latest

SCOOP: The Springfield, Missouri public school district held a training program forcing teachers to identify their racial and sexual “privilege,” promoting identities such as “pansexual” and “polyamorous,” and warning that “misgendering a trans person is an act of violence.”

The training program began with a “land acknowledgement,” led by “chief equity and diversity officer, Yvania Garcia-Pusateri, asking teachers to “acknowledge the dark history and violence” of European settlers and to commit to “social justice work.”

Next, the district asked teachers to identify their racial and sexual “privilege” and consider how they contribute to “cycles of oppression.” This system leads oppressors—i.e., white male heterosexuals—to feel “anger, dehumanization, guilt, collusion, ignorance, self-hatred.”

The program followed the basic principles of radical gender theory: society has created a “heteronormative” system that is inherently oppressive. The goal is to subvert this system and affirm identities such as “trans,” “nonbinary,” “polyamorous,” and “pansexual.”

Administrators shared a video featuring “genderqueer” and “nonbinary” children, which claimed that some children “don’t have a gender” and that “misgendering a trans person is an act of violence.”

“My identity, although you can’t see it, still needs to be validated.”

At Parkview High School, one of the district’s “equity champions” held another training telling teachers that they must “acknowledge [their] privileges” and “lean into [their] discomfort” as part of their “LGBTQ+ 101” education.

The trainer instructed teachers to “try not to use gender-specific terms in class,” to use “they/them” pronouns for nonbinary children, and to “add your pronouns to [their] email signature.”
“For some folks, pronouns are non-negotiable.”

Fortunately @kimmiehermann at Southeastern Legal Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the district and Attorney General @Eric_Schmitt has put the district under state investigation. Voters and public officials should immediately shut this program down.

ED claims that all of the single-sex spaces & activities historically allowed under Title IX were only valid b/c no one was “harmed” by them — but now that “transgender” students feel harmed, sex categories must go. Biden’s Title IX proposal helpfully explains why upholding

sex-based categories can’t continue: “When a person is denied access to education…activities consistent w/ their gender identity, it causes them more than de minimis harm on the basis of sex. Therefore…such treatment generally violates Title IX”. ED is insisting that only the

harms suffered by “transgender” students from sex categories count (“a range of serious dignitary, academic, social, psychological & physical harms”); harms suffered by “cisgender” students from losing single-sex spaces are just “unsubstantiated concerns about privacy & safety”.

In other words, nothing is more important than validating everyone’s “gender identity.” Any downsides or negative consequences to eliminating female-only spaces & activities are just bigoted, cruel overreactions to the harm prevention that really counts: affirming identities.

Of course, ED dodges an obvious question: how, exactly, is a school supposed to “treat everyone according to their gender identity” when gender identity is not defined to, for instance, be limited to cross-sex identification? How shall we avoid “harm” to enbies or gender fluid?

Maybe we’ll see a flood of Title IX complaints & even lawsuits charging schools w/ “gender identity discrimination” for not keeping up w/ neopronouns, & for “only” offering “girl/boy” options for locker rooms etc. That’s not very validating for non-binary or genderqueer students.

It’s also pretty dismissive of reality for ED to frame single-sex spaces/activities always allowed (until now) under Title IX as existing just b/c “no one was harmed,” as though there are no actual *benefits* (esp & mainly for girls & women) to having male-free spaces/activities.

It’s also insulting for ED to frame objections to losing single-sex spaces as concerns of “cisgender” students; how do ED officials know if all students who see value in keeping female-only spaces “identify as cisgender”? ED is forcing everyone into a made-up “trans/cis” binary.