When a mother sends her daughter off for the first time on the little yellow school bus, she entrusts the care and direction of her small child to adults she does not know—trusting that, in addition to the elementary instruction in reading and math, the adult will help her daughter navigate the complexities of socializing with other children. The first thing any little girl—or boy—will notice is that her peers are divided into two categories: boys and girls. From this fundamental visual heuristic, a little girl can begin the unbelievably complex process of social maturation, of growing into the young woman her parents want her to become.
Tragically, over the past decade, it has become common practice for public schools to deny this simple biological and social truth. Instead, it is insisted that a boy might not be a boy, that a girl might not be a girl, that a mother could be fundamentally mistaken in believing that her daughter is her daughter, and that her daughter may be a boy if she declares it to be so. It is difficult to imagine any more socially destabilizing doctrine for taxpayer-funded schools to promote. Any child who attends a public school that promotes gender ideology must, logically, come to realize that this fundamental truth claim runs counter to what her mother has taught her—about herself, about others, and about the nature of reality.
Forced to consider this ideological doctrine, a child developing her reasoning faculties must realize that either her mother or her school is mistaken. If she concludes that her school is mistaken, then she will face the alienation inherent in being forced to believe that the authority figure in her public school is fundamentally untrustworthy. If she concludes that her mother is mistaken, then the script is all but written for her: her mother is a “transphobe,” or a “bigot,” potentially “racist,” or any other made-to-order epithet designed to impose a massive social cost on dissent from a radical orthodoxy that virtually no one believed to be true a mere decade ago.
How did so many American public schools come to adopt gender ideology, in all but the blink of an eye? So fast that parents and the American public are still struggling to believe not only that anyone could buy into the ideology but also to find themselves blindsided and appalled by the common practices used to promote it. A casual observer might mistakenly believe that the crux of the public controversy lies in bathroom access or sports. This is how the controversy first appeared on the political radar, but even as that controversy was playing out—on repeat—in the media, deeper and more troubling practices were gaining a hold of public school practice: insisting to small children that they could be born in the wrong body, conducting “social transitions” while keeping parents in the dark, and promoting puberty blockers to children starting in third grade.
The Bathroom Wars
On May 13, 2016, the Obama Department of Education (ED) issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” on Title IX, mandating that all public schools receiving federal funding permit males to access female bathrooms and locker rooms if they claimed to be women. According to insider accounts at the time, this move came as a surprise to many political appointees in ED. It was neither an issue that President Obama had run on in 2012, nor one that the public had deliberated upon in any serious way. Veteran education policy observers and commentators saw it as a move of pure and simple political opportunism. But it was not—it was the culmination of a years-long campaign to bring gender ideology, as developed by ideologue professors, down into the K-12 school system.
Liberal blogger Kevin Drum, however, saw this as an immensely exciting development. The day after the “Dear Colleague Letter” was published, he wrote a post titled “A Very Brief Timeline of the Bathroom Wars.” In the 2012-2013 school year, some college activists started advocating for gender neutral bathrooms for the sake of “LGBTQ inclusion.” In February of 2016, Charlotte, North Carolina, passed an ordinance permitting men who claimed to be women to use public women’s bathrooms. In March of 2016, the North Carolina legislature passed a law insisting that public women’s bathrooms be used only by women and public men’s bathrooms be used only by men. Two months later, ED’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) insisted that—according to a law passed in 1972—children in public schools could use whatever restroom they wanted, regardless of their biological sex.
Reflecting with triumphalism, Drum wrote:
“There’s a lot of griping about the hypersensitivity of university students these days. You know: safe spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings, and so forth. And, sure, maybe some of this stuff is dumb. History will judge that eventually. … But guess what? The first concrete movement toward gender-neutral bathrooms started at universities. Now it’s becoming mainstream. Good work, idealistic college kids! This is why we should think of universities as petri dishes, not a sign of some future hellscape… Some of this stuff dies a deserved death. Some of it takes over the world if the rest of us think it makes sense. Stop worrying so much about it.”
