Should Fifth Graders Learn What It Means to Be Transgender?

The Free Press

When most Americans hear “sex ed,” the first thing that likely springs to mind is learning about the human reproductive system and how to avoid making use of it.

That’s exactly the kind of cis-heteronormative belief—the invidious notion that, normally, people are neither transgender nor gay—the National Sex Education Standards (NSES) and its advocates are seeking to upend.

Mimi Shelton is one such advocate. New York City’s public schools already use the standards as the basis of their sex-ed classes, but Shelton and the City Council want to see them taken one step further. In December, she attended a City Council meeting to speak out in support of Resolution 94, a measure calling for the NSES to be adopted across the entire state.

Woven throughout the standards are some fairly nouveau ideas that seem to be rooted more in queer activism than science. Like the concept that gender refers not to the state of being or “feeling” male or female but to “a set of cultural identities, expressions, and roles.” By the end of fifth grade, the NSES dictates that kids should be able to “define and explain differences between cisgender, transgender, gender nonbinary, gender expansive,” and describe “the potential role of hormone blockers on young people who identify as transgender.” (The standards do not offer guidance on whether puberty blockers should be used by young people—a subject that is hotly contested.)

The NSES—which is published by the Future of Sex Education, a collaboration of nonprofits including Planned Parenthood Federation of America—already informs the sex-ed programs of at least a half-dozen states, including Colorado and Wisconsin. Progressive states like California and Washington use sex-ed curricula that share the same ideology.

The latest edition, updated in 2020, offers a glimpse into that ideology: The National Sex Education Standards, we are told, were “written with a trauma-informed lens; have been infused with principles of reproductive justice, racial justice, social justice, and equity; address social determinants of health and how these can lead to inequitable health outcomes; and take an intersectional approach.”

Who knew there could be so much going on behind, Use a condom, kids!

Shelton is a board member of the NYC-based nonprofit Trans formative Schools, which says its mission is “designed to center the needs of trans, queer, nonbinary, and gender expansive middle school students.” After she spoke at the City Council meeting, I approached her to discuss the ramifications of a sex-ed curriculum that says sex itself is not biologically determined.

Here’s what went down.