The Anti-Science Disaster of Gender Ideology in the Schools
Scientists Must Join the Resistance.
Biologists, doctors, and other scientists must fight to get Gender Identity Indoctrination out of K-12 schools across the U.S. It is pervasive and highly destructive.
The curricula and policies implemented in U.S. K-12 schools are producing young adults who lack the most basic understanding of biology, scientific inquiry, and critical thinking. It is subjecting vast numbers of children to one of the most horrifying medical scandals of all time. And it is churning out brainwashed foot soldiers for authoritarian mobs that attack anyone who contradicts Gender Identity dogma, including, for example, a scientist who mentions binary sex as key to evolution.
Please share this article widely and visit the source documents that underlie it. Those documents—K-12 school curricula and policies from across the U.S.—are in Archives on the Women’s Declaration International (WDI) USA website. They were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and other research. (Citation format in this article: Roman number is Archive Part, Initials refer to the state where lessons are taught, Arabic number is page number.)
The miseducation of children evident in the archived materials is astounding. But those materials provide only a glimpse of the harm underway. For example, teachers are actively encouraged to promote Gender Identity Ideology in their classrooms, and much of what they do is not reflected in the Archives. Pay close attention to what teachers and other school staff are taught in training materials referenced in this article. School personnel pass their false understandings on to students in classrooms, school clubs, and other venues.
If there are schools not yet teaching the anti-science ideology-driven lessons detailed in this article, they will likely soon join in. The Biden Administration has issued orders and regulations designed to spread Gender Identity Indoctrination to all schools.
SCHOOLS TEACH BLATANT INACCURACIES REGARDING BIOLOGY.
Throughout the U.S., schools are steadily bombarding children with blatantly false information about human biology and reproduction. This starts in kindergarten, if not before, and continues relentlessly through high school.
THE NUMBER OF SEXES
Scientific Reality
There are two human sexes, male and female. Sex is not a spectrum. Males are associated with the production of the small gamete, sperm. Females are associated with production of the large gamete (the egg) and with gestation of children. People are male or female based on which of the two sexed body types they were born with, regardless of whether reproductive anatomy is functional, whether they retain their sexual organs, and whether they engage in procreation.
Disorders of Sexual Development exist but do not alter this reality. Each person with a DSD is either male or female. Cases of ambiguity are extremely rare and do not represent additional sexes. There is no 3rd gamete. There is no third sex.
What Schools Teach Instead
Schools throughout the U.S. teach that human sex is a spectrum. They inform children that there are more than two sexes, and that children can be boys, girls, neither, both, or something else.
“Did you know that some people aren’t boys or girls?” a video shown to kindergarteners in Portland, Oregon asks. The song leading into the film declares “It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy, girl or somewhere in between.” (III, OR, 10, 11) Fourth and fifth graders in Portland are told that there are “[l]ots of different sexes” and that “Assigned Sex is a spectrum. There are many sexes….Sex is not binary because there are more than two sexes.” (III, OR, 28)
In a lesson for preschoolers in Evanston/Skokie, Illinois, teachers tell children “When someone is not a boy or a girl, maybe they feel both, they are non-binary or queer.” (I, IL, 88)
A film shown as part of teacher training in Princeton, New Jersey, describes “biological sex” as a spectrum. (I, NJ, 6) Princeton middle schoolers watch happy laughing young people talk about being something other than boy or girl in a video entitled Trans 101 (II, NJ, 14-15)
Children watching a film on puberty in Seattle schools are told that it is for people who identify “as boy, girl, neither, both or transgender.” (V, WA, 46.)
“We love you if you are a girl, boy, neither or both,” a father says to his child in Born Ready, read to children across the U.S.
“It is true that many people are born with what we think of as male bodies or female bodies,” Seattle school teachers tell children. The adjective “many” indicates that other people don’t have bodies we think of as male or female. (V, WA, 5)
THE PROCESS AND CRITERIA FOR IDENTIFYING AN INDIVIDUAL’S SEX
Scientific Reality
When a baby is born, a doctor or other health care provider observes and records their sex. The observation is based on scientific knowledge.
A person’s sex is determined by whether they have the primary sex organ (gonad) of a male (testes) or a female (ovaries) at birth. Doctors generally rely on children’s genitals as an extremely reliable surrogate as to what their primary sex organ is, which makes sense given the extreme rareness of genital inconsistency with gonads. A person’s sex is not a matter of hormone concentrations, secondary sex characteristics such as facial hair, and other non-gonadal features. These are related to and impacted by the gonads a person has, but they are not the basis of a person’s sex.
Doctors do not guess a baby’s sex. Moreover, the accuracy rate of their observations is extraordinarily high. An error in the sex recorded for a child is extremely rare.
Determining a child’s sex is almost never a complicated matter. And the phrase “assign sex” is appropriate only for extremely rare situations in which a child has a type of Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD) that creates ambiguity as to sex that necessitates further investigation. (Most DSDs do no entail any ambiguity whatsoever.)
Our understanding of sex development in the womb has advanced over time. In the early 1900s, Dr. Nettie Maria Stevens discovered sex chromosomes and their important role in determining which body type develops: male or female. Knowledge of chromosomes explains how the primary sex organs develop. It does not change the centrality of those organs with respect to determining whether a person is male or female. Atypical chromosome combinations such as XXX, XYY, XXY and XO do not represent different sexes. They represent diversity within each sex.
Hundreds of scientists from around the world have signed a statement dubbed The Project Nettie Statement in honor of Dr. Stevens, which says among other things:
Reproductive anatomies differentiate and mature under the control of genetic and hormonal signals, and measurements of these factors have strong predictive power, but do not define the sex of an individual. Biological sex is fundamentally defined by male and female reproductive anatomy. Attempts to recast biological sex as a social construct, which then becomes a matter of chosen individual identity, are wholly ideological, scientifically inaccurate and socially irresponsible.
What Schools Teach Instead
Schools teach children that doctors (or others) “guess” a newborn’s sex. They use the term “assign” for all births, rather than for just rare DSDs where it is appropriate:
Teacher training materials in San Diego claim that “sex is assigned at birth” and they clearly mean all births. (I, CA, 3, emphasis added)
First graders in Portland, Oregon are told that “gender” is “something adults come up with to sort people into groups.” They imply that by classifying children as boys or girls, adults are declaring that they must live according to sexist stereotypes. (III, OR, 22) Materials for 4th and 5th graders in Portland hit home this absurd notion that doctors are imposing sexist stereotypes on babies rather than merely observing and recording the physical reality of their sex. Doctors are said to use sex labels like male, female and intersex “to sort babies into gender categories.” (III, OR, 27)
Books like It Feels Good to Be Yourself read to elementary school children throughout the U.S. tell children sex is assigned by adults who make a guess (V, WA, 25,26, emphasis added). Babies in the book are all wearing diapers which makes it impossible for readers to tell their sex, even though the adults who help deliver them see them naked.
Materials sent to all families at a Seattle elementary school in conjunction with a “Transgender Day of Remembrance” declare that “What a baby’s body looks like can be a clue to their gender – but not always!” Families are told that sometimes “the adults guess correctly.” (V, WA, 96)
What are the biological features that form the basis of identifying a person’s sex? Answers to that question vary wildly in the materials used to educate children, and nearly all are thoroughly misleading. Note that in many of the examples below the actual determinant of sex—the primary sex organ (ovaries or testes)—isn’t mentioned at all by the schools. At the same time, the lists include all sorts of other items that shouldn’t be there—things that are affected by a person’s sex but are not the basis for identifying it.
A training for teachers in San Diego says that sex is “based on physical characteristics, such as hormones, chromosomes, genitals, etc.” (I, CA, 3)
A film shown to biology students in Denver says that “Sex typically refers to your biological traits.” According to the film, “There’s your gonads, your genitalia, your internal sex characteristics, your hormone production, hormone response, and secondary sex characteristics.” (I, CO, 82)
A Princeton teacher training declares that sex is determined “mainly by hormones and organs.” It explains that “For males this means testosterone, a penis, testes and secondary sex characteristics like body and facial hair and a lower voice. For females this means estrogen, a vagina and the internal reproductive organs for pregnancy. Female secondary sex characteristics include breasts, wider hips, and higher voice….” (II, NJ, 6)
The Seattle high school curriculum declares that “biological sex” is “based on chromosomes, either XX(female) or XY(male)” and on “genitals, such as whether someone has a vulva and clitoris, or a penis and scrotum.” (V, WA, 84)
“At birth a person is assigned the sex of male or female based on their reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones,” middle schoolers in Fairfax, Virginia are told. (IV, VA, 54)
Sixth graders in Rhode Island learn from the Genderbread Person that Biological Sex pertains to “The physical sex characteristics you’re born with and develop, including genitalia, body, shape, voice pitch, body hair, hormones, chromosomes, etc.” (IV, RI, 3)
In short, schools misrepresent the anatomical basis of sex identification and portray the process of identifying sex as more complicated and contentious than it is. This sets the stage for them declaring that anatomy-based understandings of sex are misguided and outdated.
Schools teach children that whether you are male, female, a man, a woman, a boy, a girl, or “something else” has nothing to do with anatomy. It is all a matter of feelings and self-declaration. Children are to decide their sex, and what was recorded for them at birth is retroactively deemed inaccurate if they declare themselves the other sex or nonbinary.
Fourth and fifth graders in Portland, Oregon are told that who gets to be a boy and who gets to be a girl is all completely up to individuals (III, OR, 37)
Schools throughout the U.S. use terms like “people with a penis” specifically to teach children that reproductive anatomy is irrelevant to whether a person is male or female. (For examples, see I, CA, 22 and the discussion of Sex Organs below.)
Schools provide children with definitions for words like “female”, “woman”, “male” and “man” that treat sex as feelings-based rather than anatomy-based. The definition for “Female” in the Seattle Middle School curriculum, for example, is “a person who identifies as a woman.” (V, WA, 73) Children are told that “a doctor may have said that a person was male or female when they were born, but that person knows in their heart that really isn’t their gender.” (V, WA, 55.)
A science lesson in New Jersey pushes Gender Identity Ideology’s versions of what makes a person a man or a woman, claiming that it is addressing “outdated attitudes or vernacular about sex…and sex determination.” (II, NJ, 24)
“Any gender and kid can have any type of body,” second graders in Portland, Oregon learn as they look at diagrams of male anatomy, and then female anatomy, neither of which are labeled as male or female. (III, OR, 23) Children are literally being told that even if they have one kind of body, they can somehow have the other. If you’re a person with a penis and testicles, you can simply self-identify as having a female body, and vice versa.
