A school in Oakland, California wants to change boys into girls and girls into boys, Fox News reports. The latest fad in the classroom is “transgender” education, or teaching the idea that boys and girls really aren’t that different, and anyone can identify himself any way he wishes.
According to Fox, an outfit called Gender Spectrum convinced school officials to permit its propagandist to inculcate children with the idea that gender is “fluid,” as they might say, and not at all confined to the “binary concept” of “two rigidly fixed options,” as the group’s website says.
The unfortunate children at Oakland’s Redwood Heights Elementary School were the guinea pigs in this educational experiment, and the move is very likely a precursor to what is coming in California: “gender neutrality,” in which no distinctions between male and female are legally allowed.
What They Taught
Fox News was, surprisingly enough, permitted in the classroom.
A gender bender from the Gender Spectrum group was the “teacher,” Fox reported. The point was to confuse the children and make them question traditional ideas about who is a boy and who is girl. According to Fox:
Joel Baum, director of education and training for Gender Spectrum, taught the classes. In the kindergarten class he asked the 5- and 6-year-olds to identify if a toy was a “girl toy” or a “boy toy” or both. He also asked which students liked the color pink, prompting many to raise their hands, to which he responded that that boys can like pink, too.
In the fourth-grade class, Baum focused on specific animal species, like sea horses, where the males can have or take care of the children. He suggested that even if someone was born with male “private parts” but identified more with being a girl, that was something to be “accepted” and “respected.”
Students in the class were given cards, which included information on all-girl geckos and transgender clownfish, to illustrate the variations in nature that occur in humans, too.
Next, Baum began tossing out the terms that Gender Spectrum uses in its propaganda, explaining that the terms boy and girl really don’t mean too much.
Gender identity is one’s own sense of themselves. Do they know themselves to be a girl? Do they know themselves to be a boy? Do they know themselves to be a combination? Gender identity is a spectrum where people can be girls, feel like girls, they feel like boys, they feel like both, or they can feel like neither.
Understandably, the school marms in Oakland defended the brainwashing. A school spokesman told Fox that children might not “conform to gender norms” when it comes to clothes and hair or colors. “We should be accepting of these differences in the interest of creating an environment where all children are welcome.”
Also understandably, parents were upset. Kevin Snider of the Pacific Justice Institute said such a program obviously does not comport with the beliefs of most parents. “Though to many this may seem extreme,” he said, “based upon some of the bills now pending in the Capitol, such as SB 48, this will be the new normal in California’s K-12 public schools.”
AB 887
What is that “new normal”? The goal of Gender Spectrum, again, is to make children think that “boy” and “girl” don’t mean anything. Indeed, “normal” would mean nothing.
According to its website:
Western culture has come to view gender as a binary concept, with two rigidly fixed options: male or female. When a child is born, a quick glance between the legs determines the gender label that the child will carry for life. But even if gender is to be restricted to basic biology, a binary concept still fails to capture the rich variation observed. Rather than just two distinct boxes, biological gender occurs across a continuum of possibilities. This spectrum of anatomical variations by itself should be enough to disregard the simplistic notion of only two genders.
But beyond anatomy, there are multiple domains defining gender. In turn, these domains can be independently characterized across a range of possibilities. Instead of the static, binary model produced through a solely physical understanding of gender, a far more rich texture of biology, gender expression, and gender identity intersect in multidimensional array of possibilities. Quite simply, the gender spectrum represents a more nuanced, and ultimately truly authentic model of human gender.
Among other ideas, Gender Spectrum promotes the notions of “gender identity,” “gender expression,” and “gender fluidity.” The first is “[o]ne’s innermost concept of self as male or female or both or neither — how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves. One’s gender identity can be the same or different than the sex assigned at birth.” Gender Spectrum explains that gender identity is sometimes “different from their biological or assigned sex.” These individuals often choose to “change their sex.”
“Gender expression” “[r]efers to the ways in which people externally communicate their gender identity to others through behavior, clothing, haircut, voice, and other forms of presentation,” while “gender fluidity” explains that a boy might a boy one day and a girl the next. Gender Spectrum wants people to get away from “stereotyping.”
Gender fluidity conveys a wider, more flexible range of gender expression, with interests and behaviors that may even change from day to day. Gender fluid children do not feel confined by restrictive boundaries of stereotypical expectations of girls or boys. In other words, a child may feel they are a girl some days and a boy on others, or possibly feel that neither term describes them accurately.
That’s where the California legislature comes in. The state assembly passed the bill AB 887 on May 17, which prohibits any type of discrimination against the “transgendered,” which, according to Gender Spectrum, is a person “whose gender identity does not match their assigned birth gender.”
According to PJI, the bill could be a literal disaster. Under AB 887 and other legislation, PJI reports, quoting the legislative counsel, “‘gender expression would be defined as meaning a person’s gender-related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth. …'” As well, the bill would “‘require an employer to allow an employee to appear or dress consistently with the employee’s gender expression.'”
In other words, employers could not require men to dress like men. Said Brad Dacus, president of PJI:
This would allow a male transvestite to cross dress at a sales call and the employer would be unable to require the salesman to dress appropriately while representing the company. Not only does this touch on the absurd, the proposed changes will be done at taxpayer expense.
