MADISON, Wisconsin (LifeSiteNews) – The same Wisconsin school district currently under fire for multiple pro-LGBT scandals is holding a week-long session to inculcate elementary school students with gender ideology, using material from a radical LGBT activist group.
The Daily Caller reports that it has obtained an email detailing Madison Metropolitan School District’s (MMSD’s) plans to spend a week teaching students to “understand the difference between gender, sexual orientation and sex assigned at birth. Students are NOT being asked to share their specific identities for each of these components, rather just acknowledging that they exist and are different and how to show respect for all identities.”
The material, which comes from the left-wing Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC’s) “Welcoming Schools” training program and falls under the umbrella of MMSD’s “Health and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Lessons,” feature “read-alouds” and “classroom discussions,” concluding with a “rainbow day.”
“There are students in our schools with different gender identities,” according to an introductory video. “We have at MMSD many elementary school students who identify as cisgender, as transgender, as nonbinary and the whole spectrum of identities. And if we aren’t talking and teaching about these different identities, students don’t see themselves and they don’t feel like they belong in our schools.”
The video uses a “gender snowperson” diagram to convey that “gender identity” originates from the brain and is “who you know you are,” whereas sexual orientation comes from the heart and defines “who you know you love.” All aspects of sex, gender, and attraction are a “continuum,” it teaches, suggesting that the idea that “anyone can love anyone” should be impressed on students as early as kindergarten.
“Parents should remain vigilant and engaged with their local school districts, many of which do not hesitate to persuade students to a particular point of view,” responded Cory Brewer, associate counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. “And importantly, our state law requires schools to teach topics that are medically accurate and age-appropriate. It should not be controversial to suggest that students go to school to learn, not to be indoctrinated by political activists.”
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide, and may even exacerbate it by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
On top of those issues, experts outside the medical establishment further warn that surgically or chemically reinforcing gender confusion imposes irreversible harm on children such as infertility, impairment of adult sexual function, and reduced life expectancy, as well as the psychological toll of being “locked into” physical alterations regardless of whether they change their minds when they mature, as attested to by many individuals who “detransitioned” back to their true sex.
The risks are grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.
MMDS is the same district where a “family friendly” drag show was recently postponed due to public outcry, and which faces a lawsuit over its policy of hiding from parents information about their children struggling with gender dysphoria.
By contrast, last month three Wisconsin school boards (Muskego-Norway, Waukesha, and Arrowhead) voted to require parental consent before school staff may affirm and indulge confused students’ preferred “gender identity.”