It Feels Good to Be Yourself read in grade schools across the U.S. features Ruthie, a boy who announces that he’s a girl at age 5. Ruthie is immediately accepted as a girl by his parents. The doctors who observed him as a newborn and properly recorded his actual sex are deemed to have been wrong.
A man who claims to be a woman in a Teen Vogue video shown to Denver high school students declares: “When I say I'm a woman, I don't just mean that I identify as a woman. I mean that my biology is the biology of a woman regardless of whether or not doctors agree.” (I CO 83) Another person in the video calls the factual statement that “trans women are biological men” “a cringe-worthy misconception.”
A third person in the Teen Vogue video says that “Over history, the location or the idea of what determined one's true sex shifted. A hundred years ago, it used to be whether or not you had ovaries or testes. Then it shifted to what kinds of chromosomes that you had, but the body doesn't just have one place where we can sit there with a microscope or something else, and say, hey wait a second, this is really who you are, this is your true sex. In fact, who you are is who you say you are.” (I, CO, 83) This video and other materials used by schools throughout the U.S. make no mention of The Nettie Project Statement. Nor do they clarify, as that statement does, that the discovery of chromosomes helps explain prenatal sex development but does not alter the centrality of reproductive anatomy as the determinant of a person’s sex.
As part of declaring that sex is based on feelings, schools often refer to hearts and minds as the places where feelings, and therefore, sex reside. They claim that some people are born in the wrong body.
A lesson for first graders in Illinois tells them that “some people use their bodies to know their gender, but some people use their hearts….We want to call people by the gender they have in their heart.” (I, IL, 88)
I Am Jazz read to students throughout the U.S. features a boy who says he has a “girl brain” trapped in a boy body.
In Seattle, as teachers read Gender Identity picture books in grade school they are to say this to children: “Some people may have been born with a male body, but know in their hearts and minds that they are actually female…or the other way around.” (V, WA, 5) This is a key message in each of the books read to the children, including for example, Introducing Teddy where the teddy bear knows in his heart he’s a girl. (V, WA, 9):
SUPPOSED DEGREES OF MALENESS AND FEMALENESS
Scientific Reality
The difference between being male and being female is qualitative not quantitative. In other words, a person is either male or female. There aren’t degrees of maleness or femaleness.
Secondary sex characteristics, unlike a person’s sex, do exist along a continuum. And they overlap between males and females. Some men have higher voices than some women. Some women have hairier bodies than some men.
A person’s secondary sex characteristics or other things like height, do not make them more or less of a man or a woman. A man with a higher pitched voice is not less of a man than one with a lower voice. He is not “more female” than other men. A woman with a lot of body hair is not less of a woman than one who has very little body hair. Nor is she “more male” than other women. While the tallest man is taller than the tallest woman, a man who is shorter than a woman is not less male as a result. Nor is she less female.
What Schools Teach Instead
As discussed earlier, schools get the criteria for identifying an individual’s sex wrong. Some even claim that secondary sex characteristics affect whether a person is male or female. Closely connected to that miseducation, many schools push the idea that some men are more male than other men, and some women are more female than others.
The most obvious way in which these falsehoods are delivered is by widespread use of the Genderbread Person in schools. (See the visual below from a 6th grade lesson taught in Barrington, Rhode Island; IV, RI, 3) The smiling Genderbread Person tells children to think of themselves as having various degrees of woman-ness or man-ness (Gender Identity), of femininity or masculinity (Gender Expression), and with regard to Sex, various degrees of Female-ness and Male-ness. As the enlarged portion of the chart below shows, in deciding their so-called female-ness and male-ness children are told to consider “The physical sex characteristics you’re born with and develop, including genitalia, body shape, voice pitch, body hair, hormones, chromosomes, etc.” This biologically inaccurate exercise also has implications for children’s understanding of things like ethnicity. Are ethnicities that tend to have more body hair more male than other ethnicities?
SEX ORGANS AND REPRODUCTIVE ROLES
Scientific Reality
Testes are the male “primary sex organ.” Male secondary sex organs include the penis, vas deferens, epididymis, and accessory sex glands. For females, the primary sex organ is the ovaries, and the secondary sex organs include the uterus, vagina, and fallopian tubes. Acknowledging these organs as male and female is key to understanding and discussing human reproduction and evolution.
A related basic biological reality—one that humans share with thousands of other mammalian species—is this: females produce eggs, gestate the young, and provide newborns with nourishment. Only females do these things. It is definitional. Similarly, males—and only males—impregnate females. Again, it is definitional.
Adult human females are called women. Only women can get pregnant and nurse an infant. Adult human males are called men. Only they are capable of impregnating a woman.
What Schools Teach Instead
Schools teach children that male sex organs are sometimes female sex organs, and vice versa. Having declared that people who say they’re the opposite sex are the opposite sex, schools take things one step further, declaring trans-identifying individuals’ sex organs to be those of the other sex as well.
In the Teen Vogue film shown in high school Biology classes, gender identity ideologue Chase Strangio declares that “A trans woman is a woman” and “All of her body parts are female parts.” (I, CO, p.84, emphasis added.) In other words, the penis of a trans-identifying man (a so-called “trans woman”) is a female sex organ. What is often crassly referred to as “girl-dick” is a real thing, according to the schools.
Teachers in Princeton, New Jersey tell first graders “You might feel like you are a boy, even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘girl’ parts. You might feel like you’re a girl even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘boy’ parts.” (II, NJ, 80) By saying that “some people” call male anatomy male, schools tell children that other people don’t agree. Those other people say male sex organs can be female, and vice versa.
Misinformation about sexual anatomy is also spread via contorted sex-free language in lessons on reproductive anatomy, puberty, sexual reproductions, and pregnancy. Children are shown diagrams of male reproductive anatomy that are not labeled with words like “Male” or “Man” or “Boy.” Diagrams of female anatomy do not bear the words “Female”, “Woman” or “Girl.” If there’s a label at all, it says something like “Person with a Penis” or “Person with a Vulva.” Or “Some Bodies Have These Middle Parts.” (III, OR, 3,5,6)
The examples shown above are from lessons for kindergarteners in Portland, Oregon. Those lessons at least give children some clue as to who has what anatomy. Teachers say that “A lot of times people with these parts are boys” and “A lot of times people with these parts are girls.”
But these clues are very misleading. A lot of times? Try 99.99% of the time. Yes, it is possible for an external sex organ to not match a person’s sex, i.e. their gonads. These situations are extremely rare, however, and it is absurd to alter basic anatomy lessons for children based on them. A unit on Disorders of Sexual Development in later school years in which accurate information about DSDs is shared may be appropriate but giving children the false impression that boys have vaginas, and girls have penises is not.
To grasp the absurdity and hypocrisy of the school’s lessons, consider hypospadias. It is a birth defect in which the opening of the urethra is on the underside of the penis instead of at the tip. If schools want to be inclusive, why do they not present children with multiple diagrams of the penis showing the many different urethral opening locations that can exist? Why do they not have anatomical diagrams that reflect all the other birth anomalies and illness- or injury-induced differences that exist for reproductive and other anatomy? They don’t do that, because doing so would be ridiculous and confusing for children.
But the schools’ primary goal in using confusing sex-free language in their lessons is not to ensure that those with DSDs are represented. It is to teach children that sex is self-declarable and has nothing to do with anatomy. Schools want to drive home the idea that “any kid can have any body.”
Below is another example of schools teaching anatomy without letting children know what sex they are and treating sexual anatomy as somehow sexless. This one’s from an Austin, Texas lesson for 2nd graders. (IV, TX, 16)
As you can see the Texas visuals don’t include hints about who has what body. Even places that do have those hints for small children, tend to dispense with them in later school years. By middle school, children in Gender Identity-infused school districts everywhere are likely learning reproductive anatomy in a weird, detached manner without any grounding whatsoever in basic biological understandings of sex. Terms like “people with vulvas” and “someone with a penis” are used, but never terms like “boy,” “girl,” “man,” and “woman.” In general, the words “male” and “female” are also completely omitted.
The film Puberty and You shown to students in Seattle is typical. It uses the term female once and only once: “This is a diagram of the reproductive system of a person who was assigned female at birth.” The term “male” is used only once as well: “This is a diagram of the reproductive system of a person who was assigned male at birth.” The School District is telling children that even though people are “assigned” male or female at birth, doctors can be wrong. And that the anatomy being shown could be either female or male depending on how a person identifies.
The Puberty and You film NEVER uses the words “woman”, “man”, “girl” or “boy.” Not even once. It never uses the pronouns “she” or “he.” Body parts specific to each sex are presented as disembodied anatomical structures that could be in either sex. “The vagina is one of 3 openings.” “These two structures are called testicles. They’re inside a sac called the scrotum.”
Notes to teachers in curricula across the U.S. make it clear that all of this is absolutely intentional. The schools are deliberately making things vague with a goal of ensuring that children don’t see male anatomy as male, and female anatomy as female.
Read the following note to people who teach 4th, 5th and 6th grade in Seattle (V, WA, 40):
A note to teachers in Seattle makes it clear that confusing language in puberty lessons is intentional. (V, WA, 40)
Austin Texas materials tell teachers that “In this lesson, you will notice that body parts and processes are not labelled as male or female. While it is ok to use the terms boy/girl/male/female, it is important not to assume that all boys or girls have certain anatomy. This approach is more inclusive of intersex and gender diverse people.” (IV, TX, 25) (Note that the school believes that intersex people are not male or female which is wrong, as will be discussed below.)
Notes to Teachers included in an Oregon lesson plan for elementary school students emphasize that the failure to identify illustrations of sexual anatomy as “male” or “female,” man or woman, boy or girl, is not an oversight. “Make sure to use the wording written on the slides, as it was very intentional and is gender inclusive for all identities,” teachers are told. “The slides are text heavy to help teachers with language. This lesson was written by trans people.” (III, OR, 7, emphasis added.)
As they intentionally confuse children with regard to sexual anatomy, schools also intentionally confuse them about the reproductive functions of males and females, and about what happens to men and what happens to women over the course of life. Discussions of pregnancy refer to “pregnant people” or “someone” who might get pregnant, for example. Words like “woman” and “she” are missing.
The Seattle puberty film refers to “people” who menstruate and notes that “ejaculations can happen when a person is sleeping...” In other words, both men and women menstruate. Both have ejaculations. The film doesn’t delineate which puberty changes happen to which sex: “People’s body shape changes too. It goes from being straight like a kid to having shoulders or hips more like an adult….Our voices get deeper and some kids’ voices get much deeper and when that happens quickly their voices might crack or make squeaking sounds sometimes when they talk.” No mention is made of the fact that it is girls who will experience hips widening, and it is boys whose voices may crack and squeak.
