The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, teaching gender identity has no place in the k-5 school curriculum

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

It’s a debate being argued across school boards, politics, and family dinner tables: whether educators should be including gender identity and sexual orientation in their k-5 curriculums. At least 5 Canadian provinces and seven US states now require the inclusion of LGBTQ topics, while more conservative states like Florida have banned any mention of such language altogether. Conservative lawmakers and parents argue that teaching about gender identity is inappropriate and confusing for children who are too young to understand the complexity of this subject and its potential life altering consequences. Educators, driven by liberal ideology, are ignoring parents’ wishes and using their classes to push their own political beliefs on impressionable youth. Progressives believe that as the number of children who identify as transgender and non-binary rises, teachers have an obligation to dispel misconceptions about gender and provide inclusive, safe environments for all students, especially the most vulnerable. Contrary to what some right-wing groups claim, you cannot alter or influence a person’s gender identity through education, while banning its teaching altogether will cause emotional and mental distress to our most vulnerable youth. Arguing for the motion is Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at The Heritage Foundation Arguing against the motion is Elizabeth Meyer, associate professor of Educational Foundations, Policy and Practice at the University of Colorado at Boulder SOURCES: CBS, CBN, Forbes   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths  Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Adam KarchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracies. Welcome to the Mug Debates.

Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day to arm you the listener with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. Teaching gender identity has no place in the K-5 school curriculum. Parents are not happy with the Rockland Charter School Academy for having transgender discussions in a kindergarten class. An assignment at an elate the school is stirring controversy. students were asked to answer very personal questions about their gender identity.

The kindergartners came home very confused about whether or not you can pick your gender, whether or not they really were a boy or a girl. Hello, I'm your guest moderator, Ricky Gerwitz. Well, it's a debate being argued across school districts, local politics, and over family dinner tables, whether elementary schools should be including gender identity in their curriculums. Conservative lawmakers and parents argue that teaching about gender identity is inappropriate and confusing for children who are too young to understand the complexity of this subject and its potential life-altering consequences. Here's Florida Governor Ron DeSantis,

who passed a law prohibiting the teaching of gender identity or any mention of sexual orientation in elementary classrooms. It's wrong to teach a six-year-old boy, but maybe you're really a girl. That's wrong. And we see that happening in other parts of the country. We'll focus on teaching them the read, write, add, subtract. That's what school is about. Progressives, meanwhile, believe there is no such thing as too young when it comes to gender identity. Children know who they are and what they would like to identify as from a very early age. Teachers must teach about different genders in order to provide inclusive, safe environments for all students, especially the most vulnerable.

Here's Canadian transgender rights activist Morgan Oge. The idea is to teach kids that there are gay kids and there are trans kids and there are trans parents and gay parents in our society and everybody's wanted and desired. After all, that's what our human rights code says. And it's the role of schools to teach the following of our laws. On this installment of the Monk Debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, teaching gender identity has no place in the K through 5 school curriculum. Arguing for the motion is Jonathan Butcher. He's the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at the Heritage Foundation.

And arguing against the motion is Elizabeth Meyer, Associate Professor of Educational Foundations Policy and Practice at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Well, thank you both for being here and participating in this important debate. It's a subject that is top of mind to many parents of young children, and we're looking forward to hearing your different viewpoints. So I'm going to start with Jonathan, who's our first. arguing in favor of our motion today, be it resolved. Teaching gender identity has no place in the K-35 school curriculum. Jonathan, I'm putting two minutes on the show clock. Let's have your

opening statement. Thank you. At the most basic level, the issue is choosing what is age-appropriate content for children. We are each born with the ability to make either sperm or eggs. This makes us boy or girl, man or woman. These are biological facts on which we base the teaching about human anatomy, reproduction. And look, if you turn the teaching about biology into opinions about how someone feels, you've removed the authority that academic instruction needs, really in order to be trusted by children. At a deeper level here, though, telling children that sex depends on how you feel leads to the conclusion that adults can affirm you if you decide one day that you feel like a different gender. You can't change,

your sex, despite medicine's best efforts lately, children are going to struggle with a lot of things. Depression, anxiety, hormones, bullying, disagreements with friends, feeling uncomfortable with your body is a part of growing up. But if you deal with depression and anxiety by assuming a different gender so that you will be affirmed, right? You'll get the positive feedback from the adults who will affirm this idea, then you're walking down a path that leads to unauthorized. alterable, irreversible medical changes, that, by the way, science finds will not improve your mental health. Okay. So research finds 60 to 90% of cases in which a young person was confused about their sex, it resolved itself naturally after puberty and into early adulthood.

