The Biden administration is offering a $500,000 grant to help teach the English language in Pakistan, in part by providing “intensive professional development courses for Pakistani transgender youth.”
The State Department says the grant is aimed at teaching English language skills to Pakistani youth so they can “better participate in the global community and prepare them for success in the workplace.”
To reach that goal, the grant gives focus to three components: professional development for English language teachers from nonmainstream institutions, professional development for novice Pakistani English language teachers, and professional development for transgender youth and for Afghan teachers, students, and young professionals residing in Pakistan.
For the third component of the program, the award must be used to implement “intensive professional development courses for Pakistani transgender youth from the ages of 13–25, and intensive professional development courses for Afghan teachers, students, and young professionals residing in Pakistan.”
The stated goal of the program is to strengthen the “English capacity and professional capability of Pakistani transgender youth and of Afghan teachers, students, and young professionals residing in Pakistan.”
Participating teachers will “share what they learned in these trainings with English-language professional colleagues, thereby influencing pedagogy in their schools and communities.”
Applicants for the program are encouraged to address the question of “what is the most effective way to reach the greatest number of Pakistani transgender youth and Afghan teachers, students, and young professionals from diverse locations across Pakistan?”
Transgender Policies and Activism
In 2018, Pakistan enacted the Transgender Persons Protection of Rights Act (pdf), which prohibits discrimination against transgender people in schools, workplaces, and public settings and guarantees them the right to choose their gender on official documents.However, at least one U.S. lawmaker has had enough of the efforts to normalize transgender ideology and to provide preferential treatment to transgender individuals.
In 2022, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) took umbrage with a move by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “implement policy changes that permit LESS invasive screening procedures for transgender passengers” by the Transportation Security Administration at U.S. airports.
“This and other misguided policy changes were recently announced by DHS. We’re facing threats from every direction, and it is bewildering to see this agency seemingly focused more on gender ideology than its core mission,” he said in a statement at the time.
In an April 19 post on social media, Norman said, “I'll say it: I’m fed up with transgender activism. It’s gone off the deep end.”
While he believes that transgender individuals “deserve to be treated fairly,” he said that “transgender activism is no longer about acceptance or even ‘pride’ in who they claim to be.”
Norman described it as “an all-out assault on the senses” and “an attempt to desensitize Americans, in order to normalize something the majority of Americans view as abnormal.”
Norman is equally upset about the administration’s move to fund a program in Pakistan that provides favoritism to transgender youth in another country.
“Just a cursory glance through this administration’s spending reveals dizzying amounts of taxpayer dollars being sent to all sorts of questionable programs, not the least of which is millions to Pakistan for ‘gender programs,'” Austin Livingston, spokesman and deputy chief of staff for the South Carolina Republican, told The Epoch Times.
“We’re over $31 trillion in debt, but this president seems hell-bent on spending money we don’t have on programs that are simply not the role or purpose of the federal government. Congressman Norman has railed against that. It’s outrageous.”
