More conservatives need to speak out against gender ideology. Riley Gaines has led the charge in collegiate sports, objecting to men on women’s teams, and Ryan Anderson has authored the main book for public policy. However, gender ideology is still being normalized and promoted in public libraries and classroom materials. This must stop.
The National Association of Scholars will soon issue its report on the misdeeds of the Education Department titled Wasteland: The Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism. One of its case studies describes various gender identity policies that threaten a small, rural school district in Ashland, OH, a town strongly opposed to such ideologies. Two years ago, a group of concerned parents asked the board of the public library to remove, or at least relocate, sexually explicit books from the children’s section. The board president denied the request, citing censorship, so the books remain in the children’s section still today. However, the public request brought benefits since it informed more parents about the inappropriate material available to children.
At least four books on gender ideology are also in the same children’s section:
- Pink, Blue, and You! Questions for Kids about Gender Stereotypes. One page includes the drawings of two nude babies with visible private parts and the following sentence, “A few of us are born in bodies that aren’t all female or male. Scientists call us INTERSEX.”
- It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity. This book features drawings of children coming out to their parents as transgender. It goes one step further and, underneath a drawing of babies, reads, “What a baby’s body looks like when they’re born can be a clue to what the baby’s gender will be, but not always.”
- It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender, and Sexual Health says simply that transgenderism is normal.
- Puberty is gross but also really awesome. The section “I is who I is and I like who I like” tells readers about gender expression, gender identity, and sexual expression.
Wasteland also documents how federal websites intended for children, and often endorsed by the Department of Education (ED), are egregious promoters of gender ideology. StopBullying.gov, for example, is a federal website managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, supposedly to stop bullying in all its forms. However, the resources of StopBullying.gov are less focused on bullying and more focused on affirming homosexuality (“LGBT”) among young students. For example, these resources tell parents and teachers to refer to students by pronouns they demand or by names they make up, disregarding their legal names.
Another example is Youth.gov, created by the Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs and composed of representatives from 13 federal departments and 12 federal agencies. Youth.gov has a section on LGBT; an excerpt from its text reads, “Sexual orientation and gender identity/expression are important aspects of a young person’s identity. Understanding and expressing sexual orientation and gender and developing related identities are typical development tasks that vary across children and youth.” This is but a glimpse of the gender craze spreading through the federal government down to classrooms.
StopBullying.gov and Youth.gov are suggested resources for the use of Title IV, Part A, funds under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. In layman’s terms, if schools want to use the classroom materials available on these websites, the costs of the materials are covered by the ED. There are also four regional Equity Assistance Centers funded by the ED under Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The purpose of an Equity Assistance Center is “to provide technical assistance and training, upon request, in the areas of race, sex, national origin, and religion to public school districts and other responsible governmental agencies to promote equitable education opportunities. The centers work in the areas of civil rights, equity, and school reform.” Originally, these centers aided the desegregation of public schools. But the purpose now appears to be the sexualization of kids, notwithstanding the nice-sounding terms “civil rights” and “equity.”
A quick search of the term “LGBT” on the website for the Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center includes, but is not limited to, LGBT-related book lists for high school, middle school, and elementary school students; a safe space kit; and resources for creating “inclusive” classrooms and LGBT visibility in elementary schools. Many of these resources are affiliated with GLSEN, an organization founded in 1990 dedicated to the promotion of homosexuality (LGBT) in K-12 schools.
Parents never asked for this, never consented to this and when consulted, they vehemently object to it. They simply do not want their children to learn about gender ideology. It is not the place of schools or the federal government to promote such sexualization.
Interestingly, conspicuously absent in library holdings and classroom materials is the growing documentation of the irreparable damage done to young people by this ideology and its corresponding clinical procedures such as puberty blockers or genital mutilation. For example, one does not find the new book Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult, which tells the true stories of those regretting surgical interventions and hormonal modifications, all of which are ideologies masquerading as medicine. This new book adds to an existing body of research that shows the dangers of gender ideology when put into practice.
As the “gender” horrors increase and are brought to light by victims and their families, one hopes that the courage of conservatives will also increase so they speak out more against this destructive pathology.
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Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of Scholars, and a former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School, George Mason University. She authored the 2020 Report, Dear Colleague: The Weaponization of Title IX.
Nathaniel Urban is a development associate at the National Association of Scholars.
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