Queer Normative Elementary Schooling in America

Some Documents and Scenes From a Culture in Transition

I don’t know how many schools use the Black Lives Matter Coloring Book, but it is in wide circulation in both public and private schools across America.

This video tweeted by the Washington DC Chancellor of Schools, which chronicles the journey of the district he leads to becoming a “whole-child, anti-racist school district” shows its pages posted on the wall of an elementary school classroom.

Chancellor Ferebee @DCPSChancellor

“DCPS Becoming is our journey to becoming a whole-child, anti-racist school district...It means hope to me.”  - Principal Kiplinger, @garrisondcps      Watch how we’re working with the @DCEdFund to improve educational equity across the District.

Globalism — Queer Affiurming — Restorative Justice

The same materials were posted by the Evanston Illinois Board of Education and archived by the education watchdog group Parents Defending Education.

A pseudonymous source whose privacy I’ve agreed to protect — I will call him Sam — shared a screenshot taken of a post on the Facebook parent’s group page of the University of Chicago Lab School by a third party.

It is a page from the same BLM Coloring Book posted on to the walls of a DC elementary school above:

Lab is a private school founded by the educator reformer John Dewey in 1896 that has long been regarded as the most academically rigorous school in Chicago. For more than a century, it has been at the vanguard of trends in education and has been an incubator of many important figures in American life, with a particular emphasis on scholarly and artistic vocations, since many children of University of Chicago faculty attend. Its distinguished roster of alumni includes a former Supreme Court Justice, both of Barack Obama’s children, and much of the former President’s Chicago brain trust. What happens at Lab is broadly illustrative of the state of the art of America elite elementary and secondary education, and thus predictive of the attitudes and shared assumptions of those who will go on to become its intellectual class.

The post and the exchanges that ensued gives us a glimpse into the ongoing bourgeois moral revolution from above in which our cultural and tutelary institutions are engaged — showing us what materials are being injected into the bloodstream of America’s future leaders at a formative stage of life, and how their parents are metabolizing the drastic change in sensibility those materials reflect. The strange melange of therapeutism, “anti-racism”, and the new Queer Normativity catalyzes many tendencies long latent in American culture into a curricular world virtually unrecognizable to the one obtaining less than a decade ago.

In this Stunning and Brave New World, the youngest children are inducted into the dogma that we are all male, female, both, or neither by virtue of an internal sense of identification that only we can know. This sense of identification is untethered to any observable fact about ourselves — either to our anatomy or our chromosomes — and may or may not align with our anatomy.

Or, as the caption on the Transgender Affirming page of the Black Lives Matter Coloring Book puts it:

“Everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everyone gets to choose if they are girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them.”

This canonical statement of the prevailing view of gender identity now being taught in progressive school districts is not an abridgement of what has become a gender theology. It is the distilled essence of the novel view of human sexual identity that the youngest children are being taught to accept as axiomatic. The caption of the Transgender Affirming coloring book does not apprise children who are in grades K-2 that where one’s heart and mind diverges from one’s genitals and hormones levels, surgical and hormonal fixes are at their disposal. But this corollary is implicit in the statement, and the time for choosing is just around the corner. As the Mayo Clinic website reports, “For most children, puberty begins around ages 10 to 11, though puberty sometimes starts earlier.”

So back to the question posed by the parent above.

One unsuspecting parent agreed that perhaps 8 years old is too young to be teaching children to be transgender affirming:

The comment received only two likes and was instantly greeted by a sharp rebuke from another parent:

“Just because conversations might be “difficult for some families, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have them. As the parent of a non-binary kid *who this at age 8!), I’m happy lab strives to be a place where all students feel welcome and valued, despite the fact that they who they are might cause inconvenience to some who don’t like talkign about it. “

The latter got 26 likes.

The same commenter who issued the rebuke addressed the original poster:

This got 31 likes.

Yet another parent chimed in with an endorsement of transgender affirming curriculum, describing how his five-year old instructed him on the preferred pronoun of a trans-identified child at her daycare.

Yet another parent boasted of her own six year old’s understanding of trans identity:

While another explained that the new lessons in transgender inclusion were helping young people to break the cycle of dehumanization in which prior generation were ensnared:

Sam is a Catholic conservative who had no difficulty sending his kids to Lab for many years prior to sudden adoption of the new race, identity, and gender doctrines around 2018. The school had always been progressive and reflected the prevailing moral consensus of the upper reaches of the professional-managerial class of which Sam was a part. Sam was fine with this consensus prior to 2018. He would soon be driven from the school by the rapid sprint it undertook toward overt politicization of every aspect of its curriculum.

