The rise of Canada’s parental rights movement isn’t just about sex ed or trans youth—it marks the return of an ideological project that seeks to police difference at every level. Disguised as a concern for children or educational freedom, this movement functions as a vehicle for revanchist politics: a backlash against queer and trans liberation, racial justice, and the broader promise of inclusive public education.
But despite its current surge, its politics are far from new. The idea that parental authority should override collective educational values has deep roots in Britain, the United States, and Canada. What’s changed is how digital infrastructure—monopoly platforms, algorithmic radicalization, and cyberlibertarian encodings of “free speech”—have reenergized the movement and expanded its reach.
What we suggest is that the parental rights movement can be understood as a form of recurrent gender shocks—a political strategy that, building on Naomi Klein’s model, exploits moments of economic despair and cultural uncertainty to intensify gender policing, erode public education, and reassert traditional hierarchies under the guise of protecting children and preserving parental authority. In this light the movement is best seen as a recurring feature of capitalist crisis: an anti-solidarity formation that resurfaces when economic breakdown coincides with the growing visibility of progressive gains.
While gender nonconformity is the movement’s current focus, its ambitions are broader—to redraw the boundaries of belonging and to undermine the collective promises at the heart of co-operative economics. For Canada, the stakes—social, educational, and economic—are not simply about curriculum or parental oversight, but about whether we will defend or dismantle the democratic commitments that once animated the promise of the welfare state.
What then, we ask, accounts for this movement’s return—and why now? If we understand parental rights as a recurrent response to economic crisis—we must also ask: what fuels its resurgence in this particular moment? What roles do digital platforms, educational privatization, and transnational disinformation networks play in helping old anxieties find new life?
At the heart of this movement is not simply a moral panic, but a structural vulnerability in liberal democracies themselves: the erosion of shared public commitments, the fraying of social trust, and the failure to deliver material stability. As public institutions falter under the weight of austerity, inequality, and ecological crisis, gender becomes a proxy terrain for managing broader anxieties about control, order, and the future.
The policing of children’s gender and sexuality is not a fringe impulse—it is a recalibration of the democratic imaginary, one that seeks to reimpose social hierarchy at precisely the moment it might be unraveling. This is especially visible when we consider how the modern welfare state, from its inception, has been shaped by the contradictory treatment of women and children. While often heralded as an engine of equity, the welfare state was also built on the assumptions of dependency and domesticity—offering benefits that mirrored, rather than disrupted, gendered subordination.
What we are seeing now is not simply a retreat from that model, but a targeted effort to erase the limited gains it enabled: autonomy, pluralism, collective care. If the democratic promise includes the dignity and freedom of the child—as learner, thinker, and future citizen—then what does it mean that this promise now faces not only backlash, but abandonment? At a moment when the welfare state reels under pressure and the legitimacy of public institutions fractures, how we respond to this crisis will shape more than education policy—it will shape the moral and material foundation of Canada’s democracy.
We are, in many ways, at a crossroads: between solidarity and enclosure, between collective care and reaction. What we defend—or fail to—will determine what kind of future remains thinkable, and for whom. The task ahead is not to simply reject reactionary politics, but to rebuild the structures—of education, care, and belonging, that make democracy active, lived, and fundamentally plural. If this moment brings danger, it also brings possibility: to reclaim public education not as a battleground, but as a shared ground for imagining freer ways to live together.
Histories we’ve forgotten
The parental rights movement, often treated as a recent eruption in response to trans visibility or pandemic-era schooling debates, is anything but new. In fact, it’s a recurrent feature of educational backlash, one that has gained traction during moments of economic anxiety, welfare retrenchment, and rising visibility of marginalized groups. Despite this long history, much of the critical scholarship on the movement has fallen out of circulation. Revisiting this work now is not just useful—it’s urgent.
In his 1990 essay “The ‘Third Wave’: Education and the Ideology of Parentocracy”, sociologist Phillip Brown offered one of the earliest and most influential analyses of this dynamic. For Brown, the evolution of British schooling could be understood in three phases: from working-class mass education to mid-century meritocracy, to a new model of “parentocracy”—in which a child’s education is shaped not by ability or need, but by parental wealth, values, and social power.
