In once again throwing her hat into the ongoing gender discourse, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law star Tatiana Maslany has made it clear that she is a virulent opponent of her native Saskatchewan, Canada’s newly-enshrined-into-law Parent’s Bill of Rights.
The series of events which eventually led to the Bill’s creation first kicked off on August 22nd, 2023, when the province’s then-Minister of Education Dustin Duncan announced a new set of policies surrounding the subject of student sexual education.
Specifically, Duncan made it a requirement for schools that “when a student requests that their preferred name, gender identity, and/or gender expression be used, parental/guardian consent will be required for students under the age of 16” and to engage in a review of “the involvement of third-party organizations in supporting school divisions and teachers with delivering instruction related to sexual health outcomes in the curriculum”.
(For those curious, in the case of those students who believe they may be harmed if they inform their parents of this decision, the policy specifies, “If it is reasonably expected that obtaining parental consent as mentioned in subsection (1) is likely to result in physical, mental or emotional harm to the pupil, the principal shall direct the pupil to the appropriate professionals, who are employed or retained by the school, to support and assist the pupil in developing a plan to address the pupil’s request with the pupil’s parent or guardian.”)
In response to these policy shifts, the University of Regina’s Pride Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity teamed with Canadian LGBTQ advocacy group Egale Canada to challenge the implementation of the former policy on the grounds that doing so would supposedly violate the rights “to life, liberty, and security of the person” and “equal treatment before and under the law” granted to each citizen in the nation’s bill of rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Following a brief court case, Court of King’s Bench Justice Micahel Megaw eventually ruled that “at this stage the pronoun restriction does not appear to have governmental authority,” granting an injunction against the government’s policies “pending a full and complete hearing into the constitutionality.”
However, rather than wait for the legal process to play out, the Saskatchewan government moved to circumvent it all together by bulldozing the bill through its legislature and triggering its nonwithstanding clause, which itself temporarily overrode the usual requirement that a given piece of legislature undergo judicial review (For non-Canadian readers, please understand that this is a very truncated account of what went down).
This play successful, on October 20th, 2023, the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly officially enshrined the bill into law, amending their local Education Act of 1995 to require all schools abide by the aforementioned pronoun policy.
Unsurprisingly, the passage of this bill did not fly well with Maslany, herself a noted LGBTQ youth activist.
Speaking to reporters following a June appearance at an event held by Canada’s Walk of Fame at the Hotel Saskatchewan, Maslany criticized its contents, “It should not be in the control of parents how a child identifies.”
“How a child knows them self to be,” said the actress. “That isn’t a parent’s place – it’s an overreach. It’s an overreach on the part of the provincial government to legislate that. It’s absurd.”
The She-Hulk star further opined, “Children have rights. Children are human beings who have knowledge and who know themselves and we should be taking cues from them. In so many ways, we should be taking cues from them. Listening to them, empowering them to know who they are and to name that.”
“It’s their right,” she concluded. “It’s not the parent’s right.”
This is not the first such piece of legislation Maslany has publicly spoken out against.
Explaining her decision to wear a ‘Support Trans Future’ sweatshirt in a pair of official She-Hulk featurettes uploaded to Marvel’s official YouTube channel, Maslany told Elle magazine, “those [shirts] were a direct response to what was happening, in terms of the [Parentl Right’s In Education] bill passed in Florida.”
“I felt, as an employee of Disney, that I had to speak,” added the actress. “Stand with the people who I stand with. I wanted to let people know, who needed to know, that I was with them.”
