- Chris grew up in Chilliwack’s public schools without seeing the queer future that was waiting for her. Today, she is a parent of five, an educator, the district’s SOGI lead, an inclusive sexual-health educator, and a PhD student helping change those same schools from within.
Before Chris became the person helping Chilliwack schools better understand queer students and families, she was a child in those same schools trying to understand herself.
She knew family mattered to her. More than almost anything, she wanted to become a parent and build a loving home. But the only version of that future she had been shown was heterosexual: marry a man, have children, and follow the only path that seemed to be allowed for her.
So that is what she did.
Chris married a man and became a parent. She built her life around something real and deeply important to her—family—while living inside an identity that caused her pain because she did not yet know another way was possible.
Then visibility changed what she could see.
Through therapy, queer community, Pride, openly queer educators, and LGBTQ+ families living ordinary, joyful lives, Chris began to recognize herself in a profound new way. She saw that queerness did not mean losing family, love, purpose, or belonging. It could be part of all of them.
Visibility did not make Chris queer.
It gave her enough light to see the person who had been there all along.
Visibility did not make us queer.
It helped us stop hiding from ourselves.
I understand this part of Chris’s story because I have lived my own version of it.
For many of us, the hardest part of coming out was not that there had been no signs, feelings, or quiet knowledge.
It was that our community had been hidden from us.
Queer people existed all around us, but generations had been taught that being visible could cost you your family, your faith, your career, your safety, or your place in the community.
People learned to protect themselves by becoming difficult to find.
That absence could then be used as supposed proof that queer people were rare, new, or belonged somewhere else. A young person could grow up surrounded by queer neighbours, relatives, teachers, and community leaders without ever knowing who they were or what kind of future was possible.
That is the trap of invisibility.
It does not make children straight or cisgender. It simply leaves many queer and trans people to interpret themselves through stories that have no place for them.
When visibility finally reached Chris and me, it did not plant something foreign inside us. It gave us language. It challenged the shame we had inherited. It showed us people who had built lives we had never been told we could have.
We did not become different people. The conditions changed enough for more of us to become visible, even to ourselves.
This is why representation is so vital.
Not every child who sees a queer family will identify as queer, but every child deserves an honest picture of the world and every queer child deserves the chance to recognize that their life is still full of possibility.
Queer people have always been inside public education.
It is easy to speak about LGBTQ+ inclusion as though it arrived in schools recently, fully formed, through a policy, program, or acronym.
That is not how change happened.
Long before most school districts had SOGI leads, queer teachers were finding one another, publishing resources, supporting students, challenging discrimination, and asking public education to tell the truth about the families already sitting in its classrooms.
In the 1990s, the Gay and Lesbian Educators of British Columbia—then known as GALE-BC and now the Pride Education Network—was developing resources and helping teachers confront homophobia and heterosexism in schools.
A B.C. Teachers’ Federation retrospective records that, by 1995, the union was distributing GALE-BC’s Counselling Lesbian and Gay Youth booklet to local teacher organizations. (BCTF)
Queer educators also used the professional publications available to them.
In 1999, Surrey teacher James Chamberlain wrote in the BCTF’s Teacher magazine about students trying to establish gay-straight alliances and the educators who could help them.
In 2001, he shared a new website giving students and teachers practical information for starting those groups.
By 2004, GALE-BC had published a second edition of Challenging Homophobia in Schools, with K–12 lesson plans, counselling information, violence-prevention strategies, and guidance for supporting student alliances. (BCTF 1999, 2001, 2004)
These educators were not outsiders, they were teachers doing what educators do: noticing who was being missed and building something better.
Their work did not always carry an official title. Sometimes it looked like a booklet passed between teachers, a resource list, a safer classroom, a student club, or one adult willing to speak when everyone else had learned to be quiet.
But those small acts accumulated. Visibility became connection. Connection became organization. Organization became institutional change.
Celebrating joy in elementary school rainbow clubs
Read about how Gina Parkes (pictured right with wife Liz Parkes) started a rainbow club at her school in Chilliwack.
One teacher, three books, and a case that changed Canadian schools.
James Chamberlain’s name also became attached to one of the most important LGBTQ+ education cases in Canadian history.
In 1997, Chamberlain asked the Surrey School Board to approve three books for use in Kindergarten and Grade 1. The books showed families with two mothers or two fathers.
The board refused, largely in response to religious objections and concerns that young children should not encounter family structures that differed from what they were taught at home.
The fight reached the Supreme Court of Canada and in 2002, the Court found the board’s decision unreasonable.
Public schools in B.C. have a secular mandate, and the board had failed to approach the books according to that mandate, the curriculum, and the values of tolerance and respect.