Take a look at the book What Makes A Baby read in schools in Austin, Texas. There are literally no references to women, females or girls as the concepts of pregnancy and birth are addressed. Nor are their references to men. Eggs and sperm float in space as strange sexless bodies float nearby. Babies emerge from sexless people whose bodies are not in the picture. (IV, TX, 4-9)
To recap, children coming out of Gender Identity-promoting schools have only vague understandings of male and female anatomy, who has which, and who plays which reproductive roles. They literally are indoctrinated to believe that there are female penises, you don’t need a man and a woman to make a baby, and men give birth.
HOMOSEXUALITY
Scientific Reality
Homosexuality is same sex attraction.
What Schools Teach Instead
Schools regularly tell students that the definition of homosexuality is same gender attraction:
Training materials in Princeton NJ define “lesbian” as a “sexual orientation and/or identity of a person who identifies as female and who is sexually and emotionally attracted to others who identify as female.” “Gay” is “a sexual orientation and/or identity of a person who identifies as male and who is sexually and emotionally attracted to others who identify as male.” (II, NJ, 11)
Seattle’s high school curriculum says that Sexual Orientation “is determined by whether a person is attracted to the same gender, another gender, or all genders.” (V, WA, 85)
A San Diego high school lesson explains that “A person attracted to their same gender are typically referred to as gay or lesbian…” (I CA 53.) Here’s an example of the kind of convoluted language that replaces the simple language of same sex attraction, when Gender Identity takes over: “…a person whose biology at birth was characterized as ‘female’ and who also feels female on the inside, who is attracted only to people whose biology at birth was characterized as ‘female’ and who also feel female on the inside, will likely identify as a lesbian.” (I CA 53.)
Gutting the meaning of lesbian and gay is not enough for the Gender Identity ideologues writing curricula. School materials in Portland, Oregon declare that “cis and straight people” should avoid terms like “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” and use “LGBTIA2S+ terms” instead. They claim that “members of the LGBTIQIA community have taken back the word ‘queer’ as their own. Some use the words homo- and hetero-sexual to reinvent and play with those meanings too.” (III 47,OR, emphasis added.)
The LGB-undermining consequences of redefining homosexuality as same gender attraction are everywhere. See Part II of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Trans Galaxy for details. Lesbians and gays are fighting back as individuals and via various new organizations they’ve formed. But LGB Alliance, Lesbians United, Gays Against Groomers, Fred Sargeant, and other renowned LGB leaders who disagree with Gender Identity Ideology are all absent from K-12 Gender Identity curricula.
DISORDERS OF SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT (INTERSEX CONDITIONS)
Scientific Reality
Approximately 1.7% of live births involve a newborn with a Disorder (or Difference) of Sexual Development (DSD).
Approximately 88% of all people with DSDs—1.5% of live births—have Late Onset Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, a condition in which a person has all the primary and secondary organs for their sex, but later in life an adrenal gland disorder causes health problems. People with this condition are unambiguously male or female.
In fact, the sex of nearly all people with DSDs is crystal clear. Klinefelter’s Syndrome, hypospadias, vaginal agenesis, and most DSD conditions create no ambiguity whatsoever about whether a person is male or female.
Less than two hundredths of one percent of live births involve ambiguity that necessitates investigation to ascertain sex. Even that ambiguity is usually swiftly resolved. No person with a DSD is a member of a sex beyond male or female. Not even the rare individuals who are born with genital and/or gonadal ambiguity.
It is important to determine a child’s sex and why reproductive anatomy is atypical. Each child and his or her family needs to know what to expect developmentally over time. Appropriate medical diagnoses, treatments, and dosages throughout a child’s life will be affected by which sex they are. Efforts to discern a child’s sex and to assess the specific pathways by which abnormalities occurred are not a matter of attempting to tie a child to particular sex stereotypes and roles. In some instances, DSDs can pose life-threatening crises, making accurate analysis particularly critical.
Having a DSD is an entirely different thing than identifying as transgender or nonbinary. Those who identify as trans or nonbinary almost never have a DSD. And most people with DSDs do not identify as trans or non-binary. Having an anomaly in sexual development is entirely different than having a typical body and declaring yourself a different sex. The latter is ideology-driven, and it relies on ideology-based gutting of rational definitions for sex-based words.
Some refer to all DSDs as “intersex” conditions. Some employ the term “intersex” to refer to the tiny subset of DSDs that entail genital and/or gonadal sexual ambiguity. Some avoid the term “intersex” altogether considering it misleading and outdated, relying solely on the term DSD.
What Schools Teach Instead
Schools and the Gender Ideology groups they rely on use the term “intersex.” They do not use the term “DSD.”
Children are led to believe that as many people are born with ambiguous genitals and gonads as are born with red hair and green eyes. The Teen Vogue video shown in high school biology classes features a person named Hanne Gaby who is said to have an intersex condition that involves sexual ambiguity. “We're not that rare,” Hanne declares. “It's 1.7% of the population is born like this. It's as common as people with green eyes and red hair. Everybody knows somebody, but it's sometimes hard for the person to speak about it, or the person doesn't necessarily know it.” This is highly misleading, since nearly all people within that 1.7% statistic have conditions that involve no ambiguity whatsoever.’’
Even if schools don’t explicitly state that 1.7% of newborns have ambiguous sex organs, they rely on organizations that do. And they encourage students to be in contact with those organizations. Thus, it is now a widespread misperception that there are lots of people in our world who have the genitals of one sex and the gonads of the other—as many people as there are red-heads. This author has heard this claim from various young people and from a former high school counselor.
Schools give children inaccurate definitions and understandings about DSDs/intersex conditions:
“If our external body parts are different from our internal organs then we are called ‘intersex’” San Diego schools tell high school students. But for most of the people in the 1.7% group schools are referring to as intersex, there is no conflict between external and internal body parts.
Schools constantly tell children that people with DSDs/intersex conditions are not male or female, which is wrong:
“Biological sex includes hormonal, chromosomal and anatomical factors that make one male, female or intersex,” San Diego teacher training materials say. (I, CA, 17)
Third to fifth graders in Oregon are told that Intersex means “A person whose body shape, genes, sex characteristics, and/or parts do not fit within the ‘male’ and ‘female’ binary.” (III, OR, 43)
The Genderbread Person shown to students in New Jersey has this to say about intersex: “Female = vagina, ovaries, XX chromosomes. Male = penis, testes, XY chromosomes. Intersex=a combination of the two.” (II, NJ, 33)
Austin, Texas schoolchildren are told that “a person’s sex can be male, female or intersex (not clearly defined as either male or female.)” (IV, TX, 25)
Diagrams shown to children across the U.S. feature a line labeled Male on one end, and Female on the other, with Intersex written over the center of the line between the two ends.
Forms schools give children to fill out ask them to check one of the following three boxes for their sex: Male, Female, or Intersex.
As schools shamelessly misrepresent the nature of DSDs, their impact on the sex of individuals, and the prevalence of sexual ambiguity, they use the existence of DSDs to promote Gender Identity Ideology. While it is rarely spelled out, their argument goes like this: 1) DSDs exist (true), 2) there are lots of people with DSDs that entail sexual ambiguity (false), 3) people with DSDs are not men and women (false), and therefore, 4) any of the nearly 7.8 billion people on Earth who are DSD-free should be entitled to identify their way out of their sex. (This is an irrational conclusion.)
Schools leap from discussing intersex conditions to discussing the very different topic of trans and nonbinary identities. They show videos, for example, that focus on DSDs, bemoaning surgeries done on children with DSDs, and then they leap to promoting Gender Identity Ideology, which ironically promotes surgeries on children. The Teen Vogue video leads with an intersex person but very quickly asserts that DSD-free men who identify as women are women A video shown in a training in Princeton, New Jersey, tells the story of Ori who has both XX and XY chromosomes, but then seamlessly shifts to promoting sex self-ID by DSD-free people, as if trans identification and having a DSD are the same thing.(II, NJ, 9-10)
For excellent articles by a DSD activist detailing how Gender Identity ideologues misrepresent and undercut those with DSDs/intersex conditions, click here and here. False definitions, rampant claims by DSD-free Gender Identity believers that they have DSDs, advocacy for policies that undermine the needs of those with DSDs, shallow misinformed discussions of intersex surgeries, and other problems are all discussed.
THE “GENDER IS NOT SEX” SMOKESCREEN
It is sometimes claimed that concerns about sex miseducation are misguided. “Gender is different than sex,” gender ideologues say. “Didn’t you notice that when I talked about children being ‘boys, girls, both, neither or something else’ that I was referring to gender identities not sex?”
Some gender ideologues declare that the terms “male” and “female” refer to sex, while “man”, “woman”, “boy” and “girl” are gender terms. They imply that sex (male vs. female) is not affected by Gender Ideology (man vs. woman.)
All of this is a smokescreen. The attack on basic biological understandings of sex—and on all that flows from that, including sex-based rights, the ability to discuss our lives in the context of our sex, the ability to get proper medical diagnoses and treatments, and much more—is crystal clear:
Gender Ideology materials regularly explicitly refer to sex. They claim that sex is on a spectrum. That there are multiple sexes. And more.
The terms “man”, “woman”, “boy” and “girl” are vital sex-based words. They refer to the two human sexes in the context of sexual maturity. A “woman” is “an adult human female.” A “girl” is a human female who has not reached sexual maturity. And so on. Appropriating these terms for “gender” is not okay.
The supposed delineation between male/female on the one hand and woman/man/girl/boy on the other is not observed by gender ideologues. All terms are freely used for sex and for gender all the time. A Middle School lesson in Seattle says that “a doctor may have said that a person was male or female when they were born, but that person knows in their heart that really isn’t their gender.” (V, WA, 55) Chase Strangio declares that trans-identifying men have female body parts in the Teen Vogue video shown to biology students. (I, CO, 84) Student information forms in California schools provide the boxes Male, Female, and Nonbinary for both sex and for gender. (I, CA, 26) A House for Everyone read to grade school children defines “non-binary” as “Someone who does not identify exclusively as male or female.” Seattle schools define “female” as “a person who identifies as a woman” and “male” as a “person who identifies as a man.” (Vol V, WA 73) The terms male, female, man, woman, boy, and girl are all appropriated by gender ideologues and used any which way they want
Moreover, whatever the intent of gender ideologues, the consequences of their ideology on sex-based concepts and rights are very clear. If Gender Identity is distinct from and not undermining sex, then:
Why do gender identity declarations render sex observations at birth invalid?