Ideological succession was abrupt and total.

His older daughter’s fifth grade class watched the following video — an effective work of propaganda worth reading and watching in full.

MOMMA: All right, folks, here we go. A Romaine and kale salad with avocado, cucumber, Shishito peppers and four kinds of cheese sprinkled in balsamic straight from Italy.

UNCLE JAY: Wow. In my day, salads only had two ingredients. A rock-hard wedge of iceberg lettuce and a stinky old dried up tomato.

SIS: Sorry guys, I'm gonna have to eat fast. Alex is stopping by in a few minutes to work on a robotics project.

UNCLE JAY: Alex, is that the girl with that weird dog? Or the boy with the hat with the wings that flap?

SIS: No, Uncle Jay. This is Alex.

UNCLE JAY: Oh, okay. I remember a very nice young...Come to think of it. Well, is Alex a boy or girl?

SIS: Actually, Alex doesn't define themselves as boy or girl.

UNCLE JAY: What else is there?

BRO: Back in your day, most people understood the world in terms of just boys and girls. But now we know gender is more complex than that.

UNCLE JAY: Wait, aren’t we just talking about whether you're born with a hmm-hmm or a huh-huh?

SIS: When you're born, your sex is assigned in a medical way, but the sex listed on your birth certificate may not necessarily match your gender identity.

NARRATOR: Gender identity is a person's inner experience of who they are in terms of gender, their deep personal sense of being male, female, a blend of both, or neither.

SIS: And while many people have a gender identity that's the same as their assigned birth sex of female or male, that's not always the case, because gender exists on a spectrum. Like transgender, which means a person whose gender identity is not consistent with their assigned birth sex.

Non binary, which means a person whose identity doesn't fall in the category of either male or female…

And genderqueer or gender fluid, which means a person who does not identify themselves as having a specific gender at all.

UNCLE JAY: Does gender identity have anything to do with being straight or gay?

BRO: Actually, no. Gender identity has to do with the way you feel about yourself. While sexual orientation is based on the way you feel toward others, the people you may or may not be attracted to.

UNCLE JAY: You know, I really like Alex. And I can tell they're a good friend to you. But I'm still pretty confused about all of this.

MOM: That's okay. You don't have to fully understand someone to respect them. To start try not to make any assumptions about a person's gender, and use the name and pronouns that they asked you to. Above all be a friend or ally for people of all gender identities.

SIS: That's right, mom. Oh, Alex is here. Come on in.

ALEX: Hey, everyone.

UNCLE JAY: Oh, hey, Alex. Care for some salad? The balsamic’s right from Italy, you know.

Here we see on display the rhetorical persuasion techniques through which a binary understanding of sexual identity is consigned to the dustbin of history. You’ll note first the phallic connotation of the “rock-hard” wedge of lettuce, and the evocation of vaginal dryness and rot in the “stinky old dried up tomato.” This underscores how distasteful was the ancient binary conception of sex — artifact of the Before Times — still lodged in the minds of the old and irrelevant. By contrast, today’s cosmopolitan salad is diverse in its parts and encompasses peppers from Japan and vinegar from Italy.

Uncle Jay’s re-education is done compassionately. He isn’t ridiculed or made the butt of contemptuous jokes. He is gently introduced to the way things are today. When he confesses to ongoing confusion about today’s Stunning and Brave New World, he is reassured that one does not need to understand in order to pay due “respect. That is to say, if it makes no sense to him, it should not trouble him and his compliance in verbal rituals that make no sense to him will be judged as sufficient.

The adults responding to the Facebook post about transgender affirming coloring books for second graders have all enthusiastically adopted this framing, latent in most post-1960’s sixties, but finally reaching its full flowering today — wherein five- and six- years ago are magical little sages that both know themselves and point their elders in the direction of a better, kinder, more compassionate world without dehumanization. The conceit of the “but now we know” locution is that this was a world that the wise children dreamed into being on their own, rather than one constructed out of obscure academic theories that passed through Tumblr on their way to capturing the copypasta propagation machinery of institutional America.

The injection of these ideas of Queer Normativity had a dramatic effect on those who imbibed them. Sam’s daughter’s six grade classroom had one transgender identified student out of 120. Three years later there were 20.

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