Importantly, Brown situated this shift in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, when economic downturn, youth unemployment, and middle-class fear were leveraged by conservatives to frame public education as a failed social experiment. The idea of education as a public good was displaced by the language of choice, efficiency, and market logic—underwriting a moral panic about “declining standards” and legitimizing new forms of privatization.
In the 1990s, Brown’s insights seeded a wave of critical scholarship across Britain, the United States, and Canada. Researchers Barbara Miner, Sara Diamon, and LouAnn Dickson examined how otherwise separate conservative movements—religious traditionalists, market libertarians, and ethno-nationalists—fused their agendas through education. This process, sometimes called ‘fusionism’, became a defining feature of how scholars began to conceptualize and study the parental rights movement.
In the U.S., backlash to desegregation, sex ed, and child-centred pedagogy became the fuel for traditional schooling experiments, from fundamentalist “academies” to charter school expansion. In each case, the rhetoric of “choice” was used to cloak a politics of social control, driven by the perception that public schools no longer reinforced inherited hierarchies of race, gender, and class.
In Canada, this same logic took root—though often in quiet, more bureaucratic forms. By the 1990s, teachers’ unions, progressive education coalitions, and a growing network of public interest think tanks—including the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives—had begun pushing back. Through Our School/Our Selves, and in landmark reports like Education: Whose Business is it Really (1997) and In the Name of Choice (1998), Canadian scholars tracked how the traditional schooling movement imported American-style narratives of decline, filtered through both Christian conservatism and economic individualism. In Pandora’s Box (1993), John Calvert and Larry Kuehn mapped how corporate influence and free trade agreements were reshaping the educational landscape—laying the groundwork for “parent-preferred” schooling aligned with market interests.
Cecilia Kalaw’s work in particular marked a turning point. Combining education policy, migration studies, and media analysis, Kalaw traced how groups like Focus on the Family—a U.S.-based evangelical lobbying organization—helped transplant U.S.-style gender panic into B.C.’s traditional school movement. She found that anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric were already becoming organizing tools, reframed as neutral concerns about “values” and freedom. In one of the earliest studies to link gender panic to the logic of educational privatization, Kalaw showed how traditional schools were marked as alternatives to supposedly “ideological’ public institutions—often targeting racialized and working’ class neighborhoods under the guise of restoring standards.
This history has largely disappeared from view. Contemporary scholarship, particularly in legal studies and trans studies, has done vital work exposing how today’s parental rights movement weaponizes gender nonconformity as a threat to children’s innocence and parental sovereignty. But too often, this work has been disconnected from the movement’s longer history of fusionism, market logic, and imperial nostalgia. The result is an incomplete picture: one that captures the moral panic, but not the cynical structure of backlash that reemerges at every moment of crisis.
And that cycle matters. What Brown, Kalaw, and others revealed—often decades ahead of their time—was that the parentocracy is not simply a cultural argument about values, but a political strategy for redistributing public goods upward and eroding the infrastructure of the welfare state. Just as early 20th-century movements for women’s liberation collided with the patriarchal assumptions of the welfare regime, so too does today’s gender panic target the very conditions that allow for pluralism, equity, and collective belonging.
The parental rights movement’s fixation on trans children is not an aberration—it is a tactic of structural restoration, through which elites recode public fear into demands for control.
In that sense, gender is not the movement’s limit—it is its entry point. Historically, education has always been a battleground for the remaking of democratic life, and children’s gender has been a particularly potent proxy for anxieties about national identity, economic decline, and social order, From the British tripartite system to B.C.’s traditional school experiments, from American charter school lobbying to today’s social media- fueled campaigns against “wokeness”, gendered moral panic has reappeared at every juncture where the promises of democracy threaten to become real.
What makes this moment different, however, is the infrastructure of virality: the way digital platforms and algorithmic propaganda have breathed new life into old fears. Where the parentocracy once advanced through think tanks and policy papers, it now moves through TikTok, Facebook groups, and encrypted messaging chains. These channels don’t just scale the movement—they give it the appearance of a grassroots movement. The result is a feedback loop of despair and nostalgia, in which structural failure is blamed not on austerity or privatization, but on the presence of queer, trans, racialized, or “non-traditional” children in the classroom.