Why do so-called gender identities render sex-based rights null and void? Why are there men in women’s locker rooms, prison cells and sports?
Why do people alter sexual anatomy through puberty blockers, wrong sex hormones, and surgeries, on the basis of gender identity?
Gender Identity Ideology and the curricula it has spawned in K-12 schools intentionally spread blatantly false information about sex. This undermines knowledge about the biological concept of sex, the language we need to discuss it, and the rights we have that flow from it.
SCHOOLS PROMOTE GENDER BELIEFS AS IF THEY WERE FACTS
The blatant biological inaccuracies taught to children inculcate them in the quasi-religion of Gender Identity Ideology. Those inaccuracies are part of broader relentless indoctrination that teaches all the tenets of Gender Identity Ideology to children, as if they were facts rather than beliefs. All of this blurs for children the important distinction between science and ideology.
The Sacred Tenets.
Children are taught, among other things that
Everyone has a “gender identity”—a gendered soul that hovers separate from the body and is more important than it.
A person’s gendered soul either matches or doesn’t match his or her sex.
Any person gets to declare themselves male, female, neither, or both, regardless of their anatomy.
Gender identity is innate and immutable.
People know their gender identities, even as very small children, and an individual’s gender declarations and wishes must never be questioned.
Things we do “express” our “gender identities”.
Everywhere and All the Time.
These and other Gender Identity tenets are conveyed to children non-stop from every direction from the earliest days of kindergarten (or even before) on through the high school years. Gender Identity picture books and chapter books are used in elementary schools, with accompanying classroom activities. Children watch videos at school, or at home, via links provided by teachers, such as to the amaze.org website. Official Gender Identity units offered as part of Sex Ed curricula present children with Gender Identity maxims and terminology. Children are asked to study lists of the various types of gender identities, which is akin to asking them to study the signs of the Zodiac and the characteristics associated with each sign.
Every single subject area is considered an opportunity to push Gender Identity Ideology. Check out the advice teachers receive in Princeton, New Jersey about how to incorporate LGBTQ+ lessons into every subject from Drama to Math to Foreign Languages and beyond in Part II of the WDI Archives starting at page 52. (II, NJ, 52)
Schools across the U.S. implement Affirmation Only policies. These policies deliver a resounding message to all students: everyone must embrace Gender Identity Ideology, period. If a student or teacher claims a trans or nonbinary identity, everyone is required to affirm it, no questions asked. They must use requested pronouns and they must share sex-segregated locker rooms with members of the opposite sex. High school girls must compete against boys in female-only sports. Teachers who don’t go along with Gender Ideology face punishment and even dismissal. (See this example of a teacher fired for refusing to use wrong-sex pronouns and this one of teachers fired for their own-time advocacy for changes to Gender Identity curricula.) In a lot of school districts, parents who wish to engage in watchful waiting rather than Affirmation are deliberately kept in the dark by teachers and administrators about their children transitioning at school. In some schools, girls who have objected to a boy in the girls’ locker room have been subjected to investigations and barred from the girls’ locker room themselves.
Schools are covered with Gender Identity Ideology-promoting posters. Teachers are encouraged to push the ideology in their classrooms, and many engage in pronoun rituals, requiring even early elementary school children to state their pronouns and use wrong sex pronouns for others. There are regular Gender Identity promoting events at schools, as well as special mailings sent to all families on this topic. There are national programs in which schools, libraries and gender ideology groups unite to read the same Gender Identity Ideology-pushing books to children across the nation. And there are active GSAs (also known as SAGAs)—clubs that push Gender Identity Ideology—and these offer teacher “trainings”, bring in university-based gender ideologues for events, and more.
Gender Identity Ideology is Exceptionally Incoherent.
Gender Identity Ideology is a quasi-religious belief system and as such should not be promoted by schools, at least not public schools. To make matters worse, this Ideology is exceptionally incoherent. The messages delivered to children repeatedly, as if they were rational and fact-based, make no sense whatsoever. This undermines children’s critical thinking skills.
Key words are poorly defined and sometimes not even defined at all. Here are some examples:
As children study the different “genders” and learn terms like “gender identity” and “gender expression” they are often given no definition whatsoever for the key word “gender.”
When definitions of “gender” are offered, they are invariably vague and/or circular. Seattle students learn that gender is “[a] person’s feeling about being either boy or girl, or another gender” which means “gender” is a feeling about gender. (V, WA, 21) Seattle students are taught that “gender identity” is “a person’s internal, deeply felt sense of being either man, woman, boy, girl, or another gender.” In other words, “gender identity” is a feeling about gender which is a feeling about gender. Meanwhile teachers in California learn this vague definition: “Gender is a broad category that includes characteristics, identity, expression and roles.” (I, CA, 17)
Words like “woman” are also defined in a circular manner which renders them completely meaningless. A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, who is anyone who identifies as a woman, who is anyone who identifies as a woman….
Definitions for the key word “transgender” vary widely. Some limit the term to people who reject their sex as wrong or unreal. In Fairfax, Virginia schools, for example, transgender is “an individual whose gender identity….is different from the individual’s sex assigned at birth.” (IV, VA, 40) Others seem to encompass anyone who is gender non-conforming via broad definitions like this one from Seattle where transgender “is a general term used to describe a person whose gender identity or expression is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.” (V, WA, 99, emphasis added.) Or this one from San Diego: transgender is an “[u]mbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex or gender assigned at birth, and for those whose gender expression differs from what is culturally expected of them (Gender Non-Conforming).” (I, CA, 4, emphasis added.) These definitions are so broad that a lot of people fighting Gender Identity Ideology, the author included, fall within them.
There are all sorts of other poorly defined words floating around that may or may not encompass, be subsumed within, or overlap with “transgender,” depending on who you talk to. “Queer” and “Gender expansive” are just two examples of many.
The ubiquity of undefined, poorly defined, and inconsistently defined words in Gender Identity Ideology makes for confusion. People engaging in discussions may each mean very different things by the terms they’re using. The Seattle Middle School curriculum openly acknowledges this definitional chaos: “Every person has…a gender identity, but the terms that people use to describe their identities sometimes change, and not everyone uses the same words or agrees on exactly the same definitions.” (V, WA, 55)
The core concepts of Gender Ideology are nonsensical.
For starters, take the concept of “gender identity.” “Gender identity is that feeling of knowing your gender” children are told with the key word “gender” not defined, and examples of “genders” given to them being exactly the same as the sexes children can be: boys, girls. “You might feel like you’re a boy even if you have body parts that some people might tell are ‘girl’ parts.” (II, NJ, 80)
Schools explain gender identity in terms of “inside” feelings and what’s in hearts and minds and brains:
“For some people, what they see in the mirror and how they feel on the inside are different…” (I, CA, 52, emphasis added)
“Gender identity is about how you feel about yourself inside.” (III, OR, 22, emphasis added.)
“Some people may have been born with a male body, but know in their hearts and minds that they are actually female…or the other way around.” (V, WA, 5, emphasis added.)
“I have a girl brain in a boy body.” (I, CA, 61; II NJ6; V, WA, 31)
None of this makes any sense. What does it mean to “feel on the inside” something different than what you see in the mirror? Feeling the sensations of a body you do not have is a logical impossibility. And try though he may no man can know what it feels like to be a woman. No woman can know what it feels like to have a male body. The inside/outside metaphor is also quite odd given the fact that sex is determined by “inside” organs: the gonads. Those who reject their sex are literally rejecting who they are on the inside.
Why are feelings conflated with reality? Do amputees who experience phantom leg syndrome actually have their missing legs by virtue of feeling them? Do we agree with them that the legs are there? If a 5 foot 4 person “knows in his heart” that he’s 6 foot 8, does that make it so?
Do we agree with anorexic girls that they’re fat, even as they risk death from not eating? This question is particularly relevant to trans and nonbinary-identifying children because of the high incidence of eating disorders among them, a reality noted in trainings for teachers. (I,CA,11) (Click here for more on anorexic girls being suddenly “affirmed” with respect to loathing their hips and breasts, once they declare themselves trans.)
And what of the wrong body explanation? Leaving aside the chutzpah of implying that there’s scientific consensus regarding the idea of “girl brains” and “boy brains”, how in the world does this surreal misplacement of brains come about? How does this bizarre congenital condition—one that has never been identified, given a name, and incorporated into medical texts—develop prenatally? Why are the numbers of people born with “wrong-brain syndrome” skyrocketing? Why are there clusters of children with this condition who all “come out” concurrently?
Schools are teaching children to dissociate from their bodies, to split themselves into inside and outside parts. Children are being told that sometimes the inside doesn’t match the outside, and when that happens, it is the inside that must reign. The inside part is “who they are” while the outside part is not.
Notice the irrationality of the wording used with Portland, Oregon students on this topic. They are told that “Gender Identity is who you are. There are many parts of who you are. This part is about words like boy, girl, nonbinary, and more.” (III, OR, 28) How can Gender Identity be declared “who you are” in the first sentence, only to be followed by a sentence that makes it clear that it is only part of who you are. And why is the body—another part of who you are—deemed less important. Shouldn’t all parts of you be considered equally real and wonderful? Shouldn’t there at least be some discussion about the radical idea of mind over matter, especially since children are chemically and surgically altering their bodies, and sex-based rights are being gutted, as a result of it?
The book They She He, Me sheds light on this matter of why the inside is supposedly more important that the outside. (I, IL, 91 et seq) “This inside part is the most important part,” the book says “because there is no one else like you in the world. This is why everyone should be free to be exactly who they are on the inside!” They seem to be saying that people’s outsides are not unique, which is not the case.
The book goes on to note that “Who you are is not always something you can put into words or explain. You just know who you are because you are!” Gender identity is “not always something you can put into words or explain?” That’s an understatement, as the supremely confusing attempts at explaining “gender identity” throughout Gender Ideology materials illustrate so well. The real question is this: If it’s impossible to put your unique so-called gender identity into words, why is there all this pressure to slap a label on it? Why even call it a “gender identity”? Why figure out which of the vaguely defined types of identities is yours? Why figure out a pronoun to go with it?
They She He Me says that “Because this inside part is the most important part of you, it cannot be about outside ideas of how people think, she or he is ‘supposed’ to act. It has to be about how you feel.” Aha! So, what they’re really talking about is not your outside parts (your sex), but rather what other people might try to impose on you based on them, i.e. they’re talking about sexism. Why not fight sexism instead of sex?
Gender Identity Ideology tenets about the number of genders that exist and how we “express our gender” are equally nonsensical. Children are told by their schools that there are as many gender identities as there are stars in the sky. Really? So there are as many genders as there are personalities? What exactly is the difference between a “gender” and “a personality” anyway? What makes a characteristic indicative of “gender”?