These things resolve on their own as children get to live out the process of understanding how your body changes. And then B, mental health and including issues related to suicidiality, okay, feeling suicidal. It does not necessarily improve with social affirmation of gender confusion. It doesn't. Research has shown this. Young people clearly need empathy and careful counseling involving their parents when they are confused about their sex. Growing up is hard, but affirming a child's own diagnosis of themselves

about being confused over their sex is nothing short of dangerous, because you are sending them down a path that will not fix any underlying issues related to anxiety and can leave to irreparable damage to take the phrase that Abigail Schreier used for her book and changes that cannot be repaired later in life once they go beyond just social affirmation and into medical transitions. Thank you, Jonathan, for that excellent opening statement. Okay, Liz, you are arguing against our motion today, be it resolved, teaching gender, gender identity has no place in the K-35 school curriculum.

Let's have your opening statement. Thank you. Everybody has a gender identity. Man, transgender, non-binary, and woman are just a few of the more common terms used to describe our gender identities. Schools already teach about gender in so many ways, whether it be how teachers address and line up their students as boys and girls, or through dress code policies, or lessons about families. that talk about mommies and daddies, or historical figures, characters, and books, we are always already teaching about gender. So the question isn't really about if we teach about gender identity in schools, but rather how. And there are ethical, legal, logical, psychological,

philosophical, and pedagogical arguments that support an inclusive and accurate approach to teaching about gender diversity in elementary schools. And I'll start with the ethical and logical position that there are people who identify as men, transgender, non-binary, and women. They are people who exist in this world. All people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, have their basic needs met and live in a world free from violence. If we accept these two basic premises, then we must also accept that we should teach about gender diversity in elementary schools.

If we choose not to talk about gender diversity, specifically, usually we're talking about transgender and non-binary people because these are the people whose bodies and lives are being debated in policies in the United States and Canada. If we deny their presence, we're either denying their existence, denying their humanity, or simply choosing to lie to our children. Why would we omit this information from our classrooms? Why would we deny students' access to important information about the world they live in and the people in it? Pedagogically, we know that inclusive and accurate information is important for productive

and respectful learning environments. Teaching about gender diversity in schools is about providing children with accurate and honest information about the realities of the world we live in. And the earlier we provide children with accurate, honest, age-appropriate information, the more readily they can build schema that can help their brains integrate this information and support the learning of more complex ideas and will make schools and communities safe and more inclusive for everyone. This is what we know from developmental and social psychology.

Research has also demonstrated that talking about all kinds of diversity in schools reduces many forms of bullying and harassment and is particularly life-saving for transgender and non-binary youth. Many laws have been passed to reduce bullying and sex discrimination in schools. And in order to effectively implement these laws, and if we agree that schools are essential in preparing youth to be productive citizens, who can live and work in a diverse society, then we must also agree that schools must teach inclusive and accurate lessons about gender. And for all of these reasons, I will be arguing

against today's resolution. Thank you, Liz, for that great opening statement. Okay, we're going to move to rebuttals. Jonathan, this is your chance to respond to anything you heard in Liz's opening statement. Thank you, but I think what we're talking about here is sex. We're not talking about gender. Gender is an abstract concept that has been redefined over the years since the original, quote, critical gender theorist going back some into the 1970s. We're talking about teaching young children that there is a difference between male and female, and at what age, such instruction is appropriate. If we introduce the idea that the concept of sex needs to be replaced with the idea that you can just choose what your gender is, you are threatening

young people's ability to understand their own bodies and the world around them. There was a poll in the New York Times just recently, it was last fall, that showed that a majority of parents, upwards of 70%, said that the ideas of gender should not be taught to children in elementary school. The numbers got a little smaller when you got to middle school, but there was even a share that was close to 40% of high school, where parents said that we should not be teaching young people about the concept of, quote, gender. So if the issue, and again, to use the term age appropriate, which my opponent used here, then parents should be in the conversation with teachers about what is age appropriate for their children. They are their children in schools. I would argue as well

that if we're discussing this idea of dignity and respect, there is no evidence that socially affirming young people reduces their ability to be healthy in terms of their mental health or necessarily reduces suicidal thoughts or actions. In fact, there's very little research on this topic. Some of the only research has been performed by one of my colleagues who found that in states, where they allow young people access to hormone treatments and puberty blockers, it does not actually reduce suicide rates. Those states actually have higher suicide rates.

So the states among teenagers, among young people. So the states that offer young people access at minor ages, right, to either puberty blockers or these other drugs that try to alter someone's hormones and their physical operations of their body, those states actually have higher suicide rates among young people than states that do not. So again, this is an issue of protecting young children and providing them with the information that is appropriate for their young ages before they can deal with the complexity and, frankly, ambiguity that individual's, such as Judith Butler brought on these issues some 40 years ago. Thanks, Jonathan. Okay, Liz, now it's your turn to respond to anything you might have heard, Jonathan's opening statement or his rebuttal. Thank you.