At the time, gender neutral bathrooms made enough sense to win a very ill-defined public debate. The crux of the debate centered around the stories of individual students suffering from gender dysphoria, who felt discomfort going to the bathroom in school, and hence quickly garnered public sympathy. The rights of other students—particularly girls who did not want to see naked boys in their bathrooms—were regarded as immaterial. In December of 2013, OCR began an investigation into Township High School District 211 in Palatine, Illinois, on behalf of a boy who wanted to change in the girls’ locker room. This student wished to be treated as a female at school, and the school was willing to oblige in almost every way the student requested. The school agreed to address and identify the student as female, to permit the student unlimited access to female restrooms, and to allow him to participate in girls’ sports. The school, however, denied his request to change clothes in the girls’ locker room, citing the lack of privacy in that facility, and recommended other options for changing. Department of Education OCR investigators toured the locker room in question to determine whether the local school district’s account of the lack of privacy was physically valid (and it was). In analyzing the case, OCR noted that:
“The District contends that ‘permitting Student A to be present in the locker room would expose female students to being observed in a state of undress by a biologically male individual.’ The District’s second stated privacy concern is that it would be inappropriate for young female students to view a naked male in the locker room in a state of undress. The District stated that ‘granting Student A the option to change her clothes in the girls’ locker room would expose female students as young as fifteen years of age to a biologically male body.’ OCR finds the concerns unpersuasive in this case… Those female students wishing to protect their own private bodies from exposure to being observed in a state of undress by other girls in the locker rooms could change behind a privacy curtain.”
What business was it, exactly, of the Department of Education to decide that a boy’s right to use the female locker room outweighed the right of girls not to be exposed to male genitalia or not to be seen naked by a boy in school? Title IX provided the Department of Education with no jurisdiction to decide that the right of a boy to undress in a girl’s locker room ought to be weighed favorably against the rights of girls to undress without the risk of seeing or being exposed to male genitals in a public school locker room. In August 2016, Title IX’s “Dear Colleague Letter” was quickly enjoined by a court and therefore lacked the technical force of law. However, as a matter of practice, the Obama Department of Education continued to coerce school districts to permit boys into girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.
And as a matter of political controversy, the partisan lines had been set. As Kevin Drum noted, the deeper story here was not about bathrooms or locker rooms as such, but rather about the alacrity with which ideological currents en vogue amongst college students could be imported directly—without significant political deliberation—into K-12 public schools. Before the 2016 “Dear Colleague Letter,” public school administrators, teachers’ unions, non-profit and for-profit education advocacy organizations had given little real thought to the question of “gender identity.” After the letter, the partisan lines were set: Democrats were in favor of “transgender rights,” and Republicans were on the side of girls who didn’t want to see naked boys in locker rooms, or play against men in women’s sports. The deeper ideological undercurrents and their practical manifestations in public schools took years to surface in the public arena.
The Political Revolution of “Comprehensive” Sex Education
President Trump rescinded the “Dear Colleague Letter” governing bathroom and locker room access on the basis of “gender identity” in February of 2017, and the issue broadly fell out of mainstream media coverage for the next several years. Under President Obama and throughout the first Trump administration, however, a collection of far-left non-profit organizations dedicated to “comprehensive sexual education” was accruing hundreds of millions of dollars for the purpose of leveraging sexual education to promote an explicitly political agenda.
When millennial and Gen X parents attended public school, there were two variants on sex education: an abstinence-only approach that insisted that the only guaranteed way to prevent unintended pregnancy was to not engage in sexual relations, and a contraceptive-awareness approach that highlighted the efficacy and risks of condoms and birth control. In 2007, the Future of Sex Education Initiative was co-founded by three organizations—Answer, Advocates for Youth, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SEICUS)—to promote a new form of “comprehensive sexual education” (CSE), both sexually explicit and explicitly political.
In 2012, these organizations published the National Sex Education Standards (NSES), which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services used to guide its sex education grantmaking. The first edition of these standards suggested that by the end of eighth grade, students should be able to “differentiate between gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.” According to a 2016 survey by the Centers for Disease Control, 41 percent of public school districts had adopted or adapted the NSES within four years of its launch.
Four years later, in 2020, the NSES was revised to introduce “gender identity” to kindergarten students. Beginning in third grade, the NSES asks students to “distinguish between sex assigned at birth and gender identity and how they may differ” and to explain that “gender identity exists on a spectrum.” Students are expected to “define and explain differences between cisgender, transgender, gender nonbinary, gender expansive, and gender identity.” Students are also expected to identify the role that hormones play in puberty and “the potential role of hormone blockers on young people who identify as transgender.”
