This article was written by Mark Spooner and published on FairfaxSchoolsMonitor.com
The Fairfax County School Board will be voting on several recommended changes to the sex-ed curriculum for Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) at its next meeting, on June 27. For this reason, several community members addressed the issues at the Board’s June 13 meeting.
Two speakers, including myself, voiced concerns about some of the Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee’s proposals (FLECAC). My remarks (which begin at 1:13:00 of the meeting video), summarized comments I posted on this site last week (HERE). The comments of another community member, Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, were in the same vein (starting at 1:15:22 on the video).
Three other speakers promoted the transgender agenda. All three are influential activists who have the ear of the School Board. They had obviously coordinated their speeches beforehand.
Their message is clear: Radical changes to the sex-ed curriculum, far transcending all their prior and current proposals, should be implemented. The tenor of their remarks is alarming.
The first speaker was Christina McCormick, who described herself as a leader of an organization called the Transgender Education Association as well as co-chair of FCPS Pride. After praising the School Board for all its prior pro-transgender actions, she said there is “more work to do, including updating FLE instruction.” She called for “comprehensive sex education designed to be inclusive of all gender and sexual identities.” She claimed that current practices, which divide boys and girls into separate sex-ed classes at the elementary and middle school levels, “stigmatize” students who identify “outside the binary.” Worst of all, the current system “perpetuates hetero-normativity.”
The second speaker, Vanessa Hall, is co-chair of FCPS Pride, as well as a member of FLECAC (whose members are appointed by the School Board). She, too, began by applauding the Board’s prior actions, including its defiance of Virginia law relating to transgender policies in Virginia schools. She then said: “There’s still a lot of work to be done. For example, our FLE curriculum is about three decades old.” She said there are deficiencies “at the core of the curriculum.”
The third speaker, Robert Rigby, Jr., another prominent activist, said, “The family life education curriculum at Fairfax County Public Schools is not yet comprehensive sexuality education. We need to begin at first principles and develop a program that meets the needs of children. We need to start over.” Also, “family life education as it stands now in this county, in my estimation, does more harm than good from a progressive child-centered point of view.”
Bottom-line: Family life education is fundamentally flawed because it focuses on family life. It teaches about differences between boys and girls in their body parts and their sexual/emotional development, as well as issues relating to male-female sexual relations (pregnancy, benefits of abstinence), i.e., the traditional subjects of sex education in schools. It separates boys and girls when certain sensitive issues are covered. This improperly assumes everyone falls into one of these two “artificial” categories and “stigmatizes” those who don’t feel they are either a boy or a girl. It thereby “perpetuates hetero-normativity.” Sex education should be transformed so that non-“normative” sexual orientations are given the same emphasis as “normative” ones, at every level of education,
The transgender lobbyists imply that non-“hetero-normative” people are ignored in FCPS’s sex education. This is false. As described on the FCPS website:
“During ninth and tenth grades, students continue building on their base of knowledge regarding human reproduction, sexually transmitted infection prevention, and the skills needed to make health decisions. In grades nine and ten, students learn how maturation affects adolescent development and learn to recognize the development of sexuality as a lifelong aspect of personality. Students are provided definitions for heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual, and transgender and that all persons deserve to be treated with respect regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Students are taught that substance use/abuse affects decision making and that abstinence from sexual activity is the only way to guarantee the prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.”
So, the issue is not whether LGBT sexual identities should be ignored. Rather, it is a question about when, what and how much of the sex-education instruction should focus on what the advocates call non-“hetero-normative” identities.
As to the when, the activists want sexual orientation to be discussed from the fourth grade on, if not earlier, even though most parents believe young children’s minds aren’t ready for this at such an early age.
As to the what, they seek to remove all distinctions between males and females, contrary to basic biological and emotional differences. They want to put all children in the same sex-ed classes, even when sensitive sex-specific matters are being discussed, despite the overwhelming opposition of parents, students, teachers and other community members. And they seek to eliminate references to “boys” and “girls” and replace them with the “sex assigned at birth” lingo, as if sex is no more than an arbitrary label chosen by a nurse at the hospital where they were born.
Other transgender issues would certainly not be included in the so-called “comprehensive” education that the activists have in mind. For example, they wouldn’t want students to be told that feelings of being trapped in the opposite sex’s body often are attributable to other mental health issues; nor would they want them to learn that such feelings may be transitory. They would want them to learn that hormonal and surgical sex-change treatments are “normative” steps that lead to happiness, and not that such therapies often produce life-long, disastrous results.
How much of the sex-ed instruction should focus on transgender issues hasn’t been spelled out by the activists, but it seems clear from their recent comments that they want it to be fully intertwined into the entire curriculum.
Thus, the public shouldn’t be complacent. Don’t think that this year’s FLECAC proposals are all, or almost all, of what the transgender activists plan to do with the family life education curriculum. They have only just begun.