I want to first clarify and put some important vocabulary out there because I am a gender theorist. I have been studying these concepts for over 20 years, and there is extensive literature and extensive research that demonstrates that we have three different concepts that people often confuse and bring together, which makes, muddies the waters of these conversations. Gender and sex are different. Sex is not only binary.

There are more physiological realities in the human body than male and female. What we know is that babies are assigned to sex at birth by a medical professional. That's a human being making a judgment call. And then at that birth moment, a legal designation is made on a birth certificate. So sex is not a pure biological reality. that only includes two categories. We know there are 1.7% of all babies born have variations in their anatomy and physiology that vary from what we would normally assign male or female. But that's not what we're talking about today. We're actually talking about gender and how a person feels in

their body and what we're talking about in schools. Schools aren't diagnosing children. Schools aren't assigning medical treatment. Schools aren't telling children to be or change or go seek treatment one way or another. What we're talking about is curriculum, lessons, designing, what books do we read, what histories do we tell, what pronouns and names do we use and how do we recognize the full diversity of humanity in our public schools that are here to design and prepare students to be active citizens in a diverse multicultural society. So we're not talking about medical treatment, and I would like to set that aside because

it's not germane to when we talk about designing curriculum. What we're talking about is what is appropriate for children. children to learn. And when we're talking about these inclusive curricula bills, we're talking in kindergarten first and second grade. We're talking about what does it mean to be a citizen? What are examples of people in history who have been courageous and made an impact in their communities? We're not talking about sexuality. We're not talking about genitals. We're not talking about any kinds of anything other than identities, who people are, and how to treat people with respect and dignity. And what we do know, I don't understand the research that Jonathan has

referred to because the research that I have found out of the University of San Francisco about the Family Affirmation Project is that youth who have affirming families are much less likely to find themselves in situations of homelessness, having much lower rates of depression and suicidality, and that we know to have that affirmation at home or, if not at home, from a trusted adult at school, is life-saving. And I can't speak to the medical research because I'm not a medical practitioner. I'm an educator. And I think we're here today to talk about curriculum and schools. Thanks, Liz. Okay, we are entering into the moderated portion of this debate. This is a chance for me to step in and ask questions that are top of mind to our listeners. So I first just want to

follow up on something Liz said, which is an important point, which is that we're not talking about physical transformation or medical intervention in this debate. We're talking about curriculum. And so, Jonathan, if teaching about gender identity in the classroom provides a more inclusive space to young kids who might not identify with the male or the female binary, why is that a bad thing? Shouldn't we make schools more inclusive and prevent bullying against people who don't conform to what is considered normal by society standards? So we absolutely should be trying to prevent bullying, but by saying that gender is more inclusive ignores the fact that for generations, hundreds of years, we have known that the biological

fact is you are born male or female. You have physical parts that either produce sperm or eggs. That separates males from females. So introducing this new concept that you can just decide what your gender is actually is an affront to what we have known for hundreds of years, both in biology as well as in the values and the deeply held beliefs that parents have had for their children and their communities for many, many generations. So you're actually challenging what we have known in both biology and in terms of personal values for many, many years. I would add on this issue of whether or not sex is, quote, assigned when a child is born. It is a designation that we give to a child who is either male or female,

based upon their biology. You are born male or female. And as my opponent said, there's 1.7% who may have characteristics that do not perfectly align. That doesn't mean they don't almost align. What you have is either male or female. There is either X, X, X, or X, Y. There's no in between, right? So just because someone isn't perfectly, their physical apparatus isn't as functioning, right, as a male or as a female, doesn't make them any less male or female, right? It may need that there is some sort of medical intervention that may be needed for those physical functions to operate correctly, but they're still either boy or girl. I'll close with this.

This question of whether or not schools are diagnosing children, that's the problem. The children are diagnosing themselves and then telling their teachers how they want to be addressed, and then the teachers socially affirm them. Right? In what other case do we allow a young person to tell an adult, I feel whatever, that I have, say, the chicken pox, a broken leg, that you are bleeding from your hand when none of that is true? In what other case do we allow a child to diagnose themselves medically and adults affirm them and then help to proceed them? And they are, by the way, there are school systems in the United States that say that if a child wants to be addressed as a different, quote, gender, they can not only address the child that way, but they will leave the parents out of that conversation. That is in the State Department of Education Manual in California, in New York, in New Jersey. So this is absolutely happening that educators are socially affirming children when they diagnose themselves.

and moving them along a path that leads to both hormone treatments, puberty blockers, and ultimately, if they continue, life-altering surgeries that cannot be repaired, such as the removing of either reproductive organs or things such as the breasts. So to say that this is something that we are concocting is absolutely wrong. Okay, Liz, I want to follow up on what Jonathan just said and have you respond to it, which is this feeling that parents are being excluded from a lot of these conversations that are happening in the classroom. It's an issue that has come up a lot in the U.S. here in Canada,

where teachers might feel that the child's home life does not respect how their student wishes to be identified. So they're not consulting with parents about something that is so central to their child's identity. Yes, and I think that's important to talk about parents, and I will get to that, but I want to address a few points that Jonathan raised before that. First, this issue of diagnosis and associating this with disease. I think that's a problem with vocabulary.

