My name is Carolyn Burjoski, and I am a veteran elementary school teacher.  Four years ago today, at a school board meeting, I raised concerns about a library book that downplays serious medical interventions on children who identify as transgender. I was kicked out of the meeting, removed from my classroom, threatened with disciplinary action, and accused of transphobia. I launched a defamation lawsuit against the Board. 

I am deeply grateful to the hundreds of supporters who stood with me through this difficult legal battle. Together, we achieved two court victories at the Divisional Court and the Ontario Court of Appeal. Our Anti-SLAPP victory now stands as a legal precedent. The lawsuit has now been settled. This chapter is finally closed.

Today, I want to finish what I began four years ago and sound the alarm about what children are being taught in Ontario schools. I believe we may be living through one of the most serious medical scandals in modern history, and our public schools are complicit. I will lay out the facts and let you draw your own conclusions. 

My concerns began nearly ten years ago, when a new picture book in our elementary school library introduced very young children to the idea that they can be born in the wrong body. As a teacher with extensive experience working with young children, I found this troubling. Children think literally. They do not yet understand how their bodies work. When trusted adults suggest that a child’s body can be wrong, some children will inevitably wonder: Is my body wrong too?

That book was written by the star of the television series I Am Jazz, which documents the social transition of a preschool-aged child. Social transition is a powerful psychosocial intervention in which adults use opposite-sex names and language to reinforce a child’s belief that their body is wrong. For many children, this belief becomes fixed and leads the child down a pathway toward irreversible medical interventions ¹. In Jazz Jennings’ case, that pathway included penile inversion surgery at seventeen, followed by corrective procedures and struggles with an eating disorder.

To me, this wasn’t the simple happy ending that Jazz and so many other children are promised when they are socially transitioned. Jazz’s painful experience should have prompted serious reflection within medical and educational institutions. Instead, professionals who urged caution were often smeared as transphobic and dismissed², and meaningful questions went unheard. Even Jennings’ own surgeon later acknowledged³ the need for greater caution, noting that these interventions can result in lifelong sexual dysfunction and sterility.

That same call for caution was echoed by Dr. Hilary Cass, who led a four-year independent review of pediatric gender medicine in the United Kingdom. Her final report concluded that the evidence base, particularly for puberty blockers, is weak, inconsistent, and lacks long-term follow-up data. Following this review, the UK restricted the use of puberty blockers, and several European countries shifted toward a more cautious approach⁴.

Around the same time, a video of a private meeting of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) was leaked to the public. This international group publishes guidelines that set the policies of major medical groups, lawmakers, judges and insurance providers around the world.

The leaked video⁵ from WPATH showed gender clinicians acknowledging that children cannot fully comprehend or consent to the long-term consequences⁶ of these medical interventions. These admissions caused many professionals to question the ethics⁷ of current practice. Shortly afterward, fourteen Canadian physicians publicly stated⁸, “The science is not ‘settled’ by any means. So-called ‘gender-affirming care’ has proven risks and harms, but unproven benefits. It is not ‘life-saving,’ it is permanently life-altering.” 

What do these Canadian physicians mean by the term “permanently life-altering” and in what ways might the school system be complicit in creating these conditions? Let me tell you what I was seeing in schools, which caused me enough concern to speak out at the school board in 2022.

In an effort to be supportive, schools adopted policies intended to make gender-questioning children feel “safe,” including strict language directives for teachers. We were shown charts instructing us to avoid basic words, such as boys, girls, men, women, male and female. One colleague confided in me that she struggled to teach the puberty unit without using the word girl. She considered saying, “people with uteruses will get a period,” before realizing that she could not explain who has a uterus without using words like girl, female or woman.

At the same time, schools and libraries increasingly promoted materials that present gender change as self-declared and straightforward. I felt that this confusing learning environment could lead girls to believe that all they have to do is say, “I’m a boy,” and – like magic – it’s done!” When a girl says she is a boy, teachers immediately celebrate the child’s bravery, affirm the new identity, change names and pronouns and grant access to bathrooms and change rooms accordingly. In most school boards, teachers are also instructed not to inform parents of a child’s social transition without the child’s consent. In practice, this meant that the teacher would use the child’s chosen name and pronoun at school, unless the parents were there for interviews, in which case the teacher would switch back to the birth name and pronoun that the parents would expect to hear. Several colleagues told me privately that they were uncomfortable with this secrecy but felt coerced into compliance. I worried that I would soon find myself caught in this ethical dilemma. I also wondered how it would affect a student’s psyche to be treated as a girl at home and a boy with a different name at school.

By placing teachers in the role of affirming unexamined gender identity claims and by compelling staff to obscure biological facts, schools may be causing gender confusion in some children, which could lead to poorly considered outcomes. This is problematic because once a child declares a new identity, no adult is permitted to explain that this decision often places them on a path toward lifelong medicalization and probable sterilization. Yet any honest adult knows that children do not always understand the consequences of their choices. 

In fact, the majority of gender-distressed children come to accept their bodies after going through natural puberty⁹, unless they are socially or medically transitioned beforehand.

Think about that.

These thoughts were weighing heavily on me in late 2021. I had found a children’s book in my school library that makes light of a permanent, life-altering process: the halting of a child’s puberty with powerful drugs, then starting her on cross-sex hormones. I decided to read a passage from that book at a school board meeting. I was stopped before I could finish my presentation. This is what I had wanted to say: Children cannot consent to these medical interventions. They harm reproductive health. And children are too young to understand how that harm will affect their future. Even WPATH admits¹⁰ it. That is the point I was trying to make when I was silenced.

What happened to me four years ago was not an isolated incident. Across Canada, parents and educators who raise concerns about these practices face the same response: not engagement, but accusation. Not dialogue, but dismissal. The goal is not to answer the question but to ensure no one else dares to ask it. 

Over the past four years, I have watched many well-intentioned parents try to reform this system from within. I know one parent who contacted the school board, child protection services, the Ontario College of Teachers, and even showed up at the police station one day regarding sexually inappropriate school library books for children. Each institution told him to contact another arm of the government. No one took responsibility. 

This is not a single failure, but a system-wide collapse¹¹ of child-protection safeguards across multiple government institutions. 

While parents have had some effect, they have not been able to fix the root problem: an ideology that intentionally obscures the truth, dignity, and promise inherent in each human being’s physical body.

A system like this cannot be repaired from within. That is why I have come to believe that the meaningful change will require parents to reclaim their rightful role as their child’s primary educator, whether by removing their children from public schools, demanding transparency, or building alternative institutions. From that foundation – family, home, community, and the pursuit of truth – the next generation can grow up into adulthood with a healthy body, a healthy mind, healthy friendships and an open future.

In closing, this message reflects my personal experiences and opinions. I encourage you to explore the footnotes in the article on my website linked below as part of your own research on this important topic.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for standing with me to protect Canada’s children.