Revisiting this history is not merely an academic exercise—it’s a recasting of how we understand and preserve the foundational entry point into democratic freedom and the ongoing struggle over choice and equality. One that helps us understand how gender shocks operate: as a recurring political maneuver used to fracture solidarity, obscure economic injustice, and reset the terms of democratic participation.
Despair, disinformation, and digital capture
The parental rights movement, like the economic shocks described by Naomi Klein, has always thrived on crisis. As Klein showed, market fundamentalists didn’t wait for stability to push their reforms—they relied on disruption. From Pinochet’s Chile to post-Katrina New Orleans, disasters became opportunities to restructure society in line with neoliberal ideals. The parental rights movement, like its economic predecessors, has always built momentum not through consensus but through fear: fear of decline, disorder, and difference. And like earlier crises, this panic is used to justify sweeping attacks on public education, queer and trans rights, and social solidarity itself.
But the machinery of crisis has undoubtedly changed. Where Friedman’s disciples operated through governments, policy advisors, and a complex array of university and prestige networks, today’s revanchist movements rely on algorithmic infrastructure—what David Golumbia has called a politics of cyberlibertarianism. Rooted in Silicon Valley’s peculiar fusion of countercultural idealism and deregulatory zeal, cyberlibertarianism promises openness and freedom while systematically empowering anti-democratic forces.
Meme pipelines, Facebook groups, and YouTube algorithms don’t just echo outrage—they actively manufacture it. In this environment, a parent’s fear becomes a headline, a rumor becomes a platform, and bigotry gets framed as common sense. The result is a pernicious form of personality capture, where digital architectures—claiming neutrality—are used to discipline gender nonconformity, amplify white nationalist talking points, and reanimate long-standing hierarchies under the guise of “protection”.
In this light, the parental rights movement isn’t a grassroots revolt—it’s a digitally enabled restoration project. It channels legitimate despair—about inflation, inequality, and institutional failure into moral panic. The digital terrain offers a potent weapon: the appearance of democratic spontaneity masking a deeply coordinated, anti-solidarity campaign. As with earlier shocks, the goal isn’t merely to block reform—it’s to roll back the gains of collective struggle.
While disinformation thrives and reactionaries dominate headlines, something else is happening—transformation in pedagogy, care, and democratic practice that are often explicitly obscured. These experiments aren’t hidden—they’re simply not made to circulate in a U.S. dominated media economy. What any contemporary study of parental rights must then contend with is a question of visibility, inclusion, and legibility in an entirely new media ecosystem. Whose fears are amplified? Whose knowledge circulates? And what forms of care, justice, and resistance are being left out of the frame?
Building the alternative
Across Canada, educators are building curriculums that centre equity, foster belonging, and anchor learning in the realities of students’ lives—programs rooted in restorative practices, land-based education, anti-racist teaching, and queer-inclusive pedagogy. Yet these initiatives are often ignored, underfunded, or treated as fringe—even when they offer real tools for resilience in a time of deep social fragmentation. In parallel with this growing wave of progressive educational reform, the new ‘parental rights’ movement functions as an escape hatch—not just from these collective gains, but for a particular class. It responds not with engagement, but with withdrawal, upholding a broader project of denationalization by fracturing public responsibility into a patchwork of private entitlements.
This logic, of course, isn’t confined to Canada. It echoes globally—from MAGA to Orbán—in a growing alliance orbiting the regressive idea of the ethnostate. The same coalition that distrusts science, loathes collectivity, and romanticizes a return to tradition also dreams of a tech-enabled future freed from social constraint. These are not contradictions—they are the ideology of the telecosmic, a world in which sovereign individuals, sovereign families, and sovereign wealth transcend the obligations of common life.
To meet this moment, progressive pedagogy must offer more than critique. It must make visible the work already being done—the classrooms already modeling care, justice, and collective possibility. But it must also offer new ways to unravel the mechanisms underpinning this moment of regression.
Revisiting the history and evolution of the parental rights movement is one such way: a critical task that connects historical inquiry into visible educational practice. We are not just defending our schools, we are defending the very idea that education can be a form of collective solidarity, organized around progressive democracy. If the increasingly brazen cyber elite values disconnection and disassociation from any collective center, ours must concentrate on connection: a vision of public life worth remembering, worth sharing, and worth fighting to uphold—together.
