Parents pull students from Nova Scotia school after nonbinary drag queen gives compulsory gender identity presentation: report

Parents at a Halifax-area, Nova Scotia school are furious that Oyster Pond Academy allowed a drag queen to deliver a presentation on gender identity to kids aged 12 to 15. Some parents pulled their children from class on Friday to protest the school’s decision.

Teo Ferguson, who calls himself nonbinary and works as a drag queen, shared some of his social media pages – replete with sexualized material – with the children, the Daily Mail reported. Ferguson also works at The Youth Project, a non-profit that influences young people to transition to another gender identity or experiment with their sexual orientation. Ferguson told the Daily Mail that the school kids were instructed in how “queer-identifying people” go about expressing their gender.

But one parent told CTV News that Ferguson’s material should never have been allowed inside a classroom. Hollie Riggs said the first inkling she had that the presentation had occurred was on a social media post and that she then decided to keep her child home from school the next day. "I wanted to have to avoid them having that conversation with their peers after school, to avoid that communication, so I can have it at home," Riggs said.

Some of the children shared with their parents that Ferguson had promoted the social media accounts – which are supposed to be geared to adults. "It was the fact that how much of it was discussed and what the kids had access to after the meeting," Riggs told CTV.

The parents weren’t just angry at the presentation, they were upset that the presenter was also a drag queen. Ferguson complained to the Daily Mail that some parents went to the drag queen’s Facebook account to criticize the school choosing Ferguson as a presenter.

Ferguson’s Facebook and Instagram accounts are full of pictures of the drag queen wearing costumes that a stripper might wear. Ferguson goes by the stage name of “Cookie Cunningham.”

The Halifax Regional Center for Education, which houses Oyster Pond Academy, acknowledged what had happened but offered no apologies to parents or students: “One of the presenters shared their personal social media details, which prompted some of the students to view content that is intended for an adult audience,” the statement read.

Riggs told CTV that the students were not allowed to opt out of the seminar but had to attend. She said this really upset her son. "When I asked him about it, he said, 'mom I didn't want to be there, but they weren't letting us leave,'” said Riggs.

Greg Austin, another parent with a boy at the school, concurred. “My son came home from school yesterday. He was telling me about the interactions he had with the influencer," said Austin. "Mostly for me as a parent, we had no idea that anybody was coming to talk to our kids."

Austin said his son didn’t want to be there either. "He could see people were not comfortable and that other people asked to leave, and they weren't allowed to,” said Austin. “There wasn't any other option."