And the DSM, the psychological manual, has actually removed this. It's not a mental disorder. It's not a disease. This is how people live. This is how people feel in their body. And I'm not here to debate the fact that transgender people exist. And we have known this across centuries, across cultures. There are so many books, films, oral histories, scholarly articles that have documented

in medical records and multiple languages across multiple decades and centuries that there are many, many people who live in a place. that does not neatly conform to the male identity or the female identity, the man or the woman, gender. The issue with biology, there actually are bodies that have more than X, X, X, and X, Y chromosomes. There actually are bodies that don't produce sperm but have testes and a penis. There are bodies that have ovaries and a uterus, but don't produce eggs, right? So using this very reductionist biological argument does not fit many, many bodies. And we don't know when an infant is born if that body will end up producing sperm or

eggs. We just know there's certain external genitalia that we have associated with certain identities. So the biology argument is simplistic reductionist and doesn't really pay attention to what we know about the variety in human physiology. But in terms of parental notification and including parents in when students are asking to be called a different name in school or asking their teachers to use a different pronoun for them, this is not permanent. This is not irreversible. This is something that a child is experiencing in a social world that is important to them where they spent more than a third of their lives is in schools, eight hours a day, five days a week. And if they're not ready to tell their parents or their family, it's because they've gotten signals that maybe their parents or home life is not going to be supportive of this information. And they want to try it out in a place where maybe they'll feel some safety and experience if this identity that they're feeling inside is something that resonates.

when they start sharing it with others, with trusted adults, with trusted peers. And students do have a right to privacy. When students are called by a different name at school, whether it be a nickname or a name that represents a different gender identity, that doesn't require parental phone call. That's clearly notified that parents need to be notified about disciplinary, you know, safety issues, but they don't need to be notified if a child goes by a different nickname at school. This isn't complicated. We need to honor children's privacy and allow them a safe and supportive environment where they can build their sense of self without fear of being kicked out, without fear of being sent to reparative therapy, without fear of total isolation and rejection, which we know trans youth experience in very high numbers.

And that's why many of the homeless youth on the streets identify within the LGBTQ community because they came out or their parents found out or they were outed and they ended. up homeless and very dangerous situations. And so this is what schools are trying to do to protect the children in their care. So Jonathan, Liz does make an important point that sometimes parents do not respect their children's wishes with regards to their identity. Let's face it, this is a pretty new concept for a lot of parents. A lot of parents do not have a lot of experience with it. It can be overwhelming. And so sometimes they end up creating a more hostile environment for their vulnerable child? Well, in the rare, I think, cases in which you would have parents who are so neglectful or

rejecting of their children that they would do such a thing to their own children as reject them, those are cases in which we should have the other authorities involved. But those cases are outside the norm. This is not the case in which we have evidence that the overwhelming majority of parents are rejecting their children when they bring to them issues related. to either anxiety, depression, or this confusion about their sex. Okay. And so from the beginning, we should have teachers and all educators in a conversation with

parents about what material is being either introduced to them in the classroom or what their child is bringing to a teacher that would be evidence of such a thing as being confused about your sex, which, by the way, research does find is often found in the same time with these issues of anxiety and depression. These are the conversations that educators should be having with parents before it becomes such an issue that a child is struggling so much, right, with their own sense of confusion, again, over whether they are a boy or girl, that they need to be, you know, socially affirmed, right? We should be intervening in a way that is empathetic, that is careful, and that allows parents to be able to help choose the therapists and the counselors that these young people talk to, to, to, in order to unravel what is going on inside and what may be at the root cause of some of this confusion, either regarding their sex and the anxiety and the depression. I would argue, too,

against the comment that this may not be permanent, so somebody's going to change their mind, when would a child change their mind if they're being socially affirmed by an educator? It's permanent because it's in the code, right? It's in the handbooks for state departments of education. So if a child is being socially affirmed by their educator and it was their own diagnosis that got them there in the first place, at what point would they decide on their own now against the affirmation of educators and adults in their lives that, oh, wait, no, I really am a girl or I really am a boy and recognize that. And this is one of the most difficult things, okay, that gender theorists are going to have to explain right now are those who are detransitioning. They are

realizing later in life that they were born a boy or they were born a girl. And after going through a very harmful, very destructive process of social affirmation that then led to hormone changes and puberty blockers, now they have changed their minds. Now they are realizing the damage they've done to themselves and they are now warning people, right? They are now warning people about what is going on with what can only be called a contagion given the numbers, especially of teenage girls, who are saying that they want to be, they want to assume a different gender. Liz, do you want to come back on that point? Yes.

