A chaotic scene unfolded at an Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) meeting Tuesday when a father attempting to raise concerns about trans-identified male students using female washrooms was shut down just one minute into his four-minute speech.
After raising the issue of male students being allowed to use the same bathroom as his 12-year-old daughter, and pointing out how "sexually driven" adolescent males can be, the concerned father was interrupted by trustee Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth, who asked him to end his delegation on the grounds that it created "an unsafe environment for people who identify as gender diverse."
The video of the meeting has since been taken down from YouTube, while the board addresses "concerns that content from the meeting is discriminatory and causes harm towards trans and gender diverse people," but a clip uploaded to Twitter shows the trans-identified male Board Chair Lyra Evans walking out midway through the father’s speech.
When the father questioned what part of his speech was creating an unsafe environment, he received no answer and then he and a group of people who had shown up to support him were asked to leave the premises. When they protested, the police were called.
"I have a ten- and a twelve-year-old daughter; I have a right to speak," said the father who identified himself as Nick Morabito. Morabito said he wasn’t present at the board meeting when the policy to allow males into female washrooms was pushed through, and he couldn’t figure out when it had taken place.
"This is about having appropriate and safe boundaries for progression, and doing things in line with the parental community’s wishes," Morabito managed to say before he was cut off by renowned mask-enthusiast Kaplan Myrth.
Kaplan-Myrth has been militant in her desire for children in the OCDSB to be masked, and is famous locally for always wearing a mask herself, even when seemingly alone during Zoom calls.
"We didn’t know what he was going to say until he started to speak," Kaplan-Myrth told the Ottawa Citizen Wednesday. "There is no way to frame it other than transphobia. This space has to be a respectful space."
However, Morabito rejects the accusation of transphobia.
"There are legitimate concerns with regards to inclusivity in bathrooms, concerns that need to be discussed, and when they prevent discussion from happening, all it does is create anger and frustration," he said in a statement to The Post Millennial.
"The main point I was going to attempt to make in my statement to the board was that the policy leaves a wide open door for people to easily identify or pretend they are something they are not to gain access to bathrooms and change rooms."
"You can’t ignore this fact, you can’t deny that it’s a risk, and it is a lot to ask parents to look past that risk, without at least explaining what might be at stake on the other side of the argument," Morabito concluded.
The OCDSB released a statement Wednesday saying it has a commitment to cultivating safe working and learning spaces where trans and gender-diverse students, staff, families and community members felt welcome.
"Individually-held beliefs or feelings of discomfort are not a justifiable reason for discriminating against trans and gender-diverse community members," reads the statement.
"This person is not going to change my mind," Lyra Evans, the board chair who left the meeting midway through Morabito’s speech told the Ottawa Citizen. "This delegation is not going to convince me of anything. So I stepped aside. I didn’t want to get into an argument."
Morabito is one of several Canadians speaking up in opposition to trans-identified males being allowed to access female spaces. Last year, Grade 11 student Josh Alexander was suspended from his Catholic high school in Renfrew, Ontario after organizing a protest in support of female-only washrooms and expressing his sincerely held religious belief that God created only two sexes and humans cannot change sex.
Alexander has since been excluded from education for the remainder of the school year and intends to file a human rights complaint on the grounds of religious discrimination.
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