By Colton Swiderski

Transgender student-athletes can now play as gender they identify as with new SHSAA policy

Sep 9, 2016 | 5:00 PM

The governing body for Saskatchewan high school athletics has instituted a policy to allow transgender student athletes the ability to participate in sports as the gender they identify as.

In the works for more than a year, Lyle McKellar, executive director of the Saskatchewan High Schools Athletic Association (SHSAA) said the policy aligns itself with documentation that came out from the Ministry of Education in fall 2015.

He added the policy is in place for all the provinces high schools.  

“The policy is pretty straight forward in the sense it indicates students are able to participate with their gender identity,” McKellar said. “Transgender students are definitely a part of the student body in many of our schools and we’re just supporting their opportunity to participate in school sport.”

At this point, McKellar said school divisions are dealing with gender and sexual diversity as part of their whole development process.

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“Whether its facility requirements [or] supervision, school divisions are dealing with those types of things and it’s not just dealing with participation in sport, it’s recognizing the rights of transgender students across the whole realm of education,” he said.

In June 2015, the provincial council passed a resolution for the SHSAA to develop a policy surrounding transgender athletes.

McKellar said during the SHSAA’s drafting process, the head office didn’t have any direct contact with families.

As part of School Sport Canada and an affiliate member with the National Federation of High Schools, McKellar said the SHSAA was made aware transgender participation in school support was a topic being discussed by many other jurisdictions across Canada and North America.

“We came up with a five-person committee, they studied the Manitoba and Alberta policies very closely,” McKellar said. “We tried to align with those two provinces because of the inter-province play between high schools so wanted to be consistent with what neighbours were doing as well.”

He added, the committee reached out to experts and developed an inclusive policy which was passed at their June annual general meeting.

With policies in place all across Canada for a couple years now, McKellar admitted the SHSAA may be a bit behind times with the policy’s implementation.

“We wanted to make sure what we were doing, we were doing correctly and would provide the best experience for our student athletes,” he said. “We’re not looking at it as being earth shattering or anything, it’s just providing an opportunity for students to participate in school sport.”

School’s been in for a just over a week with most fall athletics starting up already.

McKellar said he hasn’t received any feedback so far, however, he isn’t expecting anything other than the odd question like how to enter the student into registration databases.

“I’m not expecting any problems or issues in terms of the participation of those students,” he said. “We’ll see what happens and what other questions come up but we have experts available to us for any questions we may have moving forward.”

Colton Swiderski is meadowlakeNOW’s municipal affairs, crime and court, health and education reporter. He can be reached at cswiderski@jpbg.ca or tweet him @coltonswiderski.