In early 2022, then-elementary school teacher, Caroline Burjoski (or the ‘cancelled teacher,’ as she later self-branded), attempted to expose what she characterized as wildly inappropriate materials available to young students in elementary school libraries. According to her presentation, the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) engaged in a double standard, permitting books that, in her words, “glorified” 2SLGBTQIA+ perspectives, while others were spuriously culled from the library’s and teachers’ collections.
What Burjoski failed to mention was that this “culling” was part of a standard exercise, by which the “library collection remains current and relevant through the continuous process of the acquisition of new materials and the deselection of materials that no longer meet selection criteria” (WRDSB 2023).1For more information on selection criteria see https://www.wrdsb.ca/blog/2021/11/08/reviewing-our-library-collections/; and, https://www.wrdsb.ca/blog/2023/04/19/wrsdb-selection-of-library-materials/
Unfortunately, none of that mattered. Within a matter of months, Burjoski became a bit of niche celebrity, celebrated by Parents As First Educators (PAFE) and the Campaign for Life Coalition (CLC), op-ed columnists at the Epoch Times and National Post, Fox News pundits, and parents’ rights advocates across Ontario as a fearsome warrior against “woke trustees,” the “woke agenda,” and “wokeness” in general.
Consistent throughout these discussions was a reliance on clever phrases, buzzwords, jargon, and rhetoric, which obscured the horizons of this discussion. What even was the “woke agenda” being forwarded? Were kids being “groomed?” What were the “parents’ rights” being trampled on? Again and again, these terms were employed without context or explanation. Again and again, these terms were employed without context or explanation. There was simply “the woke agenda,” and readers were expected to understand it was bad. Why? Because the op-ed columnist said so! These ideas were deliberately kept vague so as to ensure those who use it, could do so everywhere and for anything. Without a clear target, and devoid of context, these ideas could fit into whatever silhouette was needed.
This piece contextualizes four key terms, commonly used by the parental rights movement, showcasing them not as utterances of care and compassion for our communities and kids, but rather as complicated feelings born of and shaped by misunderstanding, hate, and a deep-rooted sense of alienation. While people that use these terms do not offer specific definitions, I do so here in order to provide some of the missing (implied or actual) context to help readers identify these as dog whistles or rhetorical tropes.
“Woke”
“Woke,” or some variation of it, is likely the most recognizable and widely used term on this list. But what does it even mean?
Historically, “woke” meant to be “awake” to systemic injustices and racist violence (Hall 2024; McCurdy, Clarke, and Cammaerts 2025). One of the earliest recorded instances of its use was by folk singer Lead Belly in his 1938 song Scottsboro Boys, which recalled the 1931 case of nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women on a freight train in Alabama and the wrongful imprisonment and extrajudicial murder of Black men and boys, falsely accused of violence against white women (Richmond and Charnley 2022, 177). Here, Lead Belly sings, “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there—best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” “Woke” draws attention to the very real and immediate and material reality of white supremacy that Black folk were meant to navigate.
Following the execution of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, and the public lynching of George Floyd by a police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2020, “woke” reemerged in mainstream discourse, maintaining its cultural footing through Black Lives Matter (BLM) and connection to Black histories.
However, as “woke” continued to garner broader support among liberal-progressives, pop culture, and media circles, it was slowly flattened, used to vaguely denote multiple strains of liberal anti-racist and progressive politics. The Right, positioned against inclusive and progressive practice, identified it as a target—nebulous enough to encompass almost anything, which allowed the Right to find evidence of it in everything.2For example, here is a non-exhaustive list of things that have been labelled ‘woke’ in the past decade, in no particular order: The military apparatus under the Trudeau government (Poilievre 2025); Paper Straws (Lobell 2022; The White House 2025); Tim Hortons’ Paper Lids (Lianne Rood [@Lianne_Rood] 2024); American Colleges and Universities (Marjorie Taylor Greene [@mtgreenee] 2023); Captain America (Ted Cruz [@tedcruz] 2025); ESPN (Ted Cruz [@tedcruz] 2024); Research grants for “studying how to make self-driving vehicles safer” (Lambert 2025); K-12 schools (Cruz 2023, 79); Canada’s math curriculum (Blaff 2023); Florida’s math book, prior to the DeSantis government (Hurley 2022); The words “women,” “diverse,” “systemic,” and “cultural relevance” (Jean 2025); Nike (Ehalt 2024; Ben Shapiro 2025, 12:56-14:45); Hollywood (PragerU 2022b); Big Business (PragerU 2022a); Sesame Street (Fox News Staff 2021).
