Is it the place of school districts across the country to reinforce western societal gender norms?
The National Review posted a story Oct. 8 on the Lincoln, Nebraska School District (referred to as Lincoln Public Schools and abbreviated LPS) headlined “School told to call kids ‘purple penguins’ because ‘boys and girls’ is not inclusive to transgender” with the subhead of the story being “Nebraska teachers are instructed to ask students what their preferred pronouns are.” According to the story, the school district “instructed its teachers to stop referring to students by ‘“gendered expressions’ such as ‘boys and girls,’ and use ‘gender inclusive ones such as ‘purple penguins’ instead.” The story focused on a document by the organization Gender Spectrum entitled “12 easy steps on the way to gender inclusiveness.”
Fox News’ Todd Starnes and Gretchen Carlson picked up on the story, and it became news on socially conservative outlets. Carlson began her story by stating “Public school system banning the terms ‘boy’ and ‘girl.’”
Headlines for other Google identified news outlets included the Inquisitr’s “Teachers told to stop calling students ‘boys’ and ‘girls.’” The Gospel Herald’s headline was “Gender neutrality: Neb. teachers ordered to call children ‘purple penguins’ to make classroom gender inclusive.”
The headlines indicating that the school district was banning “boy and girl” became trope, and the school superintendent responded to the backlash. “Never once has anyone inside our system mandated that a teacher take (the words) ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ or ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ out of their interactions with children or interaction with adults,” LPS Superintendent Steve Joel said in a statement. “There’s no policy, there’s no procedure, there’s no changes being made to bathrooms in schools.”
The reason that the superintendent brought up bathrooms is because Web sites, such as Right Wing News, The Federalist Papers and Young Conservatives brought up bathrooms in their takes on the story.
Superintendent Joel also added, in his statement, that there is no district policy on transgender students: each case is handled on an individual basis.
The Website Snopes.com, which seeks to verify whether tropes are true or not, took this trope up. They called the trope a mixture of: 1) TRUE: Lincoln Public Schools have provided educators with materials to help them better understand gender identity issues; and 2) FALSE: The Lincoln school district has banned all reference to gender in favor of calling students “purple penguins.”
The Nebraska Family Alliance has produced talking points regarding the Gender Spectrum handout. “Gender Spectrum’s material advocates for an ideology that is at odds with the beliefs of many in our community,” was one of the three talking points. Explanatory sub-points for that header talking point included “The Gender Spectrum material is not just about teaching children what transgenderism is or how to treat those who are gender confused, it’s about affirming an extreme view of gender fluidity” and “This material goes beyond mere tolerance teaching into promotion and validation of lifestyles that not everyone agrees are moral.”
Trans exclusionary, radical lesbian feminist Cathy Brennan, writing for the Gender Identity Watch (GIW), adds her own point on the dissemination of the Gender Spectrum handout in stating “gender identity is nothing more than ‘personality,’ and that there is no such thing as innate gender.” Also on GIW, in an entry entitled “What [LGBT] organizations push gender identity?” she states that “We oppose gender identity as a regressive, woman-hating ideology.”
Of course, there are other reasons to not separate boys and girls in many school settings. Many of the ways students are separated teach societal gender norms and give credence to girls and women being lesser people than boys and men. School districts that require boys attend shop classes and girls attend home economics classes, for example, teach that a woman’s role is as a homemaker.
When trans people’s lives are presented through the ideology of transgenderism, trans people are implicitly identified as gender confused deceivers. To be sure, there are delusions of gender that are limiting, and our society often enforces these gender norms. An innate gender identity that doesn’t align with the gender assigned at birth doesn’t mean trans people are deluded, deceptive or confused. Enforcing societal gender norms I believe is wrongheaded, and dividing students by means other than assigned gender at birth has benefits for transgender, ipsogender and cisgender people alike.
It should be noted that the guide sheet put out by Gender Spectrum does include the phrase “purple penguins” as an example of suggested classroom name. Obviously, there was some confusion over whether the rather silly suggestions from an obviously extremist group were intended to be taken as policy, or merely suggestions that, well, no one with a shred of good sense would adopt. A lot of this arises from the fact that some confuse a desire to engage in certain behaviors with having an inherent gender that is at odds with one’s sex. While it would be good to recognize that, in rare cases, some children are transsexual, it should also be recognized that other factors can also be an issue. Ironically, a great many of those who claim to be transgender would have shown no signs of being transsexual in childhood.
Just another way to marginalize sex and sex roles.
Real TS know better, the Tee-Gees don’t.
Anne