California’s radical curriculum is driving teenage girls crazy and is fueling the transgender epidemic, parents told Manhattan Institute fellow Leor Sapir.
Sapir spoke with more than a dozen parents and parent group leaders who have children suddenly caught up by Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and reported his findings in the City Journal.
The parents said their state-mandated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum shames white children for their supposed white “privilege,” causing them to “rush to the sanctuary of an LGBTQ+ identity,” wrote Sapir:
Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia [a pseudonym for one of the parents], some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late. The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes.
“They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context,” he continued.
California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) infuses the principles of critical race theory (CRT) “into all aspects of school life,” according to the report. As Breitbart News previously reported, CRT “claims that all of our institutions — our government, our economy, our culture — are based on racial hierarchy, with whites on top and blacks at the bottom. Even things that look race-neutral are, on closer inspection, racist.”
“No less troubling than ESMC’s obsession with foisting the lens of race on children is the lengths that teachers and administrators will go to in order to conceal their activities from parents. Gaslighting and outright lies are not uncommon, but more frequently, ESMC’s promoters bury its controversial elements under pleasant abstractions and impenetrable bureaucratic jargon,” the report states.
Two parents who lead the online support group Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT) told Sapir that their sons were first exposed to a “prolonged Marxist analysis of American History” before being exposed to gender ideology at school. Other parents said their teen daughters are escaping their “status as oppressors” by having diagnosed mental health problems like anxiety, ADHD, gender dysphoria, and depression.
Once a child has decided they align with an “LGBTQ+ identity,” parents reported being “powerless to stop” a “swift decline in..mental and physical health.” The state’s schools not only incite the “desire to escape white cis states,” but also practice “affirming” policies — meaning the school will use “preferred pronouns” and “in many cases, hide that information from her “unsupportive parents.”
One parent told Sapir an adult at her son’s school told him to leave home and seek shelter at an LGBT center. The report states:
Examples of teachers actively coaching students on how to “socially transition” without arousing suspicion at home, even providing them with chest binders, are not unheard-of. While this may not have the pedophilic connotations of “grooming,” it comes close in its deep antipathy for parental authority and its unilateral usurpation of parental responsibility for sexual education.
Sapir found that the state’s medical establishment only compounds the effects of the educational establishment. He pointed to the state’s “conversion therapy” ban and its misapplication to “gender identity” as the reason parents of ROGD children struggle to find mental experts who do not practice “affirming care.”
“Patricia, a well-educated and highly resourceful parent, said that she could not find a single therapist in her area who used exploratory therapy prior to, and as a means of discerning the need for, “affirming” interventions,” the report states.
Furthermore, minors above the age of 12 in California can, in certain instances, legally consent to “gender affirming” treatments without parental consent. Those treatments include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even sex change surgeries.
Sapir continued:
What terrifies California parents above all, however, is that openly questioning their child’s trans identity may result in a visit from Child Protective Services. The school itself can call CPS if it believes that a student’s parents are “abusive.” One Bay Area parent recounted how an acquaintance with a ROGD child had to flee the state quietly in order to find non-“affirming” mental-health treatment for her daughter.
Sapir said the “common emotion denominator” when speaking to parents and parent group leaders was “an overwhelming sense of despair.” Sapir wrote:
‘It destroys your self-confidence as a parent,’ one mother said. ‘Friends will turn on you in a second, stab you in the back to appear progressive to other people.’ The scene is reminiscent of a political dystopia in which a police state effectively delegates to citizens the task of keeping watch over one another.
Sapir summarized that California teen girls are “seeking refuge in puberty blockers, testosterone injections, and double mastectomies” to escape accusations of “white supremacy” leveled by the ethnic studies curriculum — and parents are “almost powerless to stop them.”
“These girls are the sacrificial lambs offered up by the high priests of white guilt. The state’s ESMC was obviously not intended to visit disproportionate harm on girls and women, but perhaps the Left should heed the advice of its own prophet, Ibram X. Kendi, that we ought to judge a policy not by its intention but by its effects,” he concluded.