And let’s look more closely at this concept of “gender expression.” On the one hand, children are told that “[y]ou cannot see gender because any gender can look any way” (III, OR, 28) and “[a]ny gender can look or act any way they want. (III, OR, 9)
On the other hand, children are taught that how you look and act is an expression of your gender. They watch amaze.org videos in which characters obsess over what clothes to wear in order to correctly “express their gender.” (V, WA, 93) They are given charts on which to record the “gender expressions” of characters in books, and other activities that focus their attention on discerning their own and other people’s gender expressions.
None of this makes any sense. If you can’t see gender because any gender can dress and act anyway, why are children wasting time cataloguing gender expressions? Why are they being encouraged to fixate on their own actions as expressions of gender?
A teddy bear in a video shown to children in Oregon points out the absurdity of it all: “[A]ll of this is a little confusing,” says Teddy. “If there are boys and girls and people and all of them can wear ties and dresses then how can I tell who is what gender? (III, OR, 9) The answer given to Teddy is that “all you have to do is ask someone what their pronoun is.” Sounds like a good reason to not spend time studying and thinking about “gender expression.”
Below is a chart from an elementary school classroom activity that accompanies the book A House For Everyone. Notice that things like running, spelling, and building with legos, as well as hair length and clothing choice, are all recorded as gender expressions. Is there anything that isn’t an expression of gender? (V, WA, 14)
Notice also that having short hair and wearing T-shirts are listed as gender expressions both for a boy and for a girl. How can an attribute express both a given “gender”, and its polar opposite?
Inconsistencies and irrationalities within Gender Identity Ideology abound:
Gender Identity is said to be immutable, but children also learn about people who change back and forth between genders.
Materials used in the school denounce surgeries done on intersex children, and then demand support for the Gender Identity agenda, which attacks those who question surgeries and other medicalization in children. (I-CO-p.83.)
Gender Ideology materials in the schools loudly proclaim that everyone matters and everyone’s feelings count, while failing to even mention, let alone honor the feelings of those hurt by Affirmation Only policies. The feelings of teenage girls forced to compete against males and to undress in their locker rooms in front of boys are completely ignored, for example.
Gender Identity Ideology claims to fight sexist stereotypes, even as it massively reinforces them. How can a person’s gender “match” or “not match” their sex, unless one agrees with the sexist stereotypes imposed upon the sexes? How can one claim that clothing, hairstyles and the way you do things express your gender (V WA, 13), without playing into sexism big-time?
Materials used by the schools are full of sexist overtones. A teddy bear turns its bowtie into a hair bow after deciding to be a girl teddy. Jazz Jennings announces his so-called “girl brain” after describing things he likes that are stereotypically female such as the color pink and wearing princess gowns, with the clear implication being that he would not like those things if he had a “boy brain.”
Thomas the Teddy didn’t feel he could wear a hair bow, but Tilly the Teddy does. 
Here’s the boy teddy longing to wear a hair bow instead of a bow tie. In the teddy’s mind that means he’s a girl teddy. Gender Identity Ideology doesn’t end sexist stereotyping; it reinforces it. San Diego schools acknowledge that “gender” is “[a]ttitudes, feelings, characteristics, and behaviors that a given culture associates with being male or female…” It admits that “[g]ender characteristics can change over time and are different between cultures.” (I, CA, 3, teacher training.) And yet, children are encouraged to reject their sex and even undergo medical treatments that alter their sexual anatomy, based on culturally constructed gender identities.
Gender Identity is said to be about living your most authentic life, even as it encourages lying about your sex and engaging in medical treatments in an attempt to look like something you can never be: the other sex or sexless. “It feels good to be yourself” says the book by the same title, after presenting as role models multiple children who are rejecting their bodies. Being yourself, apparently can entail rejecting and even maiming your body, which somehow is not part of yourself. “We are all awesome being exactly who we are,” Portland Oregon school children learn, even as those who pretend to be a different sex are applauded. Jazz Jennings, who used puberty blockers to stunt genital development, and then had his penis surgically destroyed, tells people that “embracing who you are” and “living your life authentically”, is important. (I, CA, 59, 63) It is hard to think of a more inappropriate person to deliver that message.
Schools urge children to love their bodies, every part of them. “Our bodies are really neat and every part is important,” teachers declare. (III, OR, 2) “Your body is exactly right for you!” (III, OR, 6) “All of your body parts are important.” (III, OR, 25) A training for teachers on how to do workshops for LGBTQ+ Youth includes a “Love Your Body” section. (I, CA, 12)
And yet, schools concurrently introduce children not only to Jazz Jennings, but also to all sorts of other people who dislike the reality of their sexed bodies. These include Desmond the Amazing (who began identifying as female and doing drag as a child), Laverne Cox, and other trans and nonbinary-identifying celebrities. They include lots of happy heroic seemingly-fulfilled fictional characters in books who identify as trans or nonbinary. Schools lavish praise upon students who have announced rejection of their sexed bodies.
It's hard to think of a more effective way to promote body self-loathing and living a lie than Gender Identity Ideology curricula and policies. That those who espouse this Ideology paint themselves as champions of self-love and authenticity is beyond Orwellian.
The Impact of Pushing Beliefs as Facts
When faith-based ideology is presented in the schools, as if it were a matter of facts rather than beliefs, the line between science and ideology is blurred for children. This is especially true when the presentation is non-stop and comes at children from all sides over the course of many years, as is the case with Gender Identity Ideology.
When the narrative presented to children is characterized by definitional chaos, nonsensical core concepts, and massive inconsistencies, even more harm is done to children. The schools should teach children to think critically and to analyze matters based on logic, but they are doing the opposite. Children are relentlessly exposed to complete irrationality, as if it made all the sense in the world, and the adults all around them are nodding approvingly as this happens. This renders children incapable of recognizing hypocrisy when they see it. It makes them prone to irrational decisions, illogical analysis, and being fooled by others.
SCHOOL CURRICULA AND POLICIES ARE NOT SUPPORTED BY SOUND SCIENCE AND COMMON SENSE
Gender Identity Ideology is presented and enforced as incontrovertible fact. But its supposed evidentiary basis falls apart upon the slightest examination.
Bogus Evidence of Discrimination and Harm
Many schools insist that their Gender Identity Ideology policies and curricula are necessitated by high rates of discrimination and other mistreatment endured by trans- and nonbinary-identifying individuals, and by those students feeling unwelcome and unsafe. There are two big flaws with this argument: First, the data on which claims are based is of very low quality because it comes from highly biased ideological organizations. Second, even if data were robust and convincing, it wouldn’t establish that the school’s Gender Identity policies and curricula make sense.
Much of the data schools rely on comes from GLSEN. This organization lobbies for Gender Identity Ideology policies at the federal, state and local level. Its research is shoddy and biased.
Look at the GLSEN report relevant to schools in Connecticut, for example. That report concludes that almost half (45%) of LGBTQ students in Connecticut “experienced at least one form of anti-LGBTW discrimination at school during the past year.” But what is the evidence of this discrimination? The most commonly reported “anti-LGBTQ discrimination” reported in Connecticut schools is students being prevented from “using the locker room that aligns with Gender.” Other items on the list include being prevented from “Using the Bathroom that Aligns with Gender” and not being able to use their “Chosen Name or Gender Pronouns.” In other words, GLSEN is literally defining failure to adopt its policy agenda as evidence of discrimination. That evidence is then used to push for their policy agenda, i.e. men in women’s sports, elimination of sex-based privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms, mandatory used of wrong sex pronouns, and more. GLSEN is very well-funded and has produced reports with similarly misleading statistics for most states.
Surveys and other research conducted by GLSEN and other gender ideology organizations have all sorts of other problems, too, such as leading questions on surveys, major bias in the selection of study cohorts, and major bias in how results are interpreted. No consideration is given to the possibility that some children who report feeling “unsafe” or “harassed” could have mental health problems that skew their perceptions. The cure for children’s discomfort is irrationally assumed to be requiring others to forfeit sex-based rights and language, and no other alternatives are considered.
The definitional chaos at the heart of Gender Identity Ideology is at play, too, which makes the details of who is in the studied population very murky. How many TQ+ people, as opposed to LGB people, are there? How many gender-nonconforming people as opposed to trans-identifying people? Who counts as gender nonconforming?
Virtually none of the schools’ Gender Identity Ideology-promoting activities are based in sound data. Regularly observed Trans Days of Remembrance, for example, revolve around claims that there’s an epidemic of murder among trans-identifying people. Fortunately, murder rates for this population are much lower than those of other demographics and in the general population, however. This is true even though Gender Identity proponents include in their count people who are not trans-identifying and crimes that were clearly not motivated by hate.
Bogus Scientific Support for “Affirmation Only”
“Social transitioning”—wherein children change their names, clothing and pronouns in accordance with their “gender identities”—is not a neutral act, but rather one with significant psychological impacts. The same is true of affirmation, wherein children’s self-diagnoses are reinforced by everyone around them. When schools jump into Affirmation Only mode, they are implementing a major therapeutic response to children dissociating from their bodies. Teachers and administrators are not qualified to prescribe and carry out such responses. Nor can they possibly know children as well as parents do, which makes the fact that schools are deliberately keeping parents in the dark about at-school transitions particularly troubling.
Affirmation has psychological implications both for trans- and nonbinary-identifying children and for their peers. It also sets those dissociating from their bodies on a path to massive irreversible medically-induced harm. A partial list of problems that plague people whose healthy bodies are medically transitioned include, but are by no means limited to: osteoporosis, cardio-pulmonary problems, vaginal atrophy, infertility, urinary problems, sexual dysfunction, kidney damage, and the irreversible loss of healthy body parts. (See details in Part III of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Transgender Galaxy.)
Gender Identity ideologues downplay or completely ignore the harms done by socially and medically transitioning children. They maintain that transitioning leads to major benefits for children which outweigh any downsides. They regularly claim that failing to affirm someone increases the chance that they will kill themselves, a claim that is very irresponsible given the lack of credible studies behind it, and some evidence that transitioning may increase suicide risk.
Multiple comprehensive reviews by respected medical experts and entities have concluded that gender ideologues’ claims are not backed by scientific data. They have found the quality of the evidence underpinning “gender affirmation medicine” to be extremely low. As a result, Finland, Sweden, France, the UK and other countries are all reversing course, leaving “affirmation only” behind. There is a growing recognition around the world that the first-line response to gender distress in children must be watchful waiting and exploratory psychotherapy.
