Commentary
As battles rage between local school districts in California and the state attorney general, Rob Bonta, regarding whether or not schools should notify parents if their child identifies as transgender or nonbinary at school, I think it’s strange—as a California public school teacher—that no one is clarifying the definitions of transgender and nonbinary.
According to the California Department of Education’s Health Education Framework adopted in 2019 (p. 353), gender identity is defined as ever-changing and ever-expanding. People assume that transgender means a girl identifying as a boy or a boy identifying as a girl. However, according to 2023 trainings on sexual harassment used as part of state-mandated training for teachers and other employees, it’s much broader than this.
Our training program stated: “Gender Identity is a person’s identification as male, female, non-binary, or other. Transgender involves identifying differently from a person’s sex at birth or something else.” After the training, I asked my employer: “What does the word ‘other’ or ‘something else’ encompass? It’s so open-ended, it could mean anything and everything.” No one could give me an answer, so I researched it myself.
In my quest, I found authoritative sources telling Americans to throw rational thinking out the window in order to embrace radical group think.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines gender nonbinary in part as “gender creative.” This means that kids can create or make up their own gender(s).
The California Department of Education defines nonbinary with these descriptive labels: transgender, intersex, gender-neutral, agender, genderqueer, gender fluid, two-spirit, bigender, pangender, gender nonconforming, or gender variant.
This long list of identities parallels the survey given to Americans in crisis, of all ages, who call the 988 National Suicide Hotline. Callers are asked how they identify and are given 11-plus genders to choose from. They are: agender, boy/man, genderfluid, genderqueer, girl/woman, intersex, non-binary, trans, trans-masculine, trans-feminine, two-spirit, other. The hotline is funded by the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act, which was signed into law in October 2020. It also has other potential funding sources as mentioned in the recent Surgeon General’s Call to Action (pages 55–56) to implement a national strategy for suicide prevention.
Planned Parenthood’s definition of gender is significant because it partners with many wellness centers in schools and offers “gender-affirming care,” such as hormone therapy. Planned Parenthood normalizes genderfluidity, saying that a person’s gender can vary weekly, daily, or moment-to-moment. It seems to me that this is the normalization of split personalities or schizophrenia. On top of this, Planned Parenthood says that gender identities (of which there are many) can begin at age 2.
Unlimited identities are now being taught to kindergartners through books in California elementary schools. The book “What Are Your Words?” says, “My pronouns are like the weather, they change depending on how I feel.” The book provides many pronouns like ey, em, ze, zir, they, them, xe, xir, and hir. Another book is “It Feels Good to Be Yourself.” This book says, “You might feel like a boy, you might feel like a girl, you might feel like both boy and girl—or like neither. You might feel like your gender changes from day to day or from year to year.”
These books cause children to question their gender, and once a child questions, they’re considered LGBTQ because the Q means Queer or Questioning.
After state schools intentionally confuse children, they want school personnel to hide the child’s “gender dysphoria” so that counselors or mental health workers can affirm them while they decide on a gender that best suits them. The state portrays parents who don’t affirm all of these identities as dangerous. However, I think the harm is coming from the state and partnering agencies that are imposing extremist gender doctrines on impressionable children.
California State Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond reads from the book "Red: A Crayon's Story" to second-grade students at Nystrom Elementary School in Richmond, Calif., on May 17, 2022. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
