Are Students Still Threatened by Gender Ideology in Schools?

Families, communities, and nations are stronger when parents understand what is happening in their schools. According to Tyler O’Neil, there is a “threat of gender ideology in schools.” He posted an article at The Daily Signal discussing the problem of schools indoctrinating kindergarteners into “trans joy” and school clinics that offer transgender “medicine” for minors. 

According to O’Neil, the historic reelection victory of President-elect Donald Trump “represented a loud rebuke to the transgender movement.” However, the “noxious ideology still has a stranglehold in many institutions” and is backed by official state policy in some cases. In fact, a new report from The Heritage Foundation states that there are at least 16 U.S. states that have “curriculum standards that force teachers’ hands on the issue.”

The report, “Gender Ideology as State Education Policy,” highlights the state-level education standards and frameworks of 16 states that encourage gender ideology, which the report defines as “the subordination or displacement of factual, ideologically neutral lessons about biological sex with tell-tale notions such as ‘gender identity,’ ‘sex assigned at birth,’ and ‘cisgender.’”

This ideology rejects biology and tradition, promoting vague notions of identity that often rely on rigid sex stereotypes that feminists have rejected for decades.

Jay Richards, director of Heritage’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, and Daniel Buck, senior visiting fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, analyzed the state-level education frameworks of all 50 states.

Richards and Buck asked whether the frameworks “encourage a distinction between sex or sex organs, and gender, the latter of which is undefined or treated as a social construct?” The analysts also asked whether the policies promote the notion that sex is merely “assigned at birth” and whether they use terms such as “cisgender,” “transgender,” and “nonbinary.”

These tell-tale signs reveal the promotion of gender ideology, which not only contradicts basic biology and tradition but also poses a real danger to impressionable children.

By telling little boys that they may really be girls, schools prime them for experimental medical interventions that leave kids stunted, scared, and infertile. The fact that medical societies endorse these interventions – despite the lack of evidence that they improve children’s lives and in the face of evidence that they carry severe side effects such as the risk of cancer in teens – is a scandal of epic proportions.

Even simply teaching children that “gender identity” may be different from biological sex carries the risk of setting kids on a destructive path. These lessons are rightly controversial, and parents should be able to remove their children from any such indoctrination.

O’Neil’s article lists the states and “the specific state policy requiring each to teach gender ideology. I will list the states, and you can link to O’Neil’s article to see the state policy. However, I will include the policy of a single state because I did not expect this state to even be on the list. The sixteen states are: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Wyoming’s policy is as follows: “Sexuality: the sum of the physical, functional, and psychological attributes that are expressed by one’s gender identity and sexual behavior.”

Wise parents will know the policies on gender ideology in their schools and can strengthen their family, community, and nation by rooting the ideology out of their school.