Schools in the U.S. are ignoring all this, however. Despite the very low quality of the scientific evidence underpinning Affirmation Only, and despite the irreversible harm done to children as the result of it, they continue to vigorously enforce Affirmation Only policies. They continue to teach children that transitioning is safe and righteous, and that anything other than affirmation is wrong.
Read more about all this at the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine’s webpage and in Part III of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Transgender Galaxy.
Shockingly Erroneous Understandings of Child Development
Gender Identity Ideology asserts that children, even those as young as 1 or 2, know whether they’re a boy, a girl, or “something else.” And their declarations must never be contradicted. Children must be permitted—encouraged even—to claim to be something other than their actual sex. Their desire to wear binders, be put on puberty blockers, take wrong sex hormones and have gender affirmation surgeries, must be honored and applauded, without question.
None of these assertions holds up to even minimal scrutiny. Agreeing with children that they are a different sex and letting them make major medical decisions for themselves with lifelong consequences is completely irrational. It conflicts with the most basic understanding of children’s developmental stages and needs, and with common sense.
There is a reason children are not allowed to make their own medical decisions or other decisions with major irreversible adverse consequences. They are children, and as such they are developmentally incapable of understanding the implications of their choices.
Preschoolers and children in elementary school still believe in things like Santa Claus. They are highly imaginative, and the line between what’s real and what’s imagined is blurry for them. Children learn through play, and locking them into one of the roles they try on, i.e. being the other sex, doesn’t help them. It stymies them.
Small children are acquiring language. If adults say that girls are people who like certain things, and boys are people who don’t like those things, children may assume as a matter of definition that they are the other sex. If they badly want to do something forbidden for their sex, there will be added pressure to believe themselves to be the other sex. Tales told by trans-identifying children and their families are full of references to parents not allowing the children to do certain things based on sexist stereotypes.
Small children are still developing basic cognitive skills. Just as it takes a while for an infant to gain “object constancy”—the understanding that an object still exists even when it’s out of sight—it takes children a while to grasp that things stay the same despite changes to external appearance. (Identity constancy.) Spend a few minutes watching both of the video clips in this article. For small children, adding a purse to a doll transforms the doll into a girl. Remove the purse and the doll is now a boy.
Children approaching puberty have a lot more cognitive skills than preschoolers and early grade schoolers, but their brains are still developing. In fact, puberty is an important time for cognitive maturation, The prefrontal cortex—key to making rational decisions—develops and matures primarily during adolescence.
Adults protect children because children need protection as they grow and explore. From birth through high school. (Since prefrontal cortex development is not complete until about age 25, young adults may still be prone to irrational decisions.)
There are plenty of reasons children may reject their sex that make more sense than having been “born in the wrong body.” Victims of sexual trauma often dissociate from their bodies, for example. Teachers are told that there will undoubtedly be children in their classes who have experienced sexual trauma. And yet they are required to “affirm” a child’s rejection of their body, no questions asked.
Gay and lesbian adolescents can reject their bodies as the result of internalized and societal homophobia. Girls who find themselves sexualized and subjected to unwanted comments and advances, can come to loathe their bodies as a result.
A high percentage of children experiencing gender distress have significant mental health problems and/or suffer from neurocognitive comorbidities like autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Gender ideologues claim that mental health problems are triggered by society not accepting trans identities, but research indicates that mental health problems generally predate trans identification. For a detailed discussion of these topics with extensive links to scientific data, see Part III of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Transgender Galaxy.
Finally, there is the reality of people insisting they’re trans or non-binary but later changing their minds. If children go through puberty, most desist from trans and nonbinary identities. Moreover, growing numbers of people who have engaged in chemical and surgical alterations of their bodies, are speaking publicly about their deep regret.
In addition, some Gender Ideology materials are now saying that gender identity isn’t immutable after all. Gender “develops around age 3 (ish) and can change over time,” Portland, Oregon schools tell children (III, OR, 44)
All of this makes the Affirmation Only policies in Portland and throughout the U.S. particularly inappropriate.
SCHOOLS USE MANIPULATION, APPROPRIATION AND CENSORSHIP TO PUSH GENDER IDENTITY IDEOLOGY
Schools don’t just bombard students with Gender Identity Ideology messages. They also employ other propaganda techniques to persuade children to buy into the Gender Identity narrative. These prime children to personally believe in Gender Identity Ideology, which for some entails declaring themselves transgender or nonbinary. It also primes them to consider anyone who disagrees with Gender Identity Ideology and its tenets as hateful, misguided, and deserving of cancelation.
The Aura of Science
The tenets of Gender Identity Ideology are taught as if they were uncontroversial facts established through scientific inquiry. School materials present them via declarative statements that brook no debate. The tenets are simply givens, children are led to believe. They are truths that all accept.
Sometimes schools use science-specific wording to frame their anti-science lessons. “Welcome Scientists,” teachers say to kindergarteners before embarking on a lesson full of ideological nonsense. (III, OR, 2 et seq.)
Sometimes Gender Identity tenets are delivered as part of actual science classes:
In the middle of a high school Biology lesson students are shown a film by Teen Vogue, wherein cool young people utter scientifically inaccurate Gender Identity mantras. (I, CO, 82)
In the middle of a science lesson on karyotypes, teachers introduce the inane Genderbread Person, and talk about “gender” which they describe vaguely as “harder to define” than sex and having something to do with people’s concepts of themselves. Students study Gender Identity terms like “cis” and “trans” alongside scientific terms like “karyotype” and “aneuploidy.” The “ticket-out-the-door” for the class requires students to mouth Gender Ideology orthodoxy, differentiating sex from gender. (II, NJ, 33)
In the middle of a science lesson on cell membranes (II NJ see especially pp 44-47) teachers leap from discussing Trans-Linoleic acid and cis versus trans configurations with respect to hydrogen atoms—in other words actual science—to cis and trans gender identities—in other words the quasi-religion of Gender Identity. One minute students are comparing diagrams of two different fatty acid structures, and the next they’re being subjected to a lengthy Gender Identity lecture based on information from the ideology-driven Trevor Project. Their Ticket-out-the-Door has them answer three questions about molecules and fatty acids, and then a question that has nothing whatsoever to do with science: “Why is working against cisnormativity important?”
At times school materials go so far as to explicitly claim that scientists have reached a consensus regarding Gender Identity mantras. A young person in the Teen Vogue video declares that “Too many people still believe that there's such a thing as a true sex and that it comes from your chromosomes. It's not the case. Science has known this for decades and it's actually a consensus in science and uncontroversial.” (I, CO, 83) This kind of statement adds insult to the injury of presenting children with false information. It is shocking that the schools not only push anti-science nonsense, but that they also have the audacity to tell children that there is consensus among scientists for the abject falsehoods they are teaching.
Emotional Manipulation
Conflating Gender Ideology with all things good.
School materials from kindergarten onward drill into children that going along with Gender Identity Ideology is loving, inclusive, compassionate, and respectful. It creates a safe and welcoming environment. It supports people’s right to self-determination. It is basically all things good. Here are just a few of countless examples:
“Our class cares about respect,” kindergarteners in Portland, Oregon hear. “Using people’s names and pronouns shows them that we care about them.” Pronouns that indicate that a boy is a girl, or vice versa, are the “correct” pronouns. (III, OR, 20, emphasis added.)
When Seattle elementary school teachers read It Feels Good to Be Yourself to their students for the second time, they are told to talk about “how we can use pronouns to show respect for all people.” They are asked to then model good behavior for the students, and demonstrate their own personal fealty to Gender Ideology: “When I was born I was assigned ______ at birth….As I grew older I realized that I am__________ When people talk about me they should use the pronouns_______” (V, WA, 29, emphasis added) Seattle middle schoolers learn that “Every person has the right to name their own identities…It is important to respectfully use the words and pronouns people have asked others to use.”(V, WA, 65, emphasis added):
Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia tells teachers to “Create a safe classroom” and to “Set and model class expectations for a supportive, respectful, and inclusive learning environment.” (IV, VA, 39, emphasis added.) School policies show what is meant by these nice-sounding words: those who claim to be a different sex get to disregard the sex-based rights of other students, impose wrong-sex pronoun usage on them, and more.
School materials also deliver the message loud and clear that having a trans or nonbinary identity is cool. It’s liberating. It makes you a freedom-fighter, and an opponent of mediocrity, conformity, and limits. In contrast, other characters are portrayed as conformist, ignorant and boring. Some are cruel.
The book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, read to elementary school students across the U.S. (II, NJ 54) is about a fantastical child named Miu Lan who looks like lots of different creatures and “can’t decide” what to be: Boy or girl? Bird or fish? This child has feathers, wings, the ability to swim like a fish, and other incredible features, and soars through the day. When Miu Lan goes to school, however, we meet the other children. While the book doesn’t use the term, they are clearly meant to represent so-called “cis” kids. They conform to boy/girl stereotypes and are unfriendly towards Miu Lan. Eventually some of the other kids realize Miu Lu is cool. They learn from Miu Lu to loosen up a bit. The message is clear. The really cool kids are the trans and non-binary ones. Other kids are boring and often mean.
The book They She He Me. Free to Be tells children throughout the U.S. that sharing your pronouns “lets people know that you have bigger ideas about he and she and you know there are more than two pronouns and ways of being yourself in the world. This helps everyone feel freer and more welcome to play.” (II, NJ; 77) The inference is that people who don’t join the Gender Identity pronoun game, people who acknowledge anatomy-based reality, don’t have bigger ideas. We’re apparently locked into stodgy sexist limits based on male and female stereotypes. Unlike Gender Identity believers we don’t make others “feel freer and more welcome to play.”
Portland, Oregon schools tells students that the schools care about LGBTQIA2S+ students, and declares that “Queer kids are rad.” No such compliments are given to other children. In fact, an entire curriculum unit informs students that white cis heteronormativity means you have “privilege” and don’t realize it.
In the book Born Ready, Penelope—a girl who claims to be a boy—is portrayed as gutsy, happy and heroic. Her older brother –the only character in the book with doubts about Penelope being a boy—is presented as a pretentious know-it-all.
