pluralistic society, be enforced in the public realm, because sincerely-held opposing viewpoints about it will be unresolvable. In positing a metaphysical, immutable “gendered soul” around which the body must be aligned—necessitating nearly universal policy interventions and the erasure in language of all meaningful distinctions between men and women—gender ideology’s status as a Rawlsian “thick theory” of the good has, in practice, meant questioning, subverting or outright rejecting the “thin” (or procedural) theories of liberalism, such as free speech, open inquiry and academic freedom, as the controversies over gender critical speakers and authors in public libraries have amply demonstrated. 

Note that this is not even to deny the possibility of the existence of a “gendered soul”, only to argue that, as an unfalsifiable metaphysical claim, it is incompatible with Rawlsian foundations for public policy in a secular, pluralist democracy, just as would be the case with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. As Rawls argued, the purpose of advancing political liberalism isn’t to declare any one comprehensive doctrine or another true or false, only to insist that such a belief cannot be imposed on the rest of society. One may believe in (and live by) any metaphysical claim one wishes, but cannot expect others to be compelled into sharing those beliefs by the authority of the state.

Recall that Rawls also argued that comprehensive doctrines of religion and philosophy are both populist (i.e., widely held among the populace) and permanent. This means that—in this case—no amount of sloganeering or placard-waving on the part of activists is going to convince the majority of the world’s 2.4 billion Christians, 2 billion Muslims, 2 million Orthodox Jews, or 26 million Sikhs to abandon their sincerely-held religious beliefs and social practices concerning the existence and nature of the two sexes, which have developed over many hundreds or thousands of years and which comprise integral parts of their respective faith traditions. Not only will these conditions not obtain, but it is (frankly) a kind of cultural arrogance to presume otherwise.

One might object that newcomers from more conservative cultures should not expect their values to determine public policy, and that they should be expected to acculturate themselves to the social norms of their new home. In this case, however, what is being protested against is the very recent and radical dissolution of the long-standing liberal Western social norms in which immigrants have expected to participate and enjoy, namely the expectations that both sexes will have access to single-sex washrooms, that girls and women can compete in their own sports, that parents have some say in (or knowledge about) the education of their children—and, in general, that they will have the freedom to practice and pass on to the next generation their faiths, beliefs and social conventions insofar as they comport with Canadian law. I’m not a member of any of these communities or cultures, but I can well imagine that many among them may feel that it is the Canadian state that has failed to live up to the promise of being a multicultural nation. 

As in any public protest, the reasons for joining these anti-SOGI events would have been as numerous as the participants themselves—and yes, some individuals may well have been motivated by bigoted attitudes. But the salience of the religiocultural dimension should, I hope, give the progressive “no space for hate” counterprotesters pause: their favourite presumed foil is the white, right-wing redneck or pearl-clutching evangelical Christian; yet inconveniently for them, their most vocal opponents are, in fact, racialized ethnic and religious minorities and immigrants. Not a great look for the Left. 

Conclusion

Comparing SOGI curricula and multiculturalism is no category error: they are both policies aimed at implementing different conceptions of the good: however, in the case of the former, what is being implemented is a “thick” comprehensive conception of the good, while the latter is an explicitly “thin” conception, aimed as it is at enabling all manner of comprehensive doctrines to coexist with one another. What this analysis reveals, I believe, is the possibility that the implementation of the thick theory of gender identity ideology is threatening to undermine the viability of multiculturalism, both as a policy and a social reality.

It would appear that the architects behind SOGI programs naively ignored the lessons of Rittel and Webber and assumed the implementation of their policies would be seamless, widely-accepted and without (as the authors put it) “waves of repercussions,” and took no account of the “differentiation of values that accompanies differentiation of publics.” They also apparently forgot Rawls’ admonition against imposing unresolvable comprehensive doctrines in the public sphere. As such, it should be conceded that public policies aimed at advancing the universal acceptance of gender identity ideology cannot by any realistic measure be expected to succeed in this goal, for the simple reason that they are incapable of securing the overlapping consensus through democratic means required of mainstream institutional policy changes. Indeed, if anything, it would appear that these policies are facing overlapping opposition among a number of diverse constituencies—gender critical feminists, sex-realist gays and lesbians, rationalist liberals, political conservatives, socially conservative immigrant groups, and communities of faith—such that their continued implementation (in their current form) can only serve to sow social and political conflict.

I stress that what I’ve set out in this essay is not a matter of my own opinion; it is, instead, a political reality, and one that cannot be escaped through the vilification of one’s opponents through the use of simplistic, pejorative labels. Indeed, such rhetoric can only worsen the situation.

The answer to this social and political dilemma is, I think, actually pretty straightforward. First off—as I’ve argued elsewhere on this substack—our starting position needs to be that of pluralism as a foundational liberal value. If we, as a society, truly value diversity, then that must include embracing a diversity of worldviews and faiths, the tenets of which will inevitably conflict with some of those found in identity-based politics. As such, public librarianship and public education in a pluralist, multicultural society should be predicated only on Rawlsian “thin” theories of the good such as freedom of thought, intellectual freedom, and open inquiry, and leave “thick” theories regarding metaphysical beliefs to the individual consciences of library users, students, and their families. In short, a return to a multicultural ethic could easily insist on a mandatory curriculum focusing on “thin” concepts such as tolerance, compassion, respect, and anti-bullying, with “thick” ideas such as the “gendered soul” being considered optional and up to parents to address, if they so choose. This would not prevent schools from discussing gender identity ideology in context, or public and school libraries collecting books about it, but (and this is essential) as only one perspective among many other diverse viewpoints held in a multicultural society, and not in a mandatory fashion as an unquestionable truth.

Secondly, we should as librarians stop viewing this debate in such strictly black-and-white terms, and consider that many of those with whom one disagrees on this issue are not hateful, malicious, or evil, they merely hold different cultural and religious values which, they feel, are threatened by present educational policies. It is incumbent upon us as public-facing professionals to actually listen to members of our diverse communities in good faith about these concerns and not condemn them, thus contributing to a climate whereby we may be better able to reach that overlapping consensus so essential to a healthy liberal society.

The author would like to thank his colleagues in the Association of Library Professionals, FAIR in Libraries and HxLibraries for their comments and suggestions on this essay.

Sources

Adams, M., & Langstaff, A. (2007). Unlikely utopia : the surprising triumph of Canadian pluralism. Viking Canada.

Hampton, J. (1989). Should political philosophy be done without metaphysics? Ethics, 99(4), 791-814.

Harper, T. L., & Stein, S. M. (2006). Dialogical planning in a fragmented society : critically liberal, pragmatic, incremental. Center For Urban Policy Research.

Rawls, J. (1993). Political liberalism. Columbia University Press.

Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Institute of Urban & Regional Development, University of California.

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