More than a third of American students are being taught the latest in transgender ideology.
More than a third of American students are being taught the latest in transgender ideology.
I t seems every day that another school unfurls a “Young Trans Joy” banner on school grounds, another library shelves a book delineating the tenets of gender theory, another district hosts a drag event for children, and another teacher mistakes the lectern for a pulpit. Each story raises the question: Just how pervasive is gender ideology in schools?
Perhaps conservative media are merely nutpicking, finding the most egregious examples of a small phenomenon and misrepresenting them as the norm. Even if a social media account, such as Libs of TikTok, profiled an activist teacher every day since the onset of the pandemic, that would total just a thousand teachers — out of America’s 3 million teachers. There will always be some number of kooks, cranks, and other screwballs holding conspiratorial views and exhibiting outlandish behavior.
So are these stories representative or outliers?
To answer that question, in a recently released report for the Heritage Foundation, my co-author, Jay Richards, and I scanned the health-education framework of every state to see how many compel educators to teach the central tenet of gender theory: that gender is socially constructed.
Do they encourage a distinction between sex or sex organs, and gender, the latter of which is undefined or treated as a social construct? Do they introduce concepts of “gender identity” and “sex assigned at birth”? Do they downplay or omit references to biological sex or sex differences? Do they employ terms such as “cisgender,” “transgender,” and “nonbinary”? These are simple questions. Affirmative answers are evidence that a curriculum pushes gender ideology on teachers and kids.
In all, we found that the health frameworks of 16 states contain the pseudoscientific belief that biological sex is entirely divorced from gender, and because a number of these are high-population states such as California and New York, that amounts to roughly 37 percent of American students.
Connecticut, for example, requires that students be able to “define and explain differences between cisgender, transgender, gender non-binary, gender expansive, and gender identity.” In California, students are taught that children younger than kindergarten can identify as transgender. Students in Illinois are expected to discuss the role and use of hormone blockers.
It’s worth noting that many of these frameworks include explicit topics in addition to gender theory: abortion, lubrication, and many others not fit to print.
And 37 percent is surely a lower bound. A 2018 CDC survey found that even in red states such as Alabama, over half of schools teach about “gender identity,” the idea that a person could be a gender that doesn’t match their biological sex. Major curriculum publishers such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publish classroom materials grounded in gender ideology such as “pronoun surveys.” And gender theorists such as Judith Butler are commonly assigned authors in teacher preparation programs.
Moreover, none of this covers areas of school instruction where students may encounter gender ideology outside of health- and sex-education courses. This includes the selection of books in English class or the lens through which they read them, units in social studies, diversions from standard content during gay pride month, school assemblies, the passing comments of teachers, school libraries, district events, pronoun policies and student handbooks, and decorations around the building. These are all mechanisms through which schools inculcate gender dogmas beyond health and sex education.
Finally, efforts to advance comprehensive sex education (and similar curricula in other content areas) are afoot. In Nebraska, for example, the board of education drafted a revised framework in 2021 that included many of the tenets of gender ideology. Parental pushback stymied that effort, but such policy initiatives from progressives are active in almost every state.
It would be absurd if schools taught children that two plus two could be four, but it could also be five, or any other number. So, too, it is unconscionable that state-level policy in 16 states indoctrinates students in pseudoscientific gender ideology instead of basic biology.