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SALEM, Oregon (LifeSiteNews) – The Oregon Department of Education’s new “transgender” guidance, now written for “LGBTQ2SIA+” students (that includes “Two Spirit, intersex, and asexual), may not have made more than a quiet splash upon its release — perhaps in part due to the numbing “boiling frog” syndrome.

However, it signals something monumental: that the state education department and the culture that shaped it have, perhaps unwittingly, completely subverted the very purpose of education.

That is, they’ve rejected the idea that we must conform our minds to reality and taken it to a new extreme by requiring students to conform their pronoun language — which represents reality — to the desires and even whims of other students in an attempt to protect their feelings.

Such gender pronouns now not only include the “gender neutral “they/them/theirs,” but strange and meaningless “neopronouns” such as “ze/hir/hirs,” “fae/faer/faers,” or “e/em/eir.” The Human Rights Campaign has admitted that “the number and types of (neo)pronouns a person may use is limitless.”

The Oregon Education Department guidance also says that “gender pronouns” can be “fluid,” changing according to the desires of a student: “The pronoun or set of pronouns” a student uses “may or may not align with their gender identity or expression. Someone’s pronouns may be conditional based on safety or privacy needs, fluid, or non-conforming in their use.”

If that weren’t disorienting enough, the document advises that “Some people use no pronouns at all, or some combination such as “she/they.”

This not only causes confusion through grammatical problems, as is so cleverly shown by this Babylon Bee video. It implies that one can lie about reality if doing so prevents hurt feelings — and ultimately, if it serves whatever you’ve decided is more important than the truth.

For an institution whose supposed main purpose is to teach youth about reality, such guidance spells the death of education.

Oregon students should be asking themselves: If their teachers and administrators encourage lying (i.e., calling a boy “she”) about their fellow students’ sex, how are they supposed to trust that their teachers care enough about reality to faithfully teach it in the classroom? How do they know those who have designed their curriculum have not misrepresented the truth about history, for example, for some other reasons of expediency?

More disturbing proclamations in the new guidance for “gender expansive” students include the claim that “discrimination may include both intended and unintended acts…” and that one can be guilty of a “bias incident,” which includes “unintentional derogatory language” and “invalidations” of gender expansive students.

Offenses that indicate “anti-transgender stigma” include “deadnaming” (using the “transgender” person’s original name), which the guidance says “can cause trauma, stress, embarrassment, and even danger;” as well as “misgendering.”

According to the document, even unintentional “misgendering” “has a harmful impact and can result in hostile and unsupportive school communities for gender expansive students.”

If a student identifies as a walrus, are other students guilty of a “bias incident” because they refuse to validate the other’s “walrus” identity? How is this fundamentally any different from insisting that students refer to a boy as “she”?

The “true believer” adherents of this gender ideology claim that we must conform to others’ false ideas about their own sex in order to prevent them from spiraling into depression and even suicide. Not only is this untrue, but it does a disservice to these “gender expansive” students by failing to address the root of their desire to identify as a different sex.

Individuals who used to identify as “trans” are increasingly testifying that their attempt to “change” their sex was a kind of a band-aid approach to dissociate from emotional distress.

For example, Jalisa Vine, in a recent testimony on how gender surgeries ruined her life, explained, “The majority of my life so far has been a trauma response. My whole identity has been rooted in trauma … My transition was a trauma response.”

Similarly, Grace Lidinsky-Smith, who received “top surgery” at age 23 and “detransitioned” about 16 months later, explained in an interview, according to The New York Times, “I slowly came to terms with the fact that it had been a mistake born out of a mental health crisis.”

We should not be reinforcing the dissociative trauma responses of those who identify as “trans,” but instead need to treat the roots of their trauma or distress.

Anyone inside or outside the Oregon Department of Education who has contributed to or affirmed this policy needs to either seriously rethink their involvement in education or change gears and fight this insanity.

As Mackensey Pulliam, president and founder of Oregon Moms Union, told The Epoch Times, such school policy will only push parents to withdraw their students from Oregon’s public schools, which are otherwise failing (a reported 66 percent of fourth graders are “not proficient” in reading and 69 percent of eighth graders “not sufficient” in math).

Education Freedom for Oregon is currently “collecting petition signatures to add two constitutional amendments to the state’s 2024 ballot that would support school choice,” The Epoch Times shared.

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