The ruling did not say every proposed book must be approved. It made clear that a public school board cannot treat the existence of same-sex families as something children must be protected from simply because some adults object to them. (Chamberlain v. Surrey School District No. 36, 2002 SCC 86)
The case changed public schools forever, because the children in those books were not hypothetical. Children with queer parents were already in public schools.
Refusing to acknowledge their families did not preserve neutrality. It taught them whose family could appear in a classroom and whose had to remain outside it.
Other queer people kept pushing.
Murray and Peter Corren challenged the exclusion of queer realities from B.C.’s curriculum through a human-rights complaint. A 2006 settlement led to a new Social Justice 12 course and a wider process for reviewing curriculum through the lenses of equality and respect, including sexual orientation and family structure. (BCTF)
That same year, educators were writing openly about the barriers they still faced: fear of parent reactions, resistance from colleagues and administrators, and accusations that supporting queer students amounted to a personal agenda. They kept going anyway.
Then came another important lesson from the courts.
In School District No. 44 (North Vancouver) v. Jubran, the B.C. Court of Appeal upheld a finding that a school district was responsible for a discriminatory environment created by years of homophobic harassment.
The student did not identify as gay. That did not matter. The effect of the harassment denied his dignity and full participation in school life. (B.C. Human Rights Tribunal case summary)
Help fund what queer communities need next
James Chamberlain helped make space for queer families in our schools—and today, he continues that work through Island Queers. Donate to Island Queers and help fund vital LGBTQ+ programs across Vancouver Island.
More recently, the public fight over SOGI-inclusive education in Chilliwack reached the Supreme Court of Canada.
In Hansman v. Neufeld, Glen Hansman—a gay teacher and former BCTF president—was sued for defamation by then-school trustee Barry Neufeld after publicly condemning statements he believed harmed transgender and other 2SLGBTQ+ students.
Hansman successfully sought dismissal of the defamation suit under B.C.’s anti-SLAPP law. Neufeld successfully appealed this ruling, however, in 2023, the Court restored the dismissal of the defamation lawsuit brought against Hansman, recognizing the substantial public interest in protecting counter-speech made in defence of a vulnerable group. (Supreme Court of Canada)
But that was not the end of the legal reckoning for the statements made by the trustee.
In 2026, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ruled on a separate complaint brought by the BCTF on behalf of LGBTQ+ members of the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association concerning the same public statements by Barry Neufeld that Glen Hansman had condemned.
The Tribunal found that Neufeld had discriminated against queer and trans teachers in their employment, contributed to a poisoned workplace, and violated B.C.’s protections against discriminatory publications and hate speech.
He was ordered to stop the conduct and pay $750,000 in compensation. (B.C. Human Rights Commissioner)
The ruling made something especially important clear: a trustee’s public statements cannot always be separated from their official role. Trustees hold power over the working conditions of educators and are responsible for helping maintain a school system free from discrimination.
Had Neufeld still been a board member when the decision was released, Chilliwack would have had a sitting trustee formally found to have discriminated against employees within the district he governed.
The ruling did not order his removal, but the Board could not reasonably have dismissed the matter as a personal opinion or ordinary political disagreement. It would have faced an immediate responsibility to protect employees, prevent further harm, enforce its conduct expectations, and restore confidence in the safety of the workplace.
Together, these decisions established both sides of the principle: people must be able to speak in defence of vulnerable communities, and elected officials remain accountable when their own conduct crosses into discrimination.
Each of these victories made something unmistakably clear: queer people were here, we had always been here, and we were here to stay.
Public schools therefore had a moral, financial, and legal duty to include queer students, families, and employees in every aspect of school life—not as an optional initiative, but as an essential part of equitable public education.
From the people policy happened to, to the people shaping it.
My recent conversation with political researcher Dr. Nicole McMahon helped me understand this history in another way.
Nicole’s work does not ask what systems do to queer people. It asks what queer people do once we enter those systems: the choices and risks we navigate, and how our presence can affect policy and public opinion. (Nicole McMahon’s research)
That shift in perspective matters far beyond any elected office.
For generations, queer and trans people were treated mainly as the subjects of school policy: people to debate, regulate, exclude, protect, or explain. But we have always been more than the people policy happens to.
We are also the people writing the resources, teaching the classes, leading the professional development, conducting the research, supporting the families, governing the systems, arguing the cases, and changing the policy.
Our lived experience is not the only knowledge that matters, and identity does not make any of us automatically right. But lived experience is knowledge.
A person who has spent years calculating whether it is safe to be known understands institutional culture in a way no checklist can fully capture. A person who grew up without the words to understand herself knows what silence can do.
A queer parent knows what it means when a school treats her family as an exception—or recognizes it as part of the community.
