If your child attends a public school, you can be absolutely certain that he or she is being taught radical gender ideology. It does not matter whether you live in a red or blue state — this ideology has become so entrenched in the education system that it is everywhere, from Republican-controlled Texas to Democratic-run New Jersey.
That could change soon. Some red states, such as Florida, are passing legislation to weed gender studies out of the curricula and ensure that parents get the final say over the values and lessons to which their children are exposed.
But even so, conservatives are facing an uphill battle that starts and ends with the federal government.
The Obama administration set the gears in motion by redefining the legal definition of sex to include gender identity, or “an individual’s internal sense of gender.” The Trump administration reversed this order, but the Biden administration plans to bring it back, which means that every school receiving federal funding will have to allow gender-confused students into the bathroom, locker room, or sports team of their choice.
In other words, even the schools prevented from teaching gender ideology as fact by state laws will have to act on gender ideology by opening up sex-based spaces and imposing federally mandated, activist-crafted policies that prioritize students’ gender identities over biological sex. There is simply no way to avoid radical gender ideology in this scenario. It might not be in a public school’s curricula, but it will almost certainly be a part of that school’s administrative policies by the time the Biden administration is finished.
Biden’s Education Department has made it clear this is the goal. Administration officials held a recent training for school staff and federal grantees, during which educators discussed the importance of pro-transgender policies and language, not just in daily classroom instruction but also in schools’ policies. One of the Biden officials present, Christian Rhodes, encouraged educators to look up guidance released by the Education Department and Justice Department titled “Confronting anti-LGBTQIA+ Harassment in Schools” so that school officials can recognize “examples of possible discrimination” and know “what steps you or anyone can take if a student experiences discrimination in school.” Given that activists perceive “misgendering” and “deadnaming” as discrimination and consider parents who don’t immediately accept their child’s new name and pronouns as abusers, the federal government’s guidance and involvement in K-12 schools are alarming.
Following this federal guidance, he said, is one of the best ways to combat the “hundreds of bills that are really targeting, unfairly, students. These bills have been proposed across the country, and they’re really targeting our young people,” Rhodes added.
Rhodes was obviously referring to laws like Florida’s, which cracks down on gender studies in elementary school curricula. And his point was that the Biden administration not only wants to fight these laws but give educators ways to subvert them.
This is what we’re up against.
But it is crucial that we keep pushing back. Radical gender ideology is a threat to girls’ safety and equality and to all young persons swindled into doing irreparable harm to their bodies because they were led to believe that adopting a new gender identity would rid them of the natural anxieties of maturation.
But above all, gender ideology is a threat to the truth. One of the teachers who attended the Education Department’s recent training said students should be taught that “not all women produce eggs, and not all egg producers are women” and that it is not the mother who carries a fetus for 9 months but the “gestational parent.” Language tricks like these are an attempt to distort what we know to be real so that the Left can replace biological reality with its preferred narrative.
At least now, parents’ eyes are wide open to what’s happening. But the fight is far from over — the Biden administration has made sure of that.