Many of us have raised kids. My wife and I raised four. But whether you've raised one child or a dozen, some things should be clearly understood by parents and educators alike, and that is that there are some things, some subjects, that parents and only parents should be discussing with their children. The schools have one purpose - to produce young adults with marketable skills, and everything else is up to the parents.
That is particularly true in matters of sex.
However, many schools, particularly in blue states, appear eager to encroach on parental prerogatives in this matter. Case in point: A Maryland middle school is under fire for a showing a presentation on "gender identity" to 8th-graders. That is, children of 14-15.
A Maryland middle school presented a slideshow to 6th graders celebrating "Transgender Awareness Week" where the children were given a lesson that included "advice for coming out" and "8 tips for being nonbinary."
"A person’s gender is who they feel that they are," middle schoolers at Westland Middle School in Bethesda, Maryland, were told last month in a video that was contained in a 12-slide presentation obtained by Fox News Digital.
"It is important to understand the difference between sex and gender so that we can better understand ourselves," the slide says beneath the video, a video that was produced by the LGBT educational resource provider Pop’n’Olly.
Multiple slides in the presentation provide information on "what it means" to be transgender and students are then quizzed about what they learned.
There's a lot of horse squeeze in that, and a lot more in the "lesson" as a whole.
First: There is utterly zero meaning in the phrase "A person's gender is who they feel that they are." Corral litter. In the first place, a 14- or 15-year-old child, in the developed world as it is today, has insufficient life experience and perspective to make any life decisions based on hard realities, much less nebulous garbage like this. A kid this age may decide he "feels like" a girl one day, a boy the next, and the star Tau Ceti the third, but the fact is that the kid is only one of the first two and not the third, no matter how hard he or she "feels."
Second: A video made by a transgender activist was shown to these children, and it's even more full of something that begins with "S."
Students were shown a video titled "Advice for Coming Out" along with a video titled "8 Tips for Being Nonbinary."
In the video with nonbinary tips, a "nonbinary creator" named Laurenzo explains what to do if someone uses incorrect pronouns to describe an individual and how to find the best "label" that describes you.
Laurenzo, who has a large following on social media, also explains to students how to "bind" properly, referring to a term used to describe the process of flattening a female’s breasts in order to appear less feminine.
There's the question of when someone claims to be "non-binary." Other than this person being seriously disturbed and confused, isn't it true that the claim to be "non-binary" separates that person from people who are "binary," or we might say, normal, thereby setting up two categories, "non-binary" and binary - thus making them, well, binary?
But not only is this Laurenzo pushing pronoun hooey, he/she/it/xir/whatever is also promoting breast-binding, a process that 1) 14-year-old girls shouldn't be attempting and 2) can cause serious injury.
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Fortunately, the pushback on this issue has already begun.
"There isn't a single justification for this cult-like propaganda being pushed on children at school," Erika Sanzi, senior director of communications for Defending Education, told Fox News Digital.
"They are presenting a harmful ideology as gospel to other people's children and manipulating language in ways that would almost be funny if it didn't come with so much risk. Many kids will rightly scoff and be unfazed by the absurdity of it all, but others may be vulnerable, potentially set down a path from which they can never fully return. These are 11- and 12-year-olds and nothing about this is remotely appropriate or defensible."
Cult-like is exactly right. Indeed, it's those vulnerable kids that are directly targeted by this. Feature, not bug. These are kids who are most easily swayed, no matter what their parents may think of all this. For years, kids like this were treated with therapy and counseling. Now, transgender activists are trying to convince them they are something they are not.
Our entire system of education has one purpose: To produce young adults with marketable skills. Part of the execution of that is to make sure students aren't being fed a diet of this kind of thing. These issues properly belong with parents, not the schools, and if parents want to teach their kids that they may be non-binary, or that their pronouns can be changed at will, or that they are a multi-phasic cosmic entity from a rogue world in the Crab Nebula, then that's their prerogative, not the schools'. The rest of us should be raising our kids as we see fit: By talking to them about reality.