In an amaze.org video seen by students in Seattle and elsewhere, a character named Jim is shocked that a boy he knows is identifying as a girl. Jim is presented as clueless and sexist. He declares that you have to have a penis to be a guy but can’t articulate anything more than that. He also has a knee-jerk reaction of wanting to never talk to the trans-identifying child again. Jim’s girlfriend, on the other hand, who refers to the trans-identifying boy as “she”, is the epitome of compassion, wisdom, and knowledge. (V, WA, 94)
One particularly bizarre way school materials lift up nonbinary-identifying children as great, while implying that other children are not, revolves around phrases like “just a person.” In Portland, Oregon children watch a video in which the cheerful narrator says this to a teddy bear: “Well Teddy, did you know that some people aren’t boys or girls? Some people are boys. Some people are girls. And some people are people. There are also people who are trans or transgender.” Huh? “Nonbinary” individuals “are people” but we don’t put “are people” in the sentences for the people who are boys and girls? (III, OR, 11) Below is a chart used in Portland, Oregon (III, OR, 9) that delivers a comparable message. Notice that only “nonbinary” individuals are “just a person.”
The subtle implication of not being “just a person” is that you’re all tied up in complying with and being judged by sexist stereotypes. Those who call themselves “nonbinary” are not limited like you are. They’ve freed themselves from self-imposed limits. And magically other people will now overlook their sex and fail to impose sex-based restrictions on them or engage in sex-based violence against them.
Showing only one side of the story.
Children are provided with absolutely no information that contradicts Gender Ideology. The only reference to the existence of dissent comes in the form of very unappealing characters in books and videos, such as those mentioned above.
All stories are told from the perspective of the trans- or nonbinary-identifying individuals, without any reference to impacts on anyone else. Children who hear or read the books are drawn to the appealing protagonists, and want them to get what they want:
The cute little teddy bear wants to be a girl teddy now? Who would say No to her?
Jazz feels sad because he can’t be on the girl’s soccer team? How can people be so mean to him? (The book, of course, uses she/her pronouns for Jazz, further confusing children as to what’s actually going on.) The Jazz story presents the sports issue in the context of grade school, thereby sidestepping what is at stake for women post-puberty. (II, NJ, 64-65)
Calvin, a little girl who claims to be a boy, worries about school: “What if my friends won’t call me he?” Of course, children will root for everyone agreeing to lie along with Calvin about her sex.
“I’m the expert. I’m in my own body. Just let me pee!” proclaims a trans-identifying child in the book Is That For A Boy or A Girl? Children feel for this poor child who just wants to pee! No one else exists, according to the book—certainly not a child of the opposite sex who would feel uncomfortable peeing next to this child. The book features a grade school child and makes no mention of increased desires for sex-based privacy in adolescence.
Similarly, if a child in Seattle asks the teacher, “If She is now He, which bathroom does he use?”, the teacher is to answer: “Since he knows in his heart and mind that he is HE, he will be using the boys’ bathroom.”(V, WA, 5) What the boys think about a girl in their bathroom doesn’t even warrant a mention. The only feelings discussed are those of trans- and nonbinary-identifying children.
Lessons and homework assignments refer students only to Gender Ideology-promoting entities and information sources. High school students who want to do a report on transgender participation in sports, for example, are directed to organizations that strive to force women to accept men in women-only sports. No links are provided to Save Women’s Sports, Dr. Emma Hilton, Dr. Helen Waite, Dr. Kristopher Hunt, and all the other experts who can explain the basis and need for women-only sports. No links are provided to sports statistics that make it crystal clear that women-only sports are important for women and based in science.
Using loaded questions and other techniques to lead children into Gender Ideology
Another manipulative tactic employed by the schools is asking children loaded questions, presenting information in a leading manner, and putting them in situations where they are forced to adhere to Gender Ideology’s tenets and rituals.
Even in kindergarten, some teachers go around the circle and have each child state their name and pronouns. Refusing to do so will be very hard for children given their desire to please the teacher, fit in, and do what their peers are doing.
Chart out your gender identity, children are told. Make a list of all the ways you express your gender. These and comparable activities start from the assumption that everyone has a gender identity, that things we do “express” that identity, and that pondering these matters is a good use of a person’s time. It plants ideological tenets in children’s minds by forcing them to partake in activities based on them.
It Feels Good to Be Yourself read to grade school children features multiple examples of children who reject their sex, presenting them as living the dream of “being yourself.” The book then turns its gaze directly on the children to whom the book is read, and talks to them about their gender journeys, as if everyone is on one or will be. “You might feel like a boy….a girl….both boy and girl, or like neither,” the book soothingly notes, skillfully planting those concepts in children’s brains. “You might feel like your gender changes…you might feel like none of these words describes you perfectly. You might not be sure yet. Maybe you’re still figuring it out.” Note the last sentence in particular. Maybe you’re still figuring it out? This assumes that everybody can, should and will “figure it out.” The book omits the possibility that young readers could also choose to pay no heed to the Gender Identity faith. They could opt instead to just be kids, learning, playing, and exploring without wasting energy on the fake existential issues created for them by gender ideologues. (V, WA 27) “Your feelings about your gender are real. Listen to your heart,” the book tells kids, thereby implanting in their impressionable minds the idea that they have feelings about their gender.
Trainings for teachers are rife with leading questions about where they are on their journeys to being good Gender Ideology “allies.” Undoubtedly many teachers bring this same mindset to their classrooms. They assume that students who are not trans- or nonbinary-identifying themselves are all eager to be “good allies”, forfeiting sex-based rights and using wrong sex pronouns. They may well ask students where they are on their ally-ship journeys which assumes students want to be on those journeys in the first place.
Appropriating the LGB.
Schools talk about LGB rights and T+ rights in the same breath constantly, which enables the Gender Identity agenda to glide forward with very little scrutiny. Gender Identity is taught as part of SOGI units (Sexual Orientation Gender Identity). Stats for LGBT+ are used to promote Gender Identity policies without any clarity as to whether the data pertains as equally to the T+ as it does to the LGB. Students watch films about the bullying of LGB students and are then led in discussions about why affirming trans identities is important. Terms like “Pride” and “coming out” are now used more for the trans agenda than for the LGB one.
But homosexuality and gender identity are very different things. Homosexuality is about sexual attraction, something known only to an individual. Lesbian and gay activists seek only the right to love whomever they want to love. Gender ideologues, on the other hand, insist that the sexes must be redefined, that men must now be allowed in women’s spaces and sports, that children can and should undergo massive alteration of their healthy bodies, and much more. Not only do they seek the right to believe that they are a different sex based on irrational new definitions, but also the right to force everyone else to be part of their faith.
Gender Ideology asks people to deny what we can see with our own eyes. The struggle for LGB rights never made such demands.
In fact, LGB rights are undercut by the Gender Identity agenda as is laid out in Part III of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Transgender Galaxy. Prominent gay rights leader Fred Sargeant , who participated in the Stonewall riots, says that “the movement that I knew, the gay liberation movement, has metamorphosized into a gender identity movement that is quite misogynistic, homophobic—values that I can’t share.” But the schools don’t’ link to Sargeant or groups like LGB Alliance which was formed in response to the T+ attack on the LGB. They only refer students to individuals and organizations that tow the Gender Identity line. That way they can continue to give the homophobic anti-science Gender Identity agenda an easy ride forward, relying on people naively believing it to be the next stage of gay liberation
THE BIGGEST ANTI-SCIENCE MESSAGE OF ALL: HAVE FAITH
Despite a steady barrage of indoctrination, some children and some teachers notice that Gender Identity Ideology doesn’t make sense. This happens because it truly doesn’t make sense. With these clear-thinkers in mind, gender ideologues deliver a powerful overarching anti-science message: If you don’t understand Gender Ideology, that doesn’t matter. You should just bow your head, have faith that it’s a good thing, and go along.
“You Don’t Have to Understand to Be Supportive,” a teacher training in Austin, Texas proclaims. (Vol IV, TX, 37). By “being supportive”, they mean, of course, cheerfully accepting the gutting of terms like “girl” and “boy”, the forfeiture of sex-based rights, and otherwise accepting Gender Identity Ideology based on faith. They don’t mean being compassionate and inclusive of a child, without agreeing with them that they’re a different sex.
This message is everywhere. They, She He, Me. Free to Be, notes that “who you are is not always something you can put into words or explain. You just know who you are because you are!” In other words, Gender Identity is a faith. It’s not something that can be explained, or even needs to be. Everyone else is required to go along with whatever you believe, even if you can’t provide them with any rational explanation. (V. WA. 17)
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a young man years ago who unbeknownst to me was about to declare himself a woman. He kept asserting that it is possible for a man to feel like, and therefore, be a woman. I kept saying things like “How is it possible for someone to know what it feels like to be in a body he doesn’t have? That’s impossible as a matter of basic logic.” And he kept saying, his exasperation increasing the longer I refused to agree with him, that he couldn’t explain it. Some things just are. Men have feelings which somehow magically they know to be the feelings of a woman. Everyone needs to accept that and treat them as women, he said, whether they understand it or not.
It doesn’t get more anti-intellectual than that.
The picture book “Born Ready” delivers this same message. Read to children across the U.S. as part of a “Transgender Reading Day in Schools” the book tells the story of Penelope—a girl who believes she’s a boy. When Penelope “comes out”, everyone in her family and at school immediately agrees she’s a boy and starts referring to her as he. Everyone except one person, that is. Her older brother, who’s already been shown to be a snarky know-it-all, as can be seen in the following page from the book:
Confronted with his sister claiming to be a boy, and everyone replying “yes, you are a boy, Penelope,” Big Brother has this to say: “This doesn’t make sense. You can’t become a boy. You have to be born one.” He is absolutely right. But he is not rewarded for his honesty and for courageously refusing to go along with the lie everyone else is telling. Instead, his mother, portrayed in the book as a paragon of wisdom and virtue, puts her arm around him and whispers, “Not everything needs to make sense. This is about love.”
Telling the truth is literally deemed hateful by the mother in the book. Big Brother, and by extension anyone hearing the story who has doubts, is emotionally manipulated into casting aside their questions. This is about love, after all. To lie is to love. To refuse to lie is to be a hateful person.
This approach is entirely consistent with religions admonishing people to let go of their rational minds and “love” instead, as if the two were in opposition.
Faith-based acceptance of things that make no sense is the essence of religion and the opposite of a mindset of scientific inquiry. Labeling someone who doesn’t engage in faith-based acceptance “hateful” is the essence of manipulation.
SCIENTISTS MUST JOIN THE FIGHT AGAINST GENDER INDOCTRINATION IN THE SCHOOLS
What’s happening in the schools is outrageous. Biologists, doctors and other scientists must join the fight against Gender Identity Indoctrination.
Children are being denied accurate information about basic biology that they need and deserve. In its place they are being fed inane anti-science nonsense about the sexes, reproductive anatomy, reproductive roles, homosexuality, and Disorders of Sexual Development.