According to the Right, to embrace “woke” is to alienate “white majorities for their reasonable concerns” (Richmond and Charnley 2022, 40). It is to support “big government” intervention (or perhaps more aptly, interference) in curtailing or compensating for traditional and institutionalized systems of power and privilege—the patriarch(y), the nuclear family, cis-heterosexual normalcy—benignly exercised by white middle-class people, and those benefiting from institutionalized systems of domination.
Rather than an acute awareness of the realities of racial violence, this version of “woke,” affirms a sycophantic, domineering group-think politics that has supposedly led to a weaker, less virile, and dumber population.3It is important to note that, yes, ‘woke’ is still used by those on ‘the left’ to indicate material awareness, but woke’s more popular and more well-known counterpart is that which is described above. It implies an unfair, unmeritorious, and unreasonable retooling of power relations to benefit an imagined Other who, according to the Right, is not disadvantaged due to structural inequity, but because of their personal, moral, and spiritual failings (as defined by those very systems of privilege whose dismantling is so lamented by the Right).
“Groomer”
Like “woke,” “groomer,” and the anxieties it conjures, has an extensive catalogue of historical uses. But unlike “woke,” it is not grounded in progressive or liberationist histories. Rather, “groomer” is just the latest iteration in a long line of attacks launched at queer and trans folk—and even their allies—casting them as sexually, morally, and intellectually corrosive, corrupting “our” youth.
“Groomers,” identified most often as teachers and queer folk in proximity to children, are indicted for the misdirection of children’s (cis-heterosexually charged) innocence, working to “turn” them queer. At the core of “groomer” is the assumption that queer folks (and their allies) are inherently predatory. Children, especially in school, are positioned as vulnerable to being manipulated—and converted—for the benefit of some imagined and coherent queer (and pedophile-adjacent) “agenda.” Teaching “queer-tainted” material (often in “secret,” without parental knowledge or consent) disrupts the normative development pathway laid out for children, undermining the sanctity of the family unit, subverting the authority of the patriarch(y), and (were that not enough) threatening the nation’s future. As a Campaign Life Coalition4The Campaign Life Coalition is a “national pro-life organization” working to against “abortion, euthanasia, doctor assisted suicide, reproductive and genetic technologies, cloning, infanticide, eugenics, population control, and threats to the family” (“About Us,” n.d.). (2019) blog post details, “[t]his is partly why math scores continue to fall.”
While positioned as a new and immediate threat, the fear of “grooming” is not new (Rosky 2013). During the 1970s, however, these anxieties took on new life with the rise of “religious conservative opponents of LGBT rights…in response to the rapid rise of the LGBT movement” (609). From Anita Bryant’s opposition to Miami-Dade County’s Ordinance 77-4—“a law that protects homosexuals from discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodation” (Ayres Jr. 1977)—to the Thatcher government’s Section 28, opponents of gay and queer inclusion worked overtime to stoke fear and colour debates around LGBT rights, specifically the possibility that “in one way or another, ‘any and every child’ may be queer” (Stockton 2009, as cited in Rosky 2013, 617).
As folks outside of the cis-heterosexual matrix found a home in Conservative politics (Blair White, Christian Walker, Lady MAGA, MP Lantsman) being both queer and Conservative had to be made acceptable. So, “groomer” was nuanced ever-so-slightly, augmented to now denote “good” and “bad” expressions of gender and sexuality, reinforcing certain acceptable expressions of queerness and gender presentation while monsterizing others.
This outlook was championed by Gays Against Groomers, to clarify that “grooming” is indicative of a specific type of outward, unafraid, proud, and non-assimilationist queer expression. While this often explicitly refers to drag queens and trans folks, it can be easily weaponized to apply to any part of the queer community that refuses to adhere to dominant norms and attitudes of the supposed “good gay citizens.” Here, the ideal queer person, one that children can be in proximity to, is sanitized, depoliticized, and demobilized, anchored in the private domicile of the family. A good queer person is one with “an ongoing case of no sex please, we’re gay” (Balogh 2014, 182).
