Evanston/Skokie District 65 students and their parents are about to get a taste of one pro-family activist’s warning about the new state law requiring the teaching of LGBTQ history in public schools.
“Don’t look at the language in the law,” Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute told North Cook News. “Look very carefully about how the law can be applied.”
Over the school week of October 7 through October 11, students spanning pre-K through eighth grade in D65 will engage in LGBTQ+ Equity Week, which “delves into age-appropriate topics pertaining to LGBTQ+ Identities and historical figures,” according to a program assembled by District 65 GSEA (Gender, and Sexuality Educator Alliance). The program says that the week is in honor of National Coming Out Day, which is October 11.
Second and third graders, for example, will be introduced to "The Genderbread Person"; they will view a back-to-school video for non-binary youth (a spectrum of gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine); and complete a template to write “A Better Cinderella” through a trans filter, an exercise that cross matches terms like cisgender (someone who identifies with the gender given them at birth), gender expression, binary, lesbian and other terms.
Higgins called the GSEA material “propaganda and indoctrination,” and anything but age appropriate.
“This is an agenda being pushed by the leftist transgender ideology,” Higgins said. “True education would present another point of view.”
Another point of view is held by groups like the American College of Pediatricians, the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, and the Catholic Medical Association. Last December the groups signed off on a letter (along with independent physicians, policy groups and bioethicists) praising the Trump Administration’s intention to uphold the scientific definition of sex in federal law and policy.
“Human sex is a binary, biologically determined, and immutable trait from conception forward,” the letter said in part. “Sex is not a spectrum; congenital disorders are not additional sexes.”
Dr. Michelle Cretella, executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, told Tucker Carlson of Fox News in 2017 that “transgender ideology has infiltrated my field and produced large scale child abuse.”
“By feeding children these lies, they are having their normal psychology development interrupted,” she said.
Some are starting sex change protocols as young as 9, Cretella told Carlson.
“They are being put on puberty blockers, which castrates them chemically followed by surgical mutilation later on,” she said.
Neither GSEA nor the school district responded to questions from North Cook News about whether the LGBT+ material will be taught in conjunction with other classes, or separately, and if all students are required to attend.
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