Again, we're not talking about medical treatments, but I do want to address the question of detransition and irreversible treatments, that the standard of care for supporting trans and non-binary youth is to not administer any irreversible treatments until the child is at the age of 18. So anything that is provided to the child by a medical provider is not irreversible. social affirmation is not irreversible. Identity is a deeply internally held experience that is impacted and influenced by your interactions with others. But that depression and anxiety that Jonathan talks about, I agree, there's a lot of depression and anxiety out there. And it is exacerbated and made worse when you think that who you know to be inside yourself is not going to be loved or

accepted by your family or the adults who you spend time with every day. So it's not the confusion that's causing the depression and anxiety. It's the societal transphobia that is causing the depression and anxiety because children are active observers of their environments. They see and they understand what is valued and what is not.

And when we don't talk about gender diversity in the curriculum, when kids don't have windows and mirrors to see themselves in the curriculum, mirrors reflect back, right? That important representation of ourselves in the stories that are told at school or windows into other people's lives

to understand the different. experiences that we might not have in our own home, our own neighborhood, our own community, those windows and mirrors are essential at school to allow children opportunities to see their identities and see their experiences reflected and to learn about those of others. And so that is why it is essential that we talk about gender diversity in the curriculum. But I, but I, hold on, I need to push back on this for just a second because this issue of standard of care is very important right now. And in fact, there is evidence that people who are minor children have had surgical transitions and have been administered drugs. There's evidence of that. And it has been, it's been in the news.

Teachers aren't administering drugs. No, I never said they were. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I never said they were. We're not talking about medical care. We're talking about K through five. Yeah, that's right. And if a child understands at a young age, that biology is not a fixed asset and that it is something that if they're confused, why they could get social affirmation from an adult in their life and then be moved along the path of receiving these interventions like we talked about, you're opening the door at a very young age to children who just learned to tie their shoes, right, that they could receive medical treatment in life before they're even of age to make decisions for themselves, right? This is in the news that this has happened to young people who are minor, minor kids, okay?

So when you open the door between K and elementary schools. They're not the ones telling people to go to the doctor. But if they affirm a young child's own diagnosis of themselves, what is the logical next step, right? The logical next step is that the child will not say. The logical next step is the child will learn to love themselves. No, they'll understand that gender is fluid and they'll move down a path where they'll be irreparable changes. They'll be confused about their own sex. Gender fluidity is not harmful.

They'll be confused about their own gender. Okay, I just want to pick up on this point. Now, all three of us have been to elementary and high school. school. It's a very confusing time for everyone. I think we can all agree on that. So in the early years, JK and SK, kids are just learning what gender is. They're learning that there's such a thing as a girl versus a boy, why they're different. It's not an easy time for many kids. So my question to you, Liz, is are we taking this time in a child's life that's quite a vulnerable one, where they're just starting to understand more complex ideas about identity and introducing something that perhaps is a little

to mature for them to fully understand? They're absolutely not beyond the maturity to understand gender. Research has demonstrated that children have a sense of their gender as early age two. So before they've even entered the schooling system, we know of many cases of young trans people who have the minute they had words, the minute they had of language began to correct their families and say, I'm not a boy or I'm not a girl, or I won't wear this, or I don't want to do that, because they have such a strong sense of themselves, and they know that the world is not seeing them the way they see themselves. So some of this can happen even before they enter school.

And so when they enter school, I've heard terrible stories of parents trying to teach kids to fit in when they get to school. Oh, you can't wear that to school anymore. Don't wear those shoes. Don't use that backpack. Don't put that in your hair because you'll get bullied. You'll made fun of that's not what girls do. That's not what boys do.

So we're always already teaching about gender. It's just which lessons are we teaching about gender? Are we telling children that gender doesn't limit you, that if you're a girl, you can be a scientist, that if you're a boy, you can be a musician, and if you're not a girl or a boy, you can create a future that is possible and creative in your own making, right? If we reinforce this male-female binary, this sex determines gender determines your future, then we continue to engage in a mind game that allows misodial. need to persist, there's actually research that shows that young boys who bully in elementary school are more likely to engage in homophobic harassment in middle school and dating violence in high school

and then domestic violence future. We know that this form of toxic masculinity is part of the gender binary and that if we don't teach a more expansive understanding of how gender can be enacted and inhibited in our bodies, then we will continue to live with all the harms that we have as a result of gender-based violence, which starts with the gender binary. Okay, Jonathan, come back on that point about reducing toxic masculinity that really only gets worse as kids get older and is left unchecked. Well, I mean, I would argue that if you have a school that is teaching young people that girls can't be scientists and that they can't be inventors, you should remove your child from that school immediately. I think that's utter nonsense that we should be teaching young people that based on their sex, that their future is determined. And I frankly know of no serious curriculum in a school that would teach such things.

