It’s easy to grow desensitized to the threat of gender ideology in schools. It seems every day there is a fresh new outrage about kindergarteners getting indoctrinated into “trans joy” and school clinics offering transgender “medicine” for minors.
President-elect Donald Trump’s historic reelection victory represented a loud rebuke to the transgender movement—after all, one of his most effective ads slammed Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ presidential nominee, as being “for they/them,” while Trump is “for you.” But this noxious ideology still has a stranglehold in many institutions, backed up in some cases by official state policy.
In fact, no fewer than 16 U.S. states have curriculum standards that force teachers’ hands on the issue, according to an important new report from The Heritage Foundation.
The report, “Gender Ideology as State Education Policy,” highlights the state-level education standards and frameworks of 16 states that encourage gender ideology, which the report defines as “the subordination or displacement of factual, ideologically neutral lessons about biological sex with tell-tale notions such as ‘gender identity,’ ‘sex assigned at birth,’ and ‘cisgender.’”
This ideology rejects biology and tradition, promoting vague notions of identity that often rely on rigid sex stereotypes that feminists have rejected for decades.
Jay Richards, director of Heritage’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, and Daniel Buck, senior visiting fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, analyzed the state-level education frameworks of all 50 states.
Richards and Buck asked whether the frameworks “encourage a distinction between sex or sex organs, and gender, the latter of which is undefined or treated as a social construct?” The analysts also asked whether the policies promote the notion that sex is merely “assigned at birth” and whether they use terms such as “cisgender,” “transgender,” and “nonbinary.”
These tell-tale signs reveal the promotion of gender ideology, which not only contradicts basic biology and tradition but also poses a real danger to impressionable children.
By telling little boys that they may really be girls, schools prime them for experimental medical interventions that leave kids stunted, scarred, and infertile. The fact that medical societies endorse these interventions—despite the lack of evidence that they improve children’s lives and in the face of evidence that they carry severe side effects such as the risk of cancer in teens—is a scandal of epic proportions.
Even simply teaching children that “gender identity” may be different from biological sex carries the risk of setting kids on a destructive path. These lessons are rightly controversial, and parents should be able to remove their children from any such indoctrination.
Below is a list of states and the specific state policy requiring each to teach gender ideology.
