NY Teacher Calls for ‘Getting Rid of Girls and Boys’ to Break Gender Binary

Students walk to a school in Chicago on Jan. 12, 2022. Scott Olson/Getty Images

A video covertly recorded and recently released by Project Veritas shows New York teachers and administrators conspiring to push minors into accepting transgenderism, alternative sexual orientations, and “antiracist” beliefs, especially if the children come from conservative, Christian families.

A video about the teachers’ aims was released by Project Veritas, which uses undercover journalists to secretly record conversations with sources, on March 13. It was the result of a five-month investigation of a program called EdCamp and culminated earlier in the month, the organization announced.

The video shows a woman identified as a tenured teacher from Jericho Middle School, part of the Jericho Union Free School District in Jericho, New York. She’s seen encouraging teachers attending the seminar to use tenure, and “lean on ... tenured colleagues to do some of this work” to help spread gender ideology to even the youngest students.

“The more work we can do at the elementary level—breaking down the gender binary, getting rid of girls and boys,” the woman, identified in the video as Elisa Waters, tells a roomful of teachers attending EdCamp. “There’s so much work that can happen, and we’re gonna have some of those conversations today.”

Waters is the founder of LGBTeach, an activist group that provides workshops to “foster awareness, inclusivity, and reflection.”

“Getting comfortable with discomfort is at the core of the LGBTeach philosophy,” a mission statement on the organization’s website reads. The group’s annual EdCamp event offers teachers instruction on how to spread radical gender ideology at their schools.

In the video, which shows Waters teaching the program at several locations, she says she teaches Spanish and social justice. She says she’s also a social worker, with a practice largely focused on “working with LGBTQ youth and their families.”

She says she loves helping families “practice affirmation through their children’s journeys of sexuality and gender.”

Praising Gender Nonconformity

The LGBTeach Facebook page alternately bemoans examples of gender conformity and praises those of gender nonconformity.

A display of children’s shoes in Nordstrom Rack, not organized with separate areas for boys and girls, receives a heart emoji on the social media account. Meanwhile, a post about the game Life, with its “heteronormative and gender conforming” implications of marriage between a man and a woman, offers criticism.

“This could easily be made more inclusive if it just said, ‘get married’ without a man and woman standing at the alter (sic) and maybe the people are just people and not pink and blue,” the post reads.

A gender-neutral sign is posted outside a bathroom at Oval Park Grill in Durham, N.C., on May 11, 2016. Sara D. Davis/Getty Images

One post on the organization’s page describes the EdCamp agenda.

Sessions for teachers, it reads, cover topics such as “Using Literature to Introduce LGBTQIA topics to Elementary-Age Students,” “Voices from the Middle—why MS [Middle School] GSAs [Gender and Sexuality Alliance clubs] are so important,” and “Should MS parents know they are in the GSA Club?”

Starting Sex Change Young

In the Project Veritas video showing EdCamp seminars, Waters can be seen advising teachers to emphasize alternative sexual orientations and gender identities with students as young as possible.

“Elementary educators, this is where it happens, my friends,” Waters is seen telling teachers.

“Because if we could actually do more of this conversation with elementary-age kids, by the time they get to me in middle school, or some of you in high school, we‘ll be in a better place. Because honestly, so many of the ’-isms’ and ‘-obias’ surrounding gender and sexuality, really have to do with gender.”

She suggested having students new to their classrooms write third-person narratives about themselves, so teachers can assess which pronouns the children prefer, and that they shouldn’t worry about losing time that should be spent teaching other things.

“You’re never losing time on curriculum if you’re doing what’s best for kids,” Waters says in the video.

“And the truth is, we know that kids are coming out at younger and younger ages” and questioning their gender “as early as 2, 3 years of age.”

A classroom in Gorham High School in Gorham, Maine, displays an LGBT flag in 2022. Courtesy of a student at the school who asked to remain anonymous

In her seminar, Waters encourages teachers to display sexual-identity flags in classrooms. She gestures to a multicolored flag behind her, referencing the “plethora of queer flags” in her own classroom.

The flags, she says, are intended to bring “more inclusivity to a marginalized community,” especially by adding stripes representing people who identify as transgender, “gender nonconforming people, and people of color.”

The Project Veritas video of the seminar also shows a woman identified as Otsego Elementary School special education teacher Rachel Singer sharing tips. She tells other teachers that students with autism are “rigid” about colors, often seeing blue strictly as a boy’s color and pink as a girl’s color.