That is what Chris brings into her work.
Chris is changing the same system in which she once could not see herself.
Chris now teaches in the district where she grew up.
She is raising five children, serves as the Chilliwack School District’s SOGI lead, works in inclusive sexual-health education, and is pursuing a PhD focused on making that education more inclusive.
The child who did not have enough language to understand herself is now helping educators find better language for the next generation.
The parent who once believed family required her to deny part of herself is now helping schools recognize the many ways loving families are built.
The student who could not see a queer future is now becoming one of the people making that future visible.
Chris develops resources, supports staff, listens to queer students and families, and helps adults approach complex conversations with greater confidence and care.
She is also thinking beyond today’s training session or policy document toward better sexual-health education and children’s books that reflect donor siblings, queer identities, and different family structures.
This is how a school system changes from within: not through one person arriving with every answer, but through people with professional knowledge, lived experience, and deep relationships doing consistent work over time.
It also answers a fear some parents may bring to conversations about SOGI and inclusive sexual health.
This work is not designed to pull children away from their families or decide their identities for them.
It gives children accurate, age-appropriate language for bodies, consent, relationships, identity, and the families that already exist around them.
It gives educators tools to respond responsibly.
It gives parents more openings for honest conversation.
Visibility does not prescribe a future. It makes more futures possible.
This work is not optional… even when the investment level is.
The history matters, but so does the law we have now.
B.C.’s Human Rights Code prohibits discrimination in services—including schools—on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family status, and other protected characteristics. (B.C. Human Rights Code, section 8)
Provincial policy also requires school codes of conduct to reference every protected ground in the Code, including sexual orientation and gender identity or expression.
It directs boards and schools to maintain safe, caring, and inclusive learning environments, build staff capacity, engage in continuous professional learning, and monitor whether school culture is improving. (B.C. Ministry of Education and Child Care)
That means a school district cannot simply decide that queer inclusion is too political, too controversial, or too unpopular to address.
Human rights do not become optional when they create discomfort or disagreement.
The law does not require every district to employ someone with the exact title “SOGI lead.”
It does not prescribe one program, staffing formula, or set of classroom resources.
But it does require districts to provide educational services without discrimination and to respond meaningfully when students are excluded or harmed.
Policies on paper are not enough to do that work.
Districts need people who understand the law, the curriculum, student development, family relationships, and the realities queer students face.
They need staff training, current resources, clear procedures, and someone responsible for turning commitments into daily practice.
They need inclusive sexual-health education that is accurate, age-appropriate, and capable of serving the students who are actually in the room.
When districts or provincial mandates cut this work back, they do not make queer students or families disappear. They weaken their own ability to meet existing obligations.
They also increase the risk of human-rights complaints, legal costs, and public failures that could have been prevented. But the worst outcome is not a lawsuit.
It is a child learning that honesty will cost them safety.
It is a family being treated as though it does not fully belong.
It is a student pushed to the edges of education by an institution with a legal and public duty to serve them.
Chilliwack’s continued investment in knowledgeable leadership, inclusive education, and staff support are essential to every student thriving academically.
It is not an extra favour offered to a narrow group.
It is part of how a public school district serves its full community and meets responsibilities that queer educators, families, advocates, and courts spent decades making impossible to ignore.
The people already here… and the people who come next.
Chris’s story belongs to her, but it is also part of a much larger inheritance.
James Chamberlain asked a school board to recognize the families already in his classroom.
Queer educators published the materials they wished they had been given.
Students fought for places to find one another.
Murray and Peter Corren challenged a curriculum that treated queer life as invisible.
Azmi Jubran’s case established that school districts must take homophobic harassment seriously.
Glen Hansman defended queer and trans students in public when silence would have been easier.
Nicole McMahon’s research now helps us see queer and trans people not merely as communities affected by power, but as people who enter institutions and use power to change what those institutions can become.
Chris is carrying that work forward inside Chilliwack schools.
So am I, in my own way.
So are queer teachers, educational assistants, counsellors, administrators, parents, trustees, researchers, authors, and community members across this province.
Some are public. Many still cannot safely be. Their work still counts.
No single person created this progress, and no single person can carry it forever.
That is the strength of a movement rooted in community: the work moves between us.
One person creates language.
Another changes policy.
Another teaches a class, writes a book, supports a family, speaks at a board meeting, or becomes the visible life someone else needs to see.
Queer people are not arriving in public education from somewhere outside.
We grew up in these schools.
We found one another in them.
And now we are helping them become places where fewer children have to live in pain before they can see themselves clearly.
We are the people already here.
Listen to my full conversation with Chris on Rainbow Country, where we talk about queer identity, family, visibility, inclusive sexual-health education, and what it means to change schools from within.
