Transgender Sex Education for Primary School Children

The full extent of the indoctrination of Australian primary school children crystallised for me soon after I hopped on a domestic flight to the Gold Coast. Next to me sat a grandma with her bag of knitting nestled on her lap, ready for a chin-wag. The conversation turned to her eleven-year-old granddaughter. Grandma was still in a state of confusion and shock about the girl’s announcement that she was “a pansexual”. Having made the leap of faith to send my children to be salt and light in a public school, this wasn’t the first eleven-year-old “pansexual” I’d encountered. However, I raised an eyebrow at the school her granddaughter attended. Deep in Victoria’s suburban sprawl, it was a world away from the progressive, utterly woke school environment within which these labels usually arise. Unsurprisingly, Grandma had no idea what “a pansexual” was and had been too afraid to ask. My explanation didn’t help her state of shock, until I reassured her that the eleven-year-old child had no real way of understanding what being “pansexual” meant in practice. It