SCHOOL TRANS AGITPROP
MILITANT transgender advocates are imposing their agenda with uncompromising zeal on schoolchildren. That’s fine with President Joe Biden. His administration announced this month that by April, it will enhance the legal entitlements of transgender publicschool students, with new guarantees regarding access to bathrooms, locker rooms and sports competitions.
These issues grab the headlines, but they’re less harmful to most students than the damage being done by the distortion of the school curriculum. From the youngest age, students are being brainwashed with gender ideology.
Children — as young as 5 — are being encouraged to disregard their anatomy and choose their gender based on their feelings.
Last week, a California mother raged at the Spreckels Union School District board for allowing teachers to coach her 12-year-old daughter on becoming a boy, choosing a boy’s name and hiding the plan from the family.
A book school libraries offer for kids ages 4 to 8 reads, “This is Ruthie. She is a transgender girl. That means when she was born everyone thought she was a boy. Until she grew a little older — old enough to tell everyone that she’s actually a girl.”
Gender dysphoria — a rare medical condition that makes people feel mismatched with their sexual anatomy — occurs in about 0.6 percent of the adult population, according to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. Anyone afflicted should be treated with kindness and offered medical help.
It first appears in childhood, but with so few children affected, the curriculum should not be distorted for everyone. Elementary-school teachers are putting words on the blackboard like “nonbinary” and “transgender” even before kids have learned multiplication.
But Maine’s Department of Education reports that between 13 percent and 18 percent of public highschool students say they’re “lesbian, gay, bisexual or unsure” of their sexual identity. It’s no wonder when the curriculum programs them to doubt their identity. In school it’s cool to be anything but heterosexual.
Maine requires public-school teachers to explore the achievements of LGBTQ+ individuals, not just in health class but also in history and social studies. That’s indoctrination since teachers are not asked to do the same for the celibate, for example.
This indoctrination offends many Christian and Jewish parents. Most Christians say that whether someone is a man or woman is determined by their sex at birth, according to Pew Foundation research (which did not cover Muslims, who’d likely agree), while agnostics and atheists are more likely to go along with gender ideology. In the document “Male and Female He Created Them,” the Vatican rejects gender ideology.
Public schools shouldn’t be taking sides. But in Maine, and many other states, they are.
On Dec. 8, when the US Supreme
Court heard oral arguments in a case involving Maine’s public schools, the state’s attorney, Christopher Taub, insisted that they’re “religiously neutral.” That’s a laugh.
Justice Samuel Alito was skeptical, asking Taub if he’d say that about schools that teach critical race theory. Taub ducked the question. Alito would have been even more on the mark asking about Maine’s transgender curriculum. It’s the left’s new religion, and there’s nothing neutral about it.
Where do parents go for help stopping this propagandizing? Sorry, not to the American Civil Liberties Union, despite its century-long record protecting the free exercise of religion. Lately, the ACLU has demoted religious rights, putting them below transgender rights. The ACLU declares that “religion is being used as an excuse to discriminate against others.”
The International Olympic Committee is also kowtowing to transgender apostles. Last month, the IOC announced it’s recommending eliminating any tests whatsoever — including of testosterone levels
— for transgender athletes to compete in women’s events. Fairness be damned.
Don’t count on Biden. He’s already told the transgender crowd that “your president has your back.” His administration is unlikely to strike a middle ground that respects the majority as well as the transgender minority.
Truth is, if students are to be educated, rather than indoctrinated, parents will have to stand up to the transgender militants. No one else has the nerve.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.