And again, if it's there, then that's why parents should have a right. to remove their children from that school. I think of what we're really discussing here are issues of age appropriateness of very ambiguous material regarding something that, yes, children do know at a young age about their biological sex of whether they are a boy or a girl. And as they enter puberty and as their hormones begin to change, there's any number of things that young people are going to struggle with, whether it's from bullying, difficulties with friends, disagreements, even with their parents. But these are part of riding out the years of puberty and doing so with parents closely involved so that they are a part of the solution so that we contribute to the family

unit, right? That is what can build stability around a child, is that they understand that they have people who love them, who in fact are their parents, right? Or guardians, right? The people who are with them all the time. This is what it is the responsibility, frankly, of schools to do in building strong civic communities. Teaching young people that their parents may be a threat to them or that anyone who doesn't agree with their definition of what gender happens to be is a threat is setting up a society in which you have stark lines

that continue to divide people. We need to be instructing young people that there is a lot that we have in common. There is a great deal we have that we can share that makes us not only members of the same communities, the same state, the same nation. That is what schools should be, building. It should not be setting up new ways for us to divide ourselves from one another.

And I do not believe any school positions themselves as a threat or talks about children's homes as a threat. And I wished we lived in a world where every child went home to a safe and loving and affirming family environment. And unfortunately, we know that and it's not true. It is not true for a lot of reasons. And so sometimes school is the only place where a child feels safe, where they feel welcome, where they feel an adult sees them and cares for them. And so, no, schools aren't telling families that they're wrong. Schools aren't telling children that their families are a threat. Schools are simply providing information that'll save lives. And it might be different from the information that children are getting at home, but children have the capacity to hold so much different

sources of information. And then that is the job of the school is to teach children to critically evaluate the sources of information and decide for themselves what is good information and bad information, how to be active engaged citizens, how to volunteer in their community. What does that mean to be a patriot? How does it show up in our lives? And all of these different lessons about being actively involved in our community, if we don't represent the full diversity of our humanity. If we don't talk about the true biological diversity and gender diversity that exists in our society, then children grow up to be teenagers and adults that end up having cognitive dissonance when they meet a transgender person, or they don't understand how the world around

them is so different than what they were taught in schools. And so we're inadequately preparing children if we're not being honest and accurate and age appropriate. And there are absolutely many, many ways to do this in age appropriate ways, starting from pre-K. all the way up through grade 12. Hey, Monk podcast listeners, I wanted to let you know about our other weekly audio program. It's called Friday Focus. And hey, guess what? It comes out each and every Friday.

It's half an hour long. And it provides you with a masterclass on international events, all the big issues and ideas shaping our world. We've got that for you. Each and every Friday here at the Monk debate, simply access via our world. website, www.w monk debates.com. Click on Friday Focus in the top right navigation. You'll get all the details or check out a sample of the program in the same podcast feed as the main monk debates podcast. I hope you'll join us for the next edition of the Friday Focus podcast. Now back to our program.

Welcome back to our debate today. Be it resolved. Teaching gender identity has no place in the K through five school curriculum. Jonathan Butcher is arguing in favor of the motion and Elizabeth Meyer is arguing against. So Liz, you just brought up grade 12 and in this debate we're talking about JK to grade 5, but I do want to ask you about the later school years if we can because I know you have expertise in that arena as well. So earlier in the debate, you said that many kids know even before the age of two that they did not fit in the gender to which they were assigned at birth. So I want to ask you about a child who is born as a girl. She lives for many years as a girl. She identifies as a girl. And then she gets to high school. And she starts to identify as a male and want to be addressed

with he, him pronouns. Do you think in this case where the student comes to this realization much later in life, she doesn't feel this way when she's two, three, or four? This is happening in her teens. Do you see how in this case the teachers or the school, might have influence over her decisions. I think the way the school can impact when a child is ready to share information about themselves with the rest of the world is by signaling to children that they'll be affirmed and loved and welcomed if this change is something that they want to go public with. It's not that they've changed their minds or they think they're in the wrong body.