“(Radical) gender ideology”
Unlike “woke,” “groomer,” and even “LGBT propaganda,” “(radical) gender ideology” has no meaningful or coherent referent outside of a loose amalgamation of feminist philosophy, gender studies, and intersectionality.
Absent a clear definition, the term “(radical) gender ideology” is employed to underscore a broad collection of ideas that serves to mock those who differentiate between gender and sex, or those who cast gender (and sex) as socially constructed. It’s a sharp contrast to the binary gender-realist view of the Right, which sees sex as immutable and insurmountable and gender as synonymous with sex. Hence, “(radical) gender ideology” is divorced from “truth,” cast against a supposed and shared idea of “common sense,” forwarded as a “feelings over facts” (ARPA Canada 2025, 2) ideology that undermines the normalcy of heterosexuality and the “true” gender binary—ultimately, harming students and undermining parental authority.
“(Radical) gender ideology” implies a permeability to the categories of man and woman, unsettling the perceived immutability of these supposedly biologically distinct classes, which works to undermine the patriarchy, traditionally ascribed gender roles and norms, and the supremacy of the nuclear family.
“LGBT propaganda”
“LGBT propaganda” is simply used to indicate the presence of identities, perspectives and ideas featuring, centring around, or mentioning5‘LGBT propaganda’ is nebulous enough to encompass the mere implication of queerness, so ‘mention’ does quite a bit of heavy lifting in this instance. queerness, transness, or something other than an accepted expression of gender and sexuality—those outside of the accepted cis-white-heterosexual canon.
The supposed proliferation of “LGBT propaganda,” specifically in schools, echoes the concerns of Burjoski’s presentation, focusing on supposedly age-inappropriate materials available to children. These materials serve to divert students from the real pillars of education, the “basics” (math, science, reading, and writing), distracting them with emotional development and soft skills (that which might not be immediately relevant to the labour market or the strict process of work and value production). Threatening the sanctity and seeming neutrality of the school, “LGBT propaganda” supposedly infects educational materials, shaping content in direct opposition to “common sense” (Perry 2023), exploiting the student’s malleable mind and imposing a reality of untruths.
“LGBT propaganda” rests on the notion of purposeful dissemination of LGBT (e.g., queer, trans, etc.) “doctrine,” usually via educational and cultural materials, with the goal of recruiting children—as though latent in every child is a dormant “gay” gene awaiting activation via a proximity trigger or activation phrase.
If elimination is not possible, the implicit solution to the “woke” indoctrination via “LGBT propaganda” is regulation, maintaining a “safe” learning environment, distinct from the influence of LGBT issues, bringing education back to the basics. Such a “solution,” however, would effectively create a zone in schools that is “safe” for some (e.g., students performing cis-heterosexuality), and unsafe for others (e.g., those who will not or cannot perform these roles).
Conclusion
Where, then, can we find solace from the issue of “woke,” “groomers,” “radical gender ideology,” and “LGBT propaganda” that now plague our schools? The solution, of course, is to return to a simpler, more “basic” time before our education system was hopelessly rainbow-clad and “woke.” (“Getting Back to Basics in Education” 2024; Ferguson 2018; Guarin 2024). But what is meant by “basics” in the “back to basics” mantra?
Again, this isn’t revolutionary or new: the calls for “back to basics” stretch far back into history. In the late 1970s, the basics denoted “the principles of honesty, efficiency, sound fiscal practice, and anti-socialism” (Morgan and Robinson 1976, 2), aiming to “ensure student competence in the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
But we can reach even further back. After the American Revolutionary War, a number of texts were published that sought to teach more than “just ‘reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic’ to the younger generations of Americans.” Seeking “cultural independence from England the country’s leaders wanted to inculcate loyalty to the United States by instilling in its boys and girls a knowledge of democratic precepts and a strong patriotic commitment” (Rippa 1971, as quoted in Johnson 1979, 644). These “basics” are those of a “good” citizen, embracing an ethic of loyalty and productivity, where they are prepared to work, fight, and die for their country—the hard skills that the “woke agenda” seeks to undermine.
Teaching children to embrace the merits of “woke,” of recognizing systems of power and privilege, and standing against hate, troubles the production of loyal and productive bodies willing to fight, work, produce, and die, for King and Country. The School, thus, continues to be a site of tension specifically because it has the potential to be a site that can teach children to acknowledge the operation of power and privilege.
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