www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_queering_the_schools.html
An advocacy session for students and teachers features three self-styled transgendered individualsa member of the senior class and two recent graduates. One of the transgenders, born female, announces that "he" had been taking hormones for 16 months. For the last decade or so, largely working beneath public or parental notice, a well-organized movement has sought to revolutionize the curricula and culture of the nation's public schools. Its aim: to stamp out "hegemonic heterosexuality"the traditional view that heterosexuality is the normin favor of a new ethos that does not just tolerate homosexuality but instead actively endorses experimenting with it, as well as with a polymorphous range of bisexuality, transgenderism, and transsexuality. The educational establishment has enthusiastically signed on. What this portends for the future of the public schools and the psychic health of the nation's children is deeply worrisome. This movement to "queer" the public schools, as activists put it, originated with a shift in the elite understanding of homosexuality. During the eighties, when gay activism first became a major cultural force, homosexual leaders launched a campaign that mirrored the civil rights movement. To claim their rights, homosexuals argued (without scientific evidence) that their orientation was a genetic inheritance, like race, and thus deserved the same kind of civil protections the nation had guaranteed to blacks. An inborn, unchangeable fact, after all, could not be subject to moral disapproval. There ensued a successful effort to normalize homosexuality throughout the culture, including a strong push for homosexual marriage, gays in the military, and other signs of civic equality. But even as the homosexual-rights campaign won elite endorsement and lavish funding, even as supportive organizations proliferated, the gay movement began to split internally. Brown and Herbert Marcuse and French deconstruction, queer theory takes to its extreme limit the idea that all sexual difference and behavior is a product of social conditioning, not nature. Sexuality is androgynous, fluid, polymorphousand therefore a laudably subversive and even revolutionary force. Rutgers English professor Michael Warner, a leading queer theorist, observes that categories like "heterosexual" and "homosexual" are part of "the regime of the normal" that queer theory wants to explode. A relatively recent arrival on college campuses, queer theory has swiftly dominated the myriad university gender-studies programs and spread its influence to other disciplines, too, "queering" everything under the sun. It would be tempting to dismiss queer theory as just another intellectual fad, with little influence beyond the campus, if not for gay activists' aggressive effort to introduce the theory's radical view of sexuality into the public schools. Leading the effort is the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network (GLSEN, pronounced "glisten"), an advocacy group founded a decade ago to promote homosexual issues in the public schools. It now boasts 85 chapters, four regional offices, and some 1,700 student clubs, called "gay/straight alliances," that it has helped form in schools across the country. GLSEN often presents itself as a civil rights organization, saying that it is only after "tolerance" and "understanding" for a victim group. It seeks to transform the culture and instruction of every public school, so that children will learn to equate "heterosexism"the favoring of heterosexuality as normalwith other evils like racism and sexism and will grow up pondering their sexual orientation and the fluidity of their sexual identity. That GLSEN embraces queer theory is clear from the addition of transgendered students to the gays and lesbians the group claims to represent. By definition, the transgendered are those who choose to change their gender identity by demeanor, dress, hormones, or surgery. Nothing could be more profoundly opposed to the notion of a natural sexual identity. One of the major goals of GLSEN and similar groups is to reform public school curricula and teaching so that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgenderor LGBTthemes are always central and always presented in the approved light. A workshop at GLSEN's annual conference in Chicago in 2000 complained that "most LGBT curricula are in English, history and health" and sought ways of introducing its agenda into math and science classes, as well. A 2002 GLSEN conference in Boston held a seminar on "Gender in the Early Childhood Classroom" that examined ways of setting "the tone for nontraditional gender role play" for preschoolers. To help get the LGBT message across to younger children, teachers can turn to an array of educational products, many of them available from GLSEN. Early readers include One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads; As for teaching aids, a 1999 book, Queering Elementary Education, with a foreword by GLSEN executive director Kevin Jennings, offers essays on "Locating a Place for Gay and Lesbian Themes in Elementary Reading, Writing and Talking" and "How to Make Boys' and Girls' in the Classroom"the scare quotes showing the queer theorist's ever present belief that categorizing gender is a political act. For comprehensiveness, nothing beats a GLSEN-recommended resource manual distributed to all K12 public schools in Saint Paul and Minneapolis. The manual presents an educational universe that filters everything through an LGBT lens. Lesson ideas include "role playing" exercises to "counter harassment," where students pretend, say, to be bisexual and hear hurtful words cast at them; In turn, principals should make an "ongoing PA announcement"once a week, the manual saystelling students about confidential support programs for LGBT students. Both films strive to present homosexuality in a favorable light, without saying what it actually is. It's Elementary, intended for parents, educators, and policymakers, shows how classroom teachers can lead kindergartners through carefully circumscribed discussions of the evils of prejudice, portrayed as visited to an unusual degree on gays and lesbians. In That's a Family, designed for classroom use, children speak directly into the camera, explaining to other kids how having gay and lesbian parents is no different from, for example, having parents of different national backgrounds. GLSEN even provides lesson plans for the promotion of cross-dressing in elementary school classes. A school resource book containing such lesson plans, Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry for Kids, Parents, and Teachers, has already been used in second-grade classrooms in California. A children's play in the book features a little boy singing of the exhilaration of striding about "In Mommy's High Heels," in angry defiance of the criticism of his intolerant peers: They are the swine, I am the pearl. Some of the LGBT-friendly curricular material aimed at older children is quite sexually explicit. The GLSEN-recommended reading list for grades 712 is dominated by such material, depicting the queer sexuality spectrum. In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth features a 17-year-old who writes, "I identify as bisexual and have since I was about six or seven. An Ohio teacher encouraged her freshman students to read Entries From a Hot Pink Notebook, a teen coming-out story that includes a graphic depiction of sex between two 14-year-old boys. In Newton, Massachusetts, a public school teacher assigned his 15-year-old students The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a farrago of sexual confusion, featuring an episode of bestiality as one of its highlights. Such books represent a growth industry for publishers, including mainstream firms. As part of its effort to make the public schools into an arena of homosexual and transgender advocacy, GLSEN works assiduously to build a wide network of student organizers. It looks for recruits as young as 14, who in turn are to bring on board other students to form gay/straight alliances or other homosexual-themed student clubs at their schools. Glancing over the biographies of 2002's student organizers reveals a unifor...
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