“We do like, you know, a ‘Wacky Wednesday’ or a ‘Turn Around Tuesday’ where we all switch colors,” Singer said. “I’m making sure that I’m making conscious decisions, too. Every boy is getting something pink, and every girl is getting something blue.”

She also works to be sure she’s “introducing” to young students the idea that boys wear dresses, she said.

Chloe Cole, who now regrets surgeries she had as a young girl to try to appear more like a boy, shares about detransitioning in front of the California state Capital building in Sacramento on March 10, 2023. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

But teachers should use “caution” and save their most radical actions to spread gender ideology until after they get tenure, the video shows Waters advising teachers.

“I always tell untenured teachers, ‘You’re going to have more longevity making change, if you maybe play it a little safer for a little longer,” Waters says.

In New York, a teacher has a four-year probation period before earning tenure, according to the United Federation of Teachers.

After a teacher gets tenure, he or she can’t be disciplined or fired without due process, unless that teacher fails to complete the requirements for professional certification. That means tenured teachers can effectively ignore school rules, Waters says in the video.

“Who knows if on Monday I’m gonna come in and I’m gonna be told to take down the flag,” she says of the LGBT pride flag in her classroom.

“But I will do what Sarah did in Connetquot and not do so,” Waters adds, referencing events in another school system. “Thank God for tenure.”

Pushing DEI

In the video, an undercover Project Veritas journalist, posing as a fan of work to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in schools, secretly records conversations on several occasions with two school administrators identified as co-founders of EdCamp.

One man, identified as Manhasset Public Schools Assistant Superintendent Don Gately, a founder of EdCamp Long Island, is seen on the video praising DEI programs, and saying his school has a DEI committee.

Gately says on the video that EdCamp “should be a great vehicle ... to do DEI work.”

Students holding signs in support of transgender rights pose for a news photographer as part of a protest against Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's efforts to curb diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in public universities and colleges around the state. Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times

But faculty members have to be careful, he warns, about admitting to participating in “DEI work,” in order to avoid being fired.

Teachers Versus Parents

In the Project Veritas video, a man identified as Joseph Wiener, principal of The Wheatley School, in Old Westbury, New York, tells about efforts to teach “antiracism” at his school. And sometimes, he says, parents object.

“Parents would say, ‘You’re indoctrinating my child,’” he says on the video.

His reply, he says, is, “Wait—you don’t believe in being antiracist?”

At his school, part of the East Williston Union Free School District, one of the missions is to make sure that children from conservative Christian families don’t “slip through the cracks,” Wiener confirmed when asked.

Parents often pose the biggest problem, educators in Waters’s seminar indicated.

According to a woman identified as Janna Nunziato, a social studies teacher at H.B. Thompson Middle School in Syosset, New York, it isn’t a problem getting students comfortable using preferred gender pronouns, because Instagram and TikTok teach the practice.

“So they’re all used to it,” Nunziato says in the video. “It’s really, unfortunately, I think, it’s the parents” who have a problem with using preferred pronouns.

Grants Pass High School displays an LGBT pride heart over its main office entrance in Grants Pass, Oregon, on Oct. 18, 2022. (Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times) 

“This year, because of the climate of everything, we started to greet the students at the door on the first day of school and have them introduce themselves to us,” Nunziato says in the video. “And that’s when they'll tell us their name and their pronouns.”

Conservative parents get upset when their children are taught DEI, Gately said.

“If you are a teacher now, you’ve got kids with parents, some of whom are extremely conservative and right-wing,” he said.

“They’re gonna connect politics to DEI work,” he said. “And the purity that you feel about DEI work now gets complicated and fraught and pushed back on.”

In response, he said he has to “calibrate” his promotion of DEI work.

“There are people who think we have no business talking about DEI work in school,” Wiener agrees in the video.

Promoting Antiracism

“You’re either racist or you’re antiracist,” Wiener asserts in the video. “There’s no in-between. If you’re not doing antiracist work, then you are contributing to the racial divide.”

Supporters of “antiracism” say that to not be racist, one must actively support “equity.” They consider equity in terms of race and say that people in racial groups that have historically been oppressed deserve special benefits. People in groups that have always enjoyed “privilege,” such as white males, should receive fewer benefits, those who consider themselves as antiracists say.

Waters, Gately, and Wiener didn’t respond by press time to a request for comment; The Epoch Times was unable to contact Singer and Nunziato.

Project Veritas has released other videos showing teachers pushing political activism and gender ideology in New York. The group’s undercover investigations have shown teachers encouraging students to commit violence against people with differing political views.