By that point in time, two of the three organizations behind the NSES had become openly dedicated to leveraging sex education to serve a left-wing political and cultural agenda. In 2019, SEICUS rebranded as “SEICUS: Sex Ed for Social Change.” Its CEO explained, “Today, we are pushing the sex education conversation beyond the benefits it can have on an individual’s sexual health … to continue to explore the large-scale culture shift that sex education has the power to create in this country.” Its website today notes that it applies an “intersectional lens” to “dismantling systems of power and oppression.” Advocates for Youth has a similarly explicit political mission; its website notes that “young people understand that reproductive and sexual health and rights are inextricably tied to social justice and the fight for liberation.”
The content of the NSES-aligned CSE curriculum is graphic and explicit. For example, Advocates for Youth sponsors Amaze instructional videos that display and promote pornography and provide graphic illustrations of erections. SEICUS: Sex Ed for Social Change promotes “Porn Literacy.” Another non-profit, Education, Training, and Research, whose curriculum is developed and endorsed by Planned Parenthood, advocates for teaching porn literacy to elementary students, including instruction on “kink and power, pleasure, sexual identity, sexual acts, and sexual exploration in relation to pornography.”
Several Democrat-run states have made CSE the mandatory or default form of sexual education. In 2016, California passed the “California Healthy Youth Act,” which mandated CSE for all public school students in grades 7-12. In 2021, Illinois passed SB 818, requiring that all public schools that provide any sexual education instruction must provide CSE. Under the Biden Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services directed prospective grantees in federal abstinence-only sex education to align their programming with the NSES. The Claremont Institute’s Scott Yenor analyzed federal grantmaking and estimated that CSE programs have received $1.68 billion in federal subsidies since 2010. These grant programs have exported CSE into Republican states, even deep-red Idaho, where Yenor has documented that they have promoted CSE, despite laws prohibiting it, in multiple Idaho school districts.
A similar turn to politicize student sexuality for left-wing political purposes has occurred in the network of student groups formerly known as “Gay-Straight Alliances.” In 1998, the “Gay-Straight Alliance Network” was launched out of California to support and encourage the formation of more GSAs. In the 2000s, GSAs were primarily dedicated to reducing the bullying of homosexual students. In 2012, President Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a message celebrating “National Gay-Straight Alliance Day” and calling for the establishment of more GSAs. In 2016, the network officially rebranded as the “Genders and Sexualities Alliance Network,” citing feedback from “countless youth leaders who understand their genders and sexualities to be uniquely theirs and have moved beyond the labels of gay and straight and the limits of a binary gender system.”
The Genders and Sexualities Alliance Network works with 40 state organizations, networked with school-based clubs at approximately 4,000 schools. Its faculty advisor handbook encourages teachers to help students organize a “GSA Day for Gender Justice” to encourage protests to advocate for its nine-point political plan, including items such as “the abolition of police, ICE, borders, and the judicial system,” and an “end of the cisgender heterosexual patriarchy.”
In 2021, journalist Abigail Shrier obtained audio files from a conference hosted by the California Teachers Association, titled “2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference: Beyond the Binary: Identity and Imagining Possibilities.” In one workshop, titled “How we run a ‘GSA’ in Conservative Communities,” two teachers explained that, to recruit students, they “totally stalked what they were doing on Google when they weren’t doing schoolwork … we use our observations of kids in the classroom—conversations that we hear—to personally invite students. Because that’s really the way we kinda get bodies in the door. Right?” These teachers operate in secrecy: “we have no club rosters, we keep no records,” one explained. “In fact, sometimes we don’t really want to keep records” because it provides the teachers with deniability if parents get upset that their children were being recruited into conversations with teachers about gender and sexuality, or about the political revolution inherent in the GSA mission.
In 2022, Florida became the first state to pass a law prohibiting teaching students about gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Opponents of the law dubbed it the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and expressed profound outrage that parental rights advocates labeled teachers and school administrators who promoted gender ideology as “groomers.” The record, however, was entirely clear: the enterprise of sexual education had turned into a political and ideological project aimed at wide-scale cultural change, and teachers were recruiting and leading students in extracurricular groups openly dedicated to cultural and political revolution.
Mainstreaming the Doctrine of Gender Identity
The 2022 Florida bill was not only or even primarily a response to Comprehensive Sex Education, but rather a reaction to a well-justified fear that teaching children about gender ideology had permeated traditional classroom instruction in elementary, middle, and high school.
