(LifeSiteNews) — Seattle Public Schools (SPS) is teaching kindergarten through fifth grade students that boys can be girls and vice versa, a Monday social media post publicized.
“Seattle Public Schools needs to be immediately INVESTIGATED and DEFUNDED,” pressed the Libs of TikTok X account, which posted a sample of a kindergarten “gender book kit” lesson found on the Seattle Public Schools website.
The video shows Brennon Ham, SPS’s Health Education Specialist, reading from the book Introducing Teddy, about a boy teddy bear who says he is really a “girl teddy,” as part of a lesson targeted to kindergarteners.
In the story, Thomas the Teddy says, “I need to be myself, Erroll. In my heart, I’ve always known that I’m a girl teddy, not a boy teddy. I wish my name was Tilly, not Thomas.” “Tilly” the Teddy goes on to swap his bowtie for a girl’s bow.
“We can all do whatever makes us feel good,” commented Ham.
Ham teaches, per the lesson for kindergarteners, that “gender” is “a person’s feeling about being either a boy, a girl, neither, both, or somewhere in between.”
In a lesson for first graders, Ham reads My Princess Boy, a story about a boy who likes to dress up in “girly dresses” and dance “like a beautiful ballerina.” He is laughed at for dressing like a girl, and characters like his brother show “compassion and acceptance” for him, two of the key vocabulary words of the lesson. Disturbingly, all the characters in the book have blank faces.
Other books included in gender book kit lessons for SPS include Jacob’s New Dress, I am Jazz, and It Feels Good to be Yourself, which is about a “transgender” boy and features a character who is “both a boy and a girl,” as well as a character who is “neither a boy nor a girl.”
Third graders are taught about so-called “sex assigned at birth” and a supposedly independent “gender identity.” “Gender expression” is how one expresses one’s “gender identity,” which can be done in a “never-ending” number of ways, Ham says.
Students of different grades are also taught the word “ally” as part of the lessons, defined as “a person who works for equality.” “To support groups different from them,” Ham adds.
Seattle’s Gender Book Kit was developed in 2017, notes a webpage showcasing the lessons.
Schools across the West have in recent years increasingly indoctrinated school children in gender ideology, which features the idea that “gender identity” is separate from sex. This has triggered widespread outrage and bans in states such as Florida on teaching gender ideology to young students, as well as a move by Donald Trump’s administration to pull grants from public schools that teach the ideology in schools.
In August, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gave 40 U.S. states, Washington D.C., and five territories 60 days to remove references in “sex-ed” to the idea that gender is not biologically determined but a “social construct.”
The warning came after Trump issued a series of executive orders to deny federal funds to medical and educational entities that promote gender ideology. So far, the new policy has led to numerous major hospital systems to cease “transition” procedures on minors.
Earlier the same month, the HHS cut off federal funding for a California “sex education” program after determining it is not in compliance with federal rules against taxpayer-subsidized programs promoting gender ideology.
While some states are still resisting the directive, research has shown that promoting gender ideology to children can result in permanent damage both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures, including “reassignment” surgery, fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.