In conjunction with this, children are also learning that sex-based rights are not important. And that they should immediately and unquestioningly forfeit sex-based privacy, women-only sports, and sex-based choice in romantic relationships. Children are learning to self-censor, in particular with respect to statements about biology, in order to avoid punishment.
Large and growing numbers of children are being fed to Big Pharma and to profit-driven medical institutions in one of the biggest medical scandals of all time. Their healthy bodies are subjected to puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, and yes invasive irreversible surgeries, with horrifying consequences. And the so-called scientific basis for this abuse is shockingly scant, which is leading other countries to reverse course.
Biologists, doctors and other scientists must take a stand against Gender Indoctrination in the schools because of all of these things.
But there’s also another very important reason they must take a stand. Generations of children are entering adulthood thoroughly lacking critical thinking skills, and with a completely upside-down understanding of what science is.
The line between science and ideology has been completely blurred for them. A quasi-religious faith has taken over and thoroughly undermined the teaching of basic biological concepts. It has been allowed to bombard children with faith-based tenets, as if those tenets were based in science. An exceptionally incoherent and illogical Gender Identity narrative has been presented to children over and over again, as if it makes perfect sense, which messes dramatically with children’s ability to reason.
A scientific mindset demands clear definitions, reliable unbiased sources of information, and a willingness to ask and answer questions. The schools teach children that subjective shifting definitions, and even a failure to define key terms, is fine. They encourage students to rely on ideology-driven highly biased organizations and the materials they produce, while failing to even mention more reliable sources of information. And they actively discourage challenges to the dogma they deliver, punishing teachers who don’t go along with Gender Affirmation, and not giving students their “ticket out the door” for lessons until they recite Gender Identity mantras.
Science seeks truth, and truth does not bend to social mores. But the schools teach the opposite. Students should “use logical thinking and open mindedness to draw accurate and socially appropriate conclusions” reads the instructions to teachers for a Biology class lesson taught in Princeton, New Jersey. (This is the lesson which delves deeply into cell membranes and then suddenly veers into a discussion of the Genderbread Person, mentioned earlier in this article.) It is sobering to see the words “socially appropriate” imposed upon the conclusions students will be made to reach in a science class. Accuracy is not enough. Accuracy, i.e. truth, is to be molded by social mores. This is the antithesis of a scientific framework.
Science is the opposite of faith - it relies on observation, evidence, and an unending desire to understand the world around us. But the schools teach that when something doesn’t make sense, one should accept it anyway, and cheerfully go along with policy measures that flow from it. Schools teach children that blind trust is noble and great. And that those who refuse to have blind faith—those who keep pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes—those people are hateful. Like teachers reprimanded or fired for not using wrong sex pronouns, all renegades are to be silenced.
What’s happening in the schools is nothing short of Orwellian. Children learn that men are women, self-loathing is self-love, delivering children to life-long medical dependency and harm is compassion, telling the truth is hateful, and silencing those who question dogma is righteous. This primes them to bow their heads and comply with official dogma, no matter how nonsensical it is. It primes them to join authoritarian mobs that attack anyone who dissents.
This author has personally experienced where indoctrination in the schools leads. On two separate recent occasions, I and a small band of gender critical individuals, have been set upon by seething mobs as we’ve attempted to express our views in public parks. The mobs pressed into us, forcing us into a tiny space. They surrounded us, spat on us, shrieked non-stop, and otherwise created a din that drowned out our voices, even though we had a microphone. On both occasions, people I was with were assaulted, and at the more recent event, a woman in our group had bones in her hand broken. Another woman narrowly escaped injury when a large young man suddenly rushed at her from behind as she spoke into the mic; he was stopped just before he could strike her.
These mobs were predominantly composed of young people. At the more recent event, which took place in Tacoma, Washington, a large proportion of our attackers were students from a local high school. Below is a montage of photos I took in Tacoma, primarily as we retreated from the park with the mob pressing behind us. We had attempted to speak above the din for about an hour before we fled for our safety. (Because these are children, I have blocked out parts of their faces to obscure their identities.) They were seething with hatred towards us, and yelling things like “Go home TERFs” “Fuck you!”, “Trans Women Are Women”, “I know who the fuck I am,” and most ironically, “No Hate Here.”
And here are a couple of video links. (The tweet associated with the 2nd video incorrectly says a woman’s arm was hurt; but it was bones in her hand that were broken.) The photos and video links don’t do justice to how menacing and oppressive these children and young adults were, and to how deafening their screaming was. They don’t capture things like a high school student shouting at a mother in our group who was standing away from the melee holding her infant: “Bitch, I will beat your ass! I will beat your baby’s ass too.”
“HRT Saves Lives” the mob chanted at one point. HRT stands for Hormone Replacement Therapy. These young people believe that children should be given puberty blockers and wrong sex hormones. It is ironic that a few years back, wearing my hat as an environmental activist, I was on a boat in nearby Commencement Bay, watching scientists examine fish for evidence of hormone disruption. We understood that even trace concentrations of pollutants that block or mimic hormones can wreak havoc for individual fish, for the food chain as a whole, and for human beings. Back then, young people were part of the fight against hormone-disrupting exposures. Now, they demand direct massive exposures in children.
The children who attacked us in Tacoma and Port Townsend know nothing about me, my partner, and the others who stood with us, attempting to speak. Nothing at all. They only know that they are supposed to hate us, so they do. They only know that we don’t believe that “trans women are women.” In their minds, that heresy, in and of itself, establishes that we are evil and must be silenced.
Routing us from the park in Tacoma, the taunting adolescents were extremely pleased with themselves. At least one of the school’s co-principals was present, and I suspect that upon return to the school, the students were praised for their actions, and that a celebration ensued.
High school students and people not long out of high school are a big part of mobs like the ones I’ve experienced that show up every time gender critics attempt to speak across the U.S. and around the world. In the UK, the term “Black Pampers” has been coined to describe youth like those in the photos below. They arrive, with all but their eyes, hidden by black clothing, to shut down Speaker’s Corners. They and their compatriots in the U.S. have been primed by full-blown indoctrination their entire lives, with schools playing a lead role in that indoctrination. They have been emotionally manipulated, given false information, and inculcated in a quasi-religious faith.
And the authoritarian suppression administered by young people doesn’t stop with trampling free speech in public parks. The mob is everywhere: in other public spaces, on-line, at community and family gatherings. It is getting people fired, de-published, de-platformed, doxxed and harassed.
Scientists would do well to consider the following two recent events on campuses:
At the University of Southern Maine, Professor Christy Hammer stated that there are only two sexes in humans. In response, all but one of her students walked out, calling her “transphobic”. “I asked [Hammer] how many sexes there were,” student Elizabeth Leibiger, who intends to be an English teacher recalled. “She said, ‘Two.’ I felt under personal attack.” Student Liv Petersen said “I think the professor was in the wrong for invalidating her own students.” Student Jalen Charles had this to say about the professor’s reference to binary sex: “It’s just not something you say out loud, especially with the current environment and stuff like that. It’s something you should really keep to yourself.” The students demanded that the professor be replaced. At this writing, the school has not fired Hammer, but has decided to offer a second version of her class taught by someone else. Since most students will likely flock to the Gender Ideology-compliant teacher, this punishes Professor Hammer. It also ensures that miseducation on basic biology will continue for recent high school grads at the school, including many who wish to become teachers.
In Germany, a presentation on evolution by biologist Marie Vollbrecht was called off, after students protested that it was transphobic. The university cited safety concerns, and at this writing, the speaker was hoping to get the talk rescheduled but to the author’s knowledge that has not yet happened. Vollbrecht believes there are two human sexes, and she discusses binary sex as central to evolution. To see a youtube video of the talk she intended to give on campus, click here.
Yes, a talk on Evolution was canceled because references to binary sex upset young people. Gender Identity Ideology is the new Creationism. Taught aggressively in K-12 schools, it is producing misinformed young adults who don’t understand basic biology and are eager to shut down anyone who says anything that contradicts Gender Identity’s tenets.
There are many more examples of attacks on people who disagree with Gender Identity Ideology, including many specifically involving the silencing of scientists and health professionals. See Part IV of Hitchhiker’s Guide. That Guide also delves into the devastating impact Gender Identity Ideology is having on the ability to fight the environmental threats that face humanity. Climate organizations that promote the anti-science mantras of Gender Ideology, for example, have lost all credibility. People they need to persuade now have ample reason to doubt these groups’ pronouncements regarding the science of global warming, even as the time for preventing full-blown climate catastrophe runs out.
Ignoring Gender Identity Indoctrination in the schools is not an option. The stakes are too high. Scientists, in particular, must speak up now, given the implications for science literacy, critical thinking, freedom of scientific inquiry, children’s health, free speech, and the future of our planet.
HOW SCIENTISTS CAN HELP
Scientists need to join organizations and networks that are organizing against Gender Identity Ideology. The more people we have, the less effective the tools of suppression used against us will be. Groups and individuals to contact include but are not limited to: Colin Wright, Emma Hilton, Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM), Women’s Declaration International (WDI) USA, Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), LGB Alliance USA, and myself: Carol Dansereau (caroldansereau@substack.com). I participate in various gender critical networks and am helping to build a movement specifically focused on getting Gender Identity Ideology out of the schools.
Lawsuits and other formal demands challenging Gender Identity curricula and policies in the schools have already begun. We need help from scientists on these. In particular, we need your help:
Reviewing petitions and other documents demanding the removal of Gender Identity Indoctrination from the schools. These will be presented to school boards and other relevant agencies. We need help from scientists as we establish the medical and scientific inaccuracy of what’s being taught.
Serving as expert witnesses as petitions, lawsuits, and other actions move forward.
Appearing as experts in videos and other materials we will be producing.
Speaking up in medical and other scientific organizations. Many of those have been captured by Gender Identity ideologues. Ideology-driven resolutions must be rescinded and replaced with science-based alternatives.
Publishing articles and otherwise taking a gender critical stand on this issue, including in conjunction with other scientists willing to be co-authors, if possible.
Please join the fight against Gender Identity Ideology in the schools. Defend science and critical thinking. Defend the rights that flow from those.
Hello All Commenters, I received notice of a comment from James M in my substack in-box, yet his comment is not visible below. If anyone else has commented and that is not visible here, email me via my substack address which appears in the About me section of this substack. Hopefully it was just some one-time glitch regarding James' comment, and thanks for your comment James.
Thank you for laying out the glaring and frankly terrifying situation we are facing. This coordinated attack on reality and especially women and homosexual folks is outrageous and has crept in under cover of darkness. Thank you for describing it so clearly. How to fight this ideology is the biggest challenge now. It’s going to take a coordinated legal, educational, medical and societal effort to roll back this terrible mind-virus.