368 Farm Ln Room S403
East Lansing, MI 48824
USA
Professor Lauren Bialystok, Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
‘My Child, My Choice’? Parents’ Identity Claims and the Challenge of Sexuality Education
Many claims for recognition and special treatment take the form of asserting an identity and insisting that it imposes ethical obligations on others (“I am x, therefore you must y”). Claims of sexual identity are paradigmatically of this form: being gay or being gender non-binary, for example, entail certain treatment or non-interference by others because of their inviolability as identities. Parents who oppose progressive sexuality education are increasingly articulating their objections in an analogous form, i.e. in virtue of their identity as parents. But what kind of an identity is “parent”? By considering authority over sexuality education in terms of these identity dynamics (as opposed to, say, parental rights), I show that educational ethics demand a deeper account of what identity is and whose identities matter.