What NOT To Do: A Top Ten List Of Bad Ideas For Gender Training For Schools
Reading the guide from Gender Health Query
“‘Gender taught in schools is evidence-based & progressive,’” reads the first of ten myths debunked in Scrutinizing Gender Education in Public Schools: Incorporating Evidence and Balancing Rights, a parent and educator resource from Gender Health Query. “‘Teachers would never introduce materials in schools that are harmful to students or damaging to parental rights.’”
As regular readers and listeners of The Distance already know, this myth of benign intent obscures a sinister pattern of behavior by overtly-ideological educators and administrators. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently endorsed this pernicious myth when he signed legislation to gag teachers and principals from telling parents about ‘gender identity’ changes in their children while they are at school. California parents are to be the last to know that their children have joined a cult.
“Gender ideology is not a science, it’s a personal belief system that demands others participate in it.” Even many transgender-identified people do not subscribe to the ideology that invokes their identity.
The unflinching approach of this guide, which is available at The Homoarchy website in a 7-page version as well as a 129-page version, was its strongest appeal to this reader. Phrases like ‘trans girls’ and ‘trans boys’ are rejected. “All students are created equal, and no student is born wrong,” it says. “The view that ‘gender is a spectrum’ is not a fact but a belief system promoted by a very small percentage of the population — many of whom stand to gain emotionally, politically, and financially as activists or providers of medical services.”
“Pretending that the growing number of parents with concerns about ‘LGBTQ+’ activism in schools are all bigots is disingenuous, as people from these populations may support their views and have the same concerns.” Politics be damned. “This is NOT a right vs. left issue, but a child safeguarding issue. Many health professionals, parents, and LGB people have grave concerns about subjecting minors to these untested treatments.” So-called ‘gender medicine’ is harmful, a new form of conversion therapy for people with same-sex attraction. “Examining risks and considering long-term outcomes is common sense, and is the right thing to do from a scientific perspective.”
To do any less is anti-LGB discrimination. “Internalized homophobia and the current celebration of trans-identification in some aspects of the culture also affect LGB youth, particularly lesbian youth.” In the new social hierarchy of ‘gender,’ identity confers a novel status upon status-craving adolescents. “Young people have stated that they received more support and accolades when they came out as trans versus being LGB,” the guide observes.
‘Gender identity’ is not good for ‘straight kids,’ either. “We believe it’s a mistake to tell dysphoric youth they must invest themselves in outside validation, rather than maintaining an internal locus of control of their feelings.” Children need guidance from adults; they do not need the pressure of being told that they must lead the adults around them. Conversations are the only medicine kids really need. “The motive of exploratory therapy is not to disrespect the child/teen, rather to not rush minors into irreversible medical treatments while they are physically and cognitively immature,” that is, the ideal age for recruiting cultists, or child soldiers.
Disembodiment is lauded as a goal in gender ideology. “Gender activists are not merely asking for kindness for gender-struggling youth — they encourage children and teens to dissociate from their sexed bodies.” Echoing Abigail Shrier’s most recent book, the guide calls out “invasive personal questions in DEI, SOGI, & SEL materials” that are designed to keep students ruminating on their psychic state rather than learning.
Autogynephilia denial gets attention in the guide. “Boys dealing with this issue deserve understanding and support based in truth from adults” rather than the “extremely aggressive gender activist effort to deny and censor” information about AGP from discussion. Men do not have “female brains trapped in male bodies.” Adult men have pushed the normalization of ‘trans kids’ to explain themselves without having to to acknowledge their motivations for ‘transitioning’.
Demands placed on other people to support the new identity can be onerous. “It is logically inconsistent to promote the view that a trans-identified person’s rejection of their own body is a human right, but others’ rejection of that same body, due to their own sexual orientation, is bigotry and worthy of engaging in online harassment, libel, censoring, firing from jobs, and obtaining sex-by-deception.”
Gender activism taught in schools is not progressive and doesn’t uphold priorities central to modern democracies. It is anti-science, reinforces sex stereotypes, encourages poor body image, confuses children about biological reality and sexual orientation, eradicates the concept of sex-based rights, ends fair sports for girls, and restricts free speech and free thought.
Puberty blockers are not ‘safe’ or ‘reversible.’ Lupron, for example, “as over 20,000 adverse side effect reports with the FDA. The manufacturers include serious mental health risks, such as suicidality, on its list.”
The supposed cure is in fact the disease, as “postmedical transition research, attempting to prove overall wellbeing for adults, has mixed findings” on suicide reduction. Activist talking points defend this form of endocrine disruption as ‘medically necessary’ and ‘lifesaving’, but in fact “there is little to no evidence that social and medical interventions for minors are appropriate or the best approach for minors.” In fact, “studies that showed how mental health issues and suicide ideation/attempt rates remain high post-medical transition, and call into question whether transition reduces suicide risk in adults at all.”
Suicide risk gets its own debunking (Myth #8). “Trans activism often misrepresents suicide risk, and there is no trans murder epidemic,” the guide says. “Activists in media, groups, and institutions make panic-inducing statements about the dangers of suicide and hate crimes that are hyperbolic, enforce an agenda, and violate suicide-reporting ethics. This behavior will only make the mental health of dysphoric young people worse.” Indeed, we are already seeing the self-fulfillment of this prophetic programming as trans-identified mass shooters and killers appear in the news with increasing frequency.
“Instead of adding fuel to the fire, adult authority figures should be role models for calm, rational, and fair solutions for conflicting interests,” Gender Health Query advises. “The blame for extremist behavior among radicalized young people falls squarely on the adults around them who have failed to teach them emotional regulation and to respect others. They’ve lied to them and led them to believe that people who oppose gender ideology and underage medicalization hate them and want them dead.”
A too-easy critique of this guide is that it is focused on what not to do (negative presciptives) rather than positive policy advice. It is written to persuade the neutral or unbiased reader that the demands of ‘gender identity’ are unfounded and unreasonable, prompting a more rational discussion of what we might term ‘gender policy’ (or better yet ‘sex realist policy’) that hopefully follows after someone reading it. In that event, the conversation will be set upon new terms.
“Bathrooms should not be used as identity validators,” for example. “That is not their purpose. If any children are receiving harassment in their correct-sex bathrooms for how they present, or for any other reason in ways that threaten their safety, the school should provide a faculty bathroom.” Solutions are actually not hard to agree upon once you hold a sane conversation about the problem.
Finally, this writer appreciated the warning to readers that gender ideology will not work out as ‘the right side of history’, after all, and in fact history suggests otherwise. The authors note that “the mental health and medical professions have been involved with many damaging fads in the past, such as the satanic panic and recovered memory psychic contagions in the 1990s, the mutilation of ‘intersex’ babies, hooking up homosexuals to shock therapy, lobotomies, thalidomide, and the Tuskegee experiments that intentionally infected black men with syphilis.”
The deprogramming of American society will be hard, but it is doable if we apply ourselves. There is hope, this resource says. Let us hope they are right.