In January of 2019, the Aspen Institute released a landmark report titled “From A Nation At Risk to a Nation At Hope: Recommendations from the National Commission on Social, Emotional, & Academic Development.” The national bipartisan commission included Democratic education leaders such as Linda Darling-Hammond, who chaired President Obama’s 2008 transition team for education, and Republicans such as former Nevada governor Brian Sandoval and former Michigan governor John Engler. The report insisted that “the promotion of social, emotional, and academic learning is not a shifting educational fad; it is the substance itself. It is not a distraction from the ‘real work’ of math and English instruction; it is how instruction can succeed. And it is not another reason for political polarization. … In fact, the basis of this approach is not ideological at all.”
A year later, that statement was no longer true. In 2020, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, Emotional Learning (CASEL), the leading Social Emotional Learning (SEL) non-profit, updated its definitions of the “competencies” that SEL should teach in light of its embrace of “Transformative SEL.” According to Transformative SEL, “self-awareness” involves adopting an “integrated identity” that requires an “intersectional approach” rooted in “black feminist theorizing” that individuals belong “to multiple social categories that occur in … contexts that may subject them to multiple oppressions simultaneously.” “Social awareness” involves a public regard for one’s racial and gender group, and “self-management” involves “resistance” and “transformative citizenship,” which involves efforts to advance “social changes” that “might be inconsistent with or violate existing local, state, and national laws.”
According to a RAND study, the percentage of elementary schools utilizing an official SEL curriculum increased from 52 percent in 2018 to 87 percent by 2024. A 2021 article in Education Week noted that school district spending on SEL grew by about 45 percent from November 2019 to April 2021, from $530 million to $765 million, and that about a third of school districts spent at least some of their COVID relief funds on SEL. SEL’s focus on “identity” provided educators with encouragement and cover to integrate gender identity into traditional classroom instruction. For example, in 2022 CASEL promoted a blog post titled “Transformative SEL and Mathematical Liberation for 2SLGBTQIA+ students,” featuring a teacher who explained her “radical journal to unconditionally accept my queer, Latinx identity.” She lamented that she had “associated mathematics with profound anxiety, intricately tied to my fears of confronting my queer identity.” Still, she celebrated that “the framework of transformative SEL offers useful insight for replicating” her practice of “centering mathematical ‘queeries’ on thriving, even in the midst of systemic oppression, fostering students’ positive development of agency.”
By now, the call to center “gender identity” in traditional classroom instruction is, however, not confined to likely more than a billion-dollar-per-year taxpayer expenditures on SEL. Within the past six years, leading non-profit professional development associations in every major subject of K-12 curriculum have issued statements encouraging teachers to promote gender identity in their classroom instruction.
In 2019, the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) issued a position statement on “Gender Equity in Science Education.” The NSTA noted that “while gender equity in science education has traditionally focused solely on providing opportunities and access for girls in science, contemporary notions of gender equity transcend binary male/female roles to include students’ gender identity (one’s internal sense of their own gender).” It explains that “science educators must recognize and respect diversity within gender,” and teach with a cognizance of “growing evidence of the non-binary nature of sex in humans” and be attentive to “intersectionality, or the confluence of factors including but not limited to sex, gender identity and gender expression.” It called on teachers to “select curriculum materials that promote gender inclusiveness through their text, illustrations, and graphics with emphases on historical and current inequities,” and curriculum developers to “design and/or select curriculum materials that accurately and equitably portray diverse gender identities.”
In 2021, the National Council of Teachers of English issued a position statement titled “Guidelines for Affirming Gender Diversity through English Language Arts [ELA] Curriculum and Pedagogy” to help “ELA educators as they guide their students, as well as their colleagues, to understand, expect, and embrace gender diversity.” It explains that “NCTE understands gender as a ‘cultural construct that is not limited to binary categories,’ but rather is ‘always constructed in cultural contexts where other identities, perhaps infinite other identities, are also always constructed.'” The NCTE encourages teachers to “consider how to think more expansively about gender within our curricular work,” and incorporate books featuring a multiplicity of gender identities because if they don’t do so “students are left on their own to process what they hear about transgender, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and gender creative people,” and may understand that sex is binary. It notes that “the prospect of pushback from parents, community members, or administrators is of course stressful and anxiety producing,” but encourages that “such resistance might also be reframed as an opportunity to create dialogue and change beyond the classroom walls.”