That discourse is outdated and frankly disrespectful to the transgender community. many trans people love their bodies. They just don't like that the rest of the world doesn't recognize who they are inside that body. And so the only thing that schools can do that would be harmful is to lie to the children or to tell the children that you cannot be this person in this school. Or I will not see you as you see yourself. I will not recognize or validate the identity that you have taken the risk and been vulnerable enough to share and trust me with.

And that trust that adults, teachers, educators in school have with youth is important and vital to their belonging and academic success at school. So we can't violate that trust. We have to support these children. And by creating safe and affirming environments, we're not creating contagions. We're not placing ideas that weren't already there in the first place. We're simply creating a context where an individual finally feels safe enough and proud enough to share publicly what they have known for a very long time privately. Jonathan, do you want to come back on that point? Well, again, I would say that this is the only case that I can think of in a medical situation

where a child diagnoses themselves and adults will affirm it without questioning at all what else is going on in that child's lives. If a child says that they are not the same sex, they are making a judgment about their own physical body, in which case in virtually no other medical instance can we say that we allow a child to make a statement about their own body and not question what is going on without further investigation of what's going on in that child's head and that child's body. And I would say, too, right, the issue with the curriculum as it goes from K3 to K5 into middle school and into high school, the fact is, is that the adults are not even comfortable

with what is being taught. There are plenty of examples that I could list off for you right now of parents going to a school board meeting, reading the text from material that's available in either a classroom or a school library young people, and the school board tells them to stop because it is too erotic, right, or it is too sexually explicit. The adults recognize that this is not material that is appropriate for young kids, and they've said so in school board meetings. They've said this materialism safe to read out loud. In one case, I think, they said that young children might be watching the school board meeting, so they wanted the parents to stop. The irony, of course,

is that the book is already in the classroom, already in the school library. We have got to be very upfront here, that the material that is in this text, talking about young people's own own sexuality, right, at a young age is not appropriate through K through 5. It absolutely isn't. If you're going to introduce this idea of the ambiguous concept, you can choose your own gender later in a child's educational career, when the child may be have enough facts, right, have enough understanding to figure out whether or not this applies to them. That's a discussion to be had between parents and educators. Well, as I said before, when we talk about gender, we're not talking about sexuality. Do not confuse the two. It's a very common trap.

that people ask us to fall into. And the cases that you're referring to are cases where people have taken, they've cherry-picked books from the school library that are not being taught as part of the official curriculum. There are books that are made available for silent reading, for students to be able to explore ideas that are more expansive than what teachers are allowed

or have time to develop planned instruction around. And so what we're talking about is censorship. Wait, but if it's silent reading, should they not be saying it out loud? If it's for silent reading, then should they be afraid to say it out loud? No, they shouldn't be afraid. say it out loud, but we shouldn't be censoring books.

Then why can't you not read it out of board meeting? Why can't you read it at a board meeting? Because you're right. There are all ages at a board meeting, but when you check a book out of the library, you're not reading it to a class of kindergartners. You're a 12-year-old. But if it's available in the elementary school library. Okay, I'm just going to step in here for a second.

This has been a fulsome debate. But before we go to closing statements, I want to ask you, Jonathan, about Florida's parental rights in education bill. So this is the so-called don't-say gay bill. which bans classroom discussion about gender identity and sexual orientation for public school children in kindergarten through grade three. So according to this law, a gay teacher cannot even mention his husband when he's talking to his students about what he did over the weekend. And some people would argue that this goes beyond what we're discussing today, that this is homophobic

and kids should be exposed to many different family and relationship scenarios. So Jonathan, what is your reaction to this bill? Well, for one, it doesn't say, don't say gay. That's not in the language, and there's no reference to that. The most important part of that provisions in that bill say you should not teach the ideas of gender to children in K through three, period. Liz, your response? Well, it's not that simple. It actually prohibits the discussion of LGBTQ families in the K-3 curriculum.

We have children, my own, included, who come from families, that have parents who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender. And if we can't talk about families in the curriculum, what are we supposed to be talking about with kindergartners and first graders? We know families come in all shapes and sizes. We have nuclear families. We have multigenerational families. We have LGBTQ families.

And so if we're not allowed to talk about the different kinds of family structures with children coming to school for the first time and leaving their families at home, what is the curriculum in kindergarten and first grade supposed to be about if it's not about relationships and families and our communities. And so that is exactly what the bill is prohibiting and limiting the possibility of an LGBTQ teacher talking about their family, a child talking about their parent

or their two moms or their two dads or their trans mom or their trans dad. And these are the realities of all the families in every state, in every region of North America, there are families that have LGBTQ family members. And if we say we can't talk about it at school, children learn that it's shameful, it's harmful. My own child in second grade was bullied

