Recently I had the opportunity to chat with a colorectal surgeon. Since this doesn’t happen every day, I asked him a question that’s been bugging me.
“Teens have been encouraged to experiment with anal sex. Can that be harmful for the walls of the rectum?”
With a look of surprise, he said, “Who in the world is promoting that?!”
I explained it is very commonly portrayed in porn videos as something women enjoy, and so girls are saying, “Hey, if you want to keep your guy, you have to let him do this.”
“The walls of the rectum aren’t the problem,” he explained. “It could very easily rupture the anal sphincter, requiring surgery.”
(As my friend would say, “Thank you for listening to WTMI: Way Too Much Information!”)
Sadly, that is not the only place teens are getting this message. Some of the new material taught in high schools of progressive states is promoting anal sex and fisting. (Not going to explain the latter one. It would definitely be TMI!)
Yes, I’m still taking in content from Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. One chapter addresses what is going on in public schools across the country. And sometimes content is put before kids without parental knowledge or consent. In fact, in California, New York and New Jersey, if a child “comes out” as trans, many schools will change the name and pronouns on school records without even informing the parents. This is done according to National Education Association recommendations.
As one educator explained to Shrier, what parents are teaching kids about sexuality is hopelessly inadequate. Yes, schools are supposed to serve the community. But “in some places, we have to lead the community.”
California, as one might expect, is at the forefront of “leading the community,” both in what they teach and what they allow, whether parents are informed or not. In addition to indoctrinating the students, they are now seeking to expand access to hormones for trans students.
State law already allows “cis minor” students to leave campus to receive birth control without parental consent. So to even the playing field, so to speak, the California Teachers Association approved a policy in 2019 to advocate for trans students to leave school without parental permission to receive hormone treatments. (As of this writing, I’m not sure this has yet been enacted.)
After that attention grabber, Shrier goes on to describe some of the most widely used educational materials found in schools today.
Beginning in kindergarten, kids are being introduced to the “Genderbread Person” and the “Gender Unicorn”. When they were born, so they are told, their parents had to guess at their child’s gender because babies can’t talk. But now they can decide for themselves where on the spectrum they land. What about input from their parents? Well ultimately the kids are told that the parents need to listen to them, because they are the ones who know what they are feeling.
Every shade of the rainbow is grilled into them. As Shrier puts it:
The way baby boomers once learned to rattle off state capitals, elementary school kids are now taught today’s gender taxonomy often enough to have committed it to memory. And while gender ideologues insist they are merely presenting an objective ontology, it is hard to miss that they seem to hope kids will pick a fun, “gender-creative” option for themselves.
When it comes to middle school, a popular curriculum used in some states is Positive Prevention PLUS. Using role playing activities and progressive videos like “Trans 102”, they further train young minds to consider the spectrum of identity.
And what about parental involvement? She quotes one California fifth grade teacher as saying:
As much as parents want to have rights, what they need to do is be involved in the process. And the more they’re involved with their kids anyway, the more they’re going to know what’s going on. It’s not the school’s obligation to call up and “out” a kid to a parent because you’re not sending that kid home to the gay pride parade. You’re sending them home to somewhere that’s going to be very unsafe and a lot of misinformation, a lot of anger and it’s just not going to be a safe place for that kid.
Hm. OK, so it’s good for parents to be involved in the process, but they aren’t going to “out” the children when they grab onto some gender-creative identity. So parents ought to be involved, but apparently only the gender affirming types.
What are parents supposed to do with all of this?
It’s mid-June as I write this, and Loudoun County, Virginia, is very much in the news. An elementary teacher told the school board he refused to alter pronoun usage and to tell little boys that they might actually be girls. He was blunt, upfront, and stated it was against his religion. So the board suspended him.
As you probably know, students, faculty and parents rallied to his defense, as did a lawyer. A judge ruled he should be reinstated, but that is being contested.
Is this the right way to handle our objections to the gender ideology infiltrating our schools? Maybe. We should always be willing to stand up for the truth. But one would be wise to be fully informed before launching a crusade. Not all states are pushing the envelope, and some teachers themselves may not be aware of what students are reading.
Consider this story from my friend’s blog Resources4Restoration:
Before going further, I recently read a comment from a Christian parent who is involved with activism surrounding matters of sexuality about her child coming home with some rather blatant gender ideology propaganda in his schoolwork. Her child noticed it and brought it to her attention. She asked for advice on how to address this, and most responses involved bringing this situation up in public in some way. But the Lord directed her to pause, pray and speak to her child’s teacher directly.
The teacher was “horrified by the discovery” of the materials, as she had been so caught up with the pandemic precautions that she had not examined the content as she would have otherwise. The teacher was “extremely apologetic and even asked if I thought she might need to apologize to the rest of the parents in the class.”
It was a reminder that we are not to assume the worst about people, and are instructed to bring up our concerns to individuals before involving others.1
May the Lord grant us much grace to be wise as serpents, innocent as doves, courageous as lions, and guided by his Spirit.
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