In 2022, the National Council for the Social Studies issued a statement “in Support of Trans Youth, Trans Educators, and our LGBTQ+ Community,” decrying the Florida bill prohibiting promoting gender identity in grades K-3, explaining that the bill and others like it are motivated by “hate.” “To act in accordance with these measures,” the NCSS exhorted, “goes against our responsibility to care for our LGBTQ+ identifying students.” It declared that “trans students and trans educators, as well as all students, educators and families who identify as LGBTQ+, should be supported and celebrated for who they are,” and that it stands “by their right to live authentically.”
There is no way of knowing for certain how many Science, English, and Social Studies teachers have heeded these calls to promote gender identity in their classrooms. But the call to incorporate ideas about “gender identity,” “gender expansiveness,” and “gender diversity” has, within the past six years, thoroughly permeated virtually all major organizations that influence the practice of K-12 education.
Secret Gender Transitions
As teachers incorporate ideas of “gender identity” into their classroom instruction or extra-curricular relationships with students, the number of suggestible children who have—temporarily—embraced the notion that they are “transgender” or “non-binary” has increased dramatically.
In 2022, the American School Counselor Association issued a position statement stating that if a student identifies as a different gender, she must be immediately affirmed, without respecting or even consulting parents: “School counselors recognize the responsibility for determining a student’s gender identity rests with the student.” The ASCA recommends that counselors work with the school to change the student’s name and gender marker amongst all staff and in the student record systems. Cognizant, however, of federal laws requiring parents to access school records, the ASCA advises secrecy: “If students have not disclosed their gender identity to a parent or guardian and as a result their name and/or gender marker cannot be changed on their student records, their chosen/affirmed name should be noted as a ‘preferred name’ in the system.”
Also in 2022, the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) issued a position statement advising secrecy in social transition: “Maintain confidentiality of the student’s birth sex, gender identity, and gender expression by keeping identifying records separate and limiting unnecessary disclosure, doing so only with the explicit assent of the student.” The NASP also advises its members to take students medical care, and even custody, into their own hands by providing “access to affirming binders … and affirming medical and mental health services in schools and communities,” as well as “access to safe and supportive housing, within their family’s home or elsewhere.”
In 2023, the New York State Department of Education (NYSED) issued guidelines to all of its schools encouraging them to conduct social transitions on students at the child’s sole discretion, and to directly mislead parents if the child requested. “Only the student,” the NYSED stated, “knows whether it is safe to share their identity with a caregiver. If, for example, a student named Kevin wants to go by ‘Kimi’ but doesn’t want his parents to know, then the teachers call her Kimi and use she/her pronouns at school. When calling home for any reason, teachers use the name Kevin and he/him pronouns.” In 2024, California passed a law to prohibit school districts from informing parents if their child requested to identify as another gender without the child’s explicit consent.
Secret social transitions are not confined to deep blue states; they have become common nationwide. Defending Education, a non-profit watchdog organization, has conducted a public records campaign to try to assess the number of school districts that have transgender policies that explicitly state that teachers and administrators can and should socially transition students without informing parents. Their non-exhaustive list, last updated in May 2026, counts 1,217 school districts, governing 21,319 schools serving over 12.3 million students, as having secret social transition policies.
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A decade ago, the idea of providing bathroom accommodations to students on the basis of their “gender identity” was an item on the activist wish list of students at largely elite universities. Today, virtually every non-profit organization that socializes and supports teachers encourages them to promote the doctrine that children can be born in the wrong bodies, and that it is their duty to “affirm” children who identify as the opposite sex. School districts serving at least 20 percent of American school children go as far as to encourage teachers to keep a student’s “transgender status” secret from the parent.
This represents a rapid and fundamental rupture in the relationship between parents and taxpayer-funded government schools. Mothers and fathers send their children off to school each morning in the hope that they will grow in academic competence and self-confidence, to make friends and grow up like what they experienced when they attended school. No previous generation, indeed no generation in the history of mankind, has ever willingly handed its children over to a government institution that teaches an ideological doctrine contrary to their own sincerely held religious and human beliefs.
The promoters of “gender identity” in public schools explicitly seek a massive cultural shift and the “liberation” of children. Parents, therefore, face the terrible yet reasonable suspicion that the public school they’ve entrusted their child to may teach their child that they are oppressors. Because this is such a terrible suspicion, many parents may wish to ignore it. But without substantial pressure from parents or state legislators, the new paradigm of public schools that teaches children that they can be born in the wrong body, and that their parents may have falsely “assigned” their sex at birth, will not easily be dislodged.