A recent report revealed that Fort Worth ISD libraries contain shocking amounts of transgender sex ed content that is available to kids as young as kindergarten without parental notice or consent. But this is a Texas-sized problem from Amarillo to Brownsville and from El Paso to Texarkana.
Here’s a sampling of results from some of the state’s largest school districts when searching for the keyword “transgender” in the District’s library catalog (a “record” is typically an individual title):
(El Paso ISD, Fort Bend ISD, Katy ISD, Garland ISD, Lewisville ISD, Frisco ISD, Northwest ISD, Tyler ISD, and Mansfield ISD had transgender content but the library catalog could only be searched by campus.)
The listed school districts educate over one million Texas kids!
As an example of content, several districts have copies of the kindergarten level picture book I Am Jazz, described as, “From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl’s brain in a boy’s body.” Many districts have copies of the fourth-grade level Lily and Dunkin. This innocuous sounding title talks about hormone blockers, sex change surgery, and taking estrogen.
But did you also know thousands of Texas school children from third to sixth grades have been exposed to transgender content without parental notice through the Texas Bluebonnet reading competition?
Each year the Texas Library Association (TLA) nominates 20 books for third through sixth graders called the Texas Bluebonnet master list. Thousands of public school libraries participate in the program which encourages kids to read at least five books on the master list and vote for their favorite to win the Texas Bluebonnet Award.
Participating libraries typically make all of the 20 books available and feature them in a prominent place to encourage kids to read them. Extra programming activities occur throughout the year to highlight the books including book discussions and author presentations.
For the 2017-2018 school year one of the 20 books was The Best Man by Richard Peck. The story “is bookended by weddings. In the first, Archer is 6, a ring bearer and clueless about love. By the second, he’s 12, a best man and a lot more enlightened: the uncle he idolizes is marrying a teacher he idolizes. The newlyweds are men.”
The book promotes transgenderism with a scene from a sixth-grade class where the students instruct a substitute teacher that she cannot call them “boys and girls.” One can get a sense of the book’s age-inappropriate topics in the suggested discussion questions like the following:
“Mrs. Stanley calls the class ‘boys and girls’ instead of ‘people’. Why is this a mistake? What do you want a teacher to call your class by? Why?”
Transgender and gender identity sex education content is medically and scientifically inaccurate and educationally unsuitable for school-aged children. And such content certainly should not be provided to students without parental notice and consent. The inaccuracy of this content is a legitimate pedagogical reason for the removal of the material.
Thousands of taxpayer dollars have filled Texas public school libraries with sex-ed content that promotes hormone blockers and sex change surgery. Texas public schools need to be more focused on preparing students for the workforce – not a sex change.