Progressive activists are forcing public schools to teach and practice gender ideology in the name of civil rights, but more American students and their parents are saying “no” to the demands made on behalf of a minority who claim to be the opposite sex.
In Portland, Oregon, parents of high school students have filed a federal lawsuit over the school district’s policy that allows a biological female student who claims to be male to use the boys’ locker room and bathroom.
The lawsuit is similar to one filed in Palatine, Illinois last year where, as the Chicago Tribune reported in October 2016, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Gilbert ruled that high school students “do not have a constitutional right not to share restrooms or locker rooms with transgender students whose sex assigned at birth is different than theirs.”
The Portland lawsuit claims the Dallas School District’s policy to allow a 16-year-old female – Elliot Yoder – to use the boys’ facilities violates the civil rights of the majority of the students who are not gender-confused, the Associated Press observes.
The Oregon chapter of the ACLU argues the parents’ lawsuit is “senseless and cruel” and “targets transgender youth for simply existing and seeking an education.”
However, Herb Grey, the parents’ attorney, says boys who use the facilities at the school are embarrassed to get undressed in front of a biological female.
“The key to this whole thing is not just the privacy and the rights of just one student,” Grey explains. “It’s the rights of all the students and their parents and you can’t interpret federal law and state law and impose it on everyone else and say you’re accommodating everyone — because you’re not accommodating everyone.”
Yoder reportedly asked to use the boys’ facilities for changing before gym class because the gender-neutral bathroom is on another floor and other students noticed when she left to change.
Two years ago, when the Dallas school district first informed parents it would be accommodating a biological female who claimed to be male by allowing her to use the boys’ facilities, the enraged parents came together to protest at a school board meeting.
In May 2016, students at Green Mountain Union High School in Chester, Vermont also pushed back against the school’s transgender policy that was allowing a female student who claims to be male to use the boys’ facilities.
As Breitbart News reported, the students argued it is unfair to make the majority of students feel uncomfortable to satisfy the demands of a small minority.
Similarly, in September of 2015, 150 students in Missouri organized a protest against their school principal’s decision to force gender ideology on them following the demands of one male student who claimed his gender identity was female.
In Seattle, students in grades K-5 will be assigned books and short lessons that teach the new gender ideology according to updated state health education requirements, reports public radio station knkx.org.
According to the report:
For kindergarten, there’s a book called Introducing Teddy. In it, a bear named Thomas is sad and finally tells a friend, “I’m a girl teddy, not a boy teddy.” Thomas asks to be called Tilly instead. The friend, Errol, says that he doesn’t care and that “what matters is that you are my friend.”
The gender ideology narrative as explained by Lisa Love, manager of health education for the Seattle school district is:
We’re not talking about body parts. We’re not talking about sex. We’re not talking about anything that would put kids in an uncomfortable position to have to disclose. Instead, we’re talking about how people are behaving and how we treat them, and that’s sort of a universal value that we can share of being kind and supportive of one another.
The state of California, in fact, is the first to use what it terms “LGBT-inclusive history” textbooks in the nation, a fact that is celebrated by Planned Parenthood which teaches gay and transgender sexuality in its sex education programs.
As the Los Angeles Times reports, “The California State Board of Education … approved 10 textbooks for kindergarten through eighth-grade students that include coverage of the historical contributions of LGBT people, and rejected two that failed to include such coverage.”
The report adds about the rejected textbooks:
The textbooks were rejected because they failed to address the sexual orientations of historical figures who were LGBT, or widely speculated by historians to have been LGBT. They include poets Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and President James Buchanan.
More parents of all political stripes, however, are refusing to go along with the claims of activists – often funded by wealthy progressive philanthropists – who accuse them of bigotry and discrimination for not accepting an ideology that rejects the scientific fact of the existence of two biological sexes – male and female.
Washington State-based Kaeley Triller Haver, Co-Founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, tells Breitbart News, “We need to be very clear about naming this whole movement what it is: religious indoctrination of a cult like nature.”
Triller Haver says the forced gender ideology narrative is meant to undermine parents who are not buying into it:
Those with the audacity to challenge the narrative are shamed, and those foolish enough to overtly disagree are shunned. How else do you explain the phenomena of teachers being put on administrative leave for pronoun infractions? We won’t allow a football coach to pray off the clock, but we will allow kindergarten teachers to teach 5 year olds about mythical gender unicorns and that you can change your sex if you want to? This is an absurd and appalling abuse of power. Kids do not have the cognitive development necessary to grasp these abstract theories, but more and more it seems that the people tasked with educating them lack the cognitive development necessary to understand reality. Parents need to start speaking up and pushing back.
Outside of the United States, students in Namao, Alberta, Canada say their school’s decision to convert the majority of single-sex bathrooms to gender-neutral bathrooms with multiple stalls poses significant privacy concerns. At least half of the student body of Sturgeon Composite High School signed a petition to urge a return to the single-sex bathrooms.
Graeme Gibson, an 11th grade student at Sturgeon Composite, objects to the school’s decision to change most of the bathrooms despite the fact that gender-confused individuals constitute a small minority of the population.
“It needs to reflect the population of the student body,” she said. “There are absolutely some people that need to be accommodated with the gender-neutral washrooms and that’s totally cool. But that is a minority.”
Many students and their parents agree making an accommodation for the very few children who suffer from gender dysphoria is acceptable, but demanding that the majority of students have their privacy and safety compromised is not.
Breitbart News reports:
Polls show that a strong majority of ordinary Americans oppose the progressive claim that unverifiable “gender” is more important than a person’s sex. Polls also show that Americans want sexual privacy in bathrooms and shower rooms and especially in K-12 schools. Also, the polls show that most Americans want to be polite and helpful to the very few transsexual people who wish to live as members of the other sex. According to one study of the 2010 census, the population of transgender people amounts to one in every 2,400 Americans, or 0.03 percent of the adult population.
Like Triller Haver, Jane Robbins, senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based American Principles Project, tells Breitbart News the progressive activists behind the forced gender ideology are dismissing what is obvious to most Americans as they perhaps seek a greater aim.
Robbins explains:
If the goal is social chaos, nothing will achieve that quicker than undermining not only the family and parental rights, but the very foundations of human existence.
There’s no such thing as boys and girls, male and female, mommy and daddy. If you, little kindergartner, find that confusing, all the better. And if your parents tell you otherwise, they are horrible, bigoted people, and you should ignore them and listen instead to us, the all-wise State.
“This is a diabolical but ingenious way of remaking society,” she adds. “And if the lives of confused children have to be destroyed in pursuit of the political agenda, that’s just acceptable collateral damage.”
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