Nebraska largely scraps gender identity lessons after uproar

Nebraska education officials announced Thursday that they have largely scrapped plans for gender identity lessons in public school curriculum after an uproar from conservatives who argued that the topics weren’t appropriate for children.

The new draft of the proposed sexual standards from the Nebraska Department of Education came after agency officials faced intense criticism from parents, school boards, state lawmakers and Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, who held town hall events to blast the proposal. Opponents flooded a meeting of the Nebraska State Board of Education, an elected board that oversees the agency.

“What we’re really trying to do is understand what Nebraskans as a whole accept as a standard and an expectation of what our students learn in school,” Matthew Blomstedt, Nebraska’s education commissioner, said Thursday at a press conference. “There’s always going to be a little bit of tensions over those types of issues, especially in this sense.”

Nebraska currently has no statewide sex education standards. Even if adopted, the proposal would just be recommendations that school districts could use or ignore.

The original draft would have suggested lessons about family structures, including same-gender families, for kindergartners, and a discussion about gender identity and stereotypes for first-graders. Sixth graders would have learned about a range of gender identities, and seventh graders would have been taught about different types of sex and how diseases are transmitted.