Daniel Buck , Jay W. Richards, PhD
The fruits of gender ideology seem to spring up almost everywhere. It seems routine when a conservative journalist uncovers yet another bannerREF celebrating “Young Trans Joy” on school grounds. It is all too easy to find footage online of a school district hosting a drag queen eventREF or of a rainbow-spangled teacher explaining how he, she, or “they” treat the teacher lectern as a pulpit for indoctrinating children with radical ideology. When parents complain about pornographic books and materials in school libraries and classrooms, the media uniformly attack them as puritanical book banners.
Of course, even if a social media account, such as Libs of TikTok, profiled an activist teacher every day since the onset of the pandemic that would total just a thousand teachers—compared to America’s 3 million teachers. So, are these stories representative, or are they outliers?
That is the question this Backgrounder seeks to answer. The authors scanned state-level policies in public K–12 education to see how many state health education frameworks and standards explicitly teach and endorse the concepts of gender ideology. The results are deeply troubling.
Gender ideologues encourage children to dissociate their identities from their bodies—to entertain the thought that they might be born in the wrong body. This is a falsehood akin to claiming that two plus two may or may not equal five.
Gender ideologues often target children—to judge from the countless picture books, drag queen story hours, and curricular materials that have flooded the market in recent years. As a result, this Backgrounder includes the introduction of controversial sexual topics at inappropriate ages as evidence of gender ideology.
The authors found 16 states that explicitly compel teachers to inculcate this ideology in students. Because several of these are populous states, such as California and New York, that amounts to roughly 37 percentREF of American students. » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/gender-ideology-state-education-policy