Gender Theory in Schools – Two Things the TERFs Get Right (Plus Two Things They Get Wrong): Another dispatch from our undercover teacher correspondent

Last month, I wrote another piece for Wesley’s Substack where I talked about the biggest barrier to discussing DEI programs productively: If you’re honest about what’s going on, no one will believe you, because it just sounds too crazy to be true. I imagine the same problem is going to pop up here, but what else can I do? Like it or not, the TERFs are right about this one.

Here are some solid figures: I had six classes last year, and I didn’t have a single one without multiple students who identified as transgender. Some classes had more than others, but the absolutely lowest number was two in a 26-person class. Most of these students were just non-binary, but I had least five in the midst of actual medical transition, along with quite a few more who spent their days planning how to get the process started. I’d estimate that 70% or so of these students are female, and talk about breast binding and “top surgery” are common conversation topics at lunch time. It’s hard to not step in when you hear an obviously depressed, dysfunctional teenage girl working out how she can convince her parents to approve a double mastectomy, but what can you do? If I said anything at all, I’d be fired in a heartbeat.

These children’s identities, as you might expect, are wildly unstable; I can count a total of nineteen pronoun changes requested by twelve students over just the last semester, along with six for changing names. It’s relatively common for students to transition, detransition, and transition again, especially in response to the identity shifts in their classmates. At one point, a single student’s decision to go with they/them pronouns set off a chain reaction that resulted in four more of her friends doing the same. It’s gotten so ridiculous that a neighboring teacher recommended weekly pronoun checks, just to avoid the outrage that inevitably comes with every “misgendering.”

This sort of obsessive fixation on gender is concerning enough, but the dynamic is hugely exacerbated by the administration’s willingness to outsource tedious work virtue signaling to student organizations – almost all of which are staffed entirely by the wokest of the woke. As a result, gender theory inevitably seeps into every last corner of the entire school experience. A quick example: Last March, our principal thought it would be fun to have some students from the feminism club do a short Women’s History Month profile at the end of each day’s morning announcements. How many of the thirteen women they decided to cover were transgender, would you guess? One? Maybe two?

Nope! Seven of the thirteen women who received shout-outs for Women’s History Month were actually men. Some of the usual suspects showed up, of course; we got Rachel Levine and Christine Jorgensen, along with a double dose of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. But the list also included such trailblazing luminaries as Alok Vaid-Menon, who doesn’t even identify as a woman in the first place, and Laverne Cox, whose major accomplishment was a supporting role in a mediocre Netflix series. At least students had the good sense to include Sappho, where she was described as a “queer poet” whose poetry focused on a love for “women and femmes.”