because people told him he must come from a fake family because there's no way he could have two moms. And if we don't teach against that kind of belief, that ignorance that happens without instruction, then we have opportunities for children to feel like they are not welcome in that school community. Jonathan, do you want to come back on that before we go to closing statements? Well, I'm very sorry to hear that any child was bullied ever for any reason. So I think that it is the responsibility of the adults in the school to make sure that that doesn't happen. whether it's race, whether it's gender or the concept of gender or whether it's sex, right, there shouldn't be bullying. Nevertheless, the point in the beginning of the debate was whether or not

this material was appropriate for children in grades K through five. And again, teaching young people the facts about biology and the facts about the world around them is absolutely essential for them to understand later in life the more complicated issues they're going to be presented with. And so it still remains, right, that parents and teachers should be absolutely the ones decided. what should be presented in schools and then how students, who may be confused about their sex, receive appropriate counseling, empathy, and help with whatever other mental health issues they may be struggling with. Thanks, Jonathan. Okay, we're going to go to closing statements now. Liz, you are arguing against our motion today, be resolved. Teaching gender identity has no place

in the K-3-5 school curriculum. What main points do you want to leave us with? I believe gender diversity is essential to include in the K-3-5 school curriculum. Erasing trans and non-binary people from lessons at school won't stop them from existing. It just prevents them from being treated as fully human. Excluding planned lessons about gender in schools allows biases and stereotypes to persist, and these biases and stereotypes are at the root of gender inequality, which includes pay gaps, domestic violence, sexual assault, bullying and harassment, as well as youth homelessness, suicide rates, and murders of trans women.

Public schools are by definition open to everyone and designed to serve our society by preparing students academically and socially to live and work productively in a DERFERS society. As such, it's the duty of public schools to provide spaces and curricula that accurately and honestly reflect the diversity and reality of the world and prepare students to interact with people in their community with dignity and respect. teaching about gender at all ages is absolutely developmentally appropriate. Kids know their gender as early as age two, and most kindergarten curricula teach about developing a sense of self, understanding families, community, positive interactions with others, along with social skills like listening, sharing, kindness, respect, and keeping your hands to yourself. Our gender is actually a very central part of each of these concepts and all people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. even if they're different from us or we don't fully understand who they are or who they're telling us they want to be. I have presented legal, ethical, psychological, philosophical, and pedagogical arguments to support that the best approach to teaching about gender in elementary schools is inclusive and diverse.

As I have consistently demonstrated, we already teach about gender in so many ways in schools. And so the question is not if we teach about gender, but it is always about how. if we value human dignity and care about preparing productive and engaged citizens, if we want to reduce discrimination and gender-based violence, then we must teach about gender in accurate and inclusive ways from the earliest of ages. As such, I continue to stand firmly against today's resolution. Thank you, Liz, for that excellent closing statement. Okay, Jonathan, I'm going to put a few minutes on the show clock for you. Let's have your closing statement arguing in favor of the resolution, be it resolved, teaching gender identity has no place in the K-5 school curriculum.

Thank you. You are born either male or female. You are born with the ability to produce either eggs or sperm, and no redefinition of a term is going to change that. In fact, the idea of gender has been redefined over the years by, in fact, different critical gender theorists. The truth is, is that the children who are most vulnerable today in public schools are those who are struggling to learn how to read and do math. And those are the children who are in the areas of low-income urban cities around the United States. Schools have already underprepared these young children. So to present a highly fluid and very ambiguous concept, such as gender, layered on top of the biological facts between male and female, is already going to be confusing to young people.

The danger that you run is not only that you're introducing subjects on top of what schools should be doing, preparing students to be both members of their community but also productive in civil society is that you are setting them up to accept the idea that they can diagnose themselves in terms of their confusion about their sex. They will receive affirmation from adults and then they could progress down the path of irreparable changes to their bodies based on the drugs that they may receive and then surgical procedures that may happen later in life that they will that they may regret for the rest of their lives. You are setting children up for a lifetime of confusion. We need to set at a young age, age-appropriate material that parents and teachers agree with,

and then decide later when children are older, whether or not and how you can address this issue that some people may be confused about their biological sex. Thank you, Jonathan, and thank you, Liz. This is a debate that is not only timely but very contentious. and you both provided important and knowledge-based arguments, and you are willing to engage with each other. And that's something, frankly, that does not happen very often when it comes to this topic. So on behalf of the Monk Debates and our audience, I just want to thank you. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Jonathan and Elizabeth.

You've given us a lot to think about. If you have any feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email at podcast at monkdebates.com. A reminder that our weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus, comes out, you guessed it, every Friday. Join Janice Stein and Richard Griffiths as they delve into the big news stories of the week. You can access the Friday Focus podcast on our website, wwww monkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. I'm Ricky Gerwitz.

The Monk Debates are a project of the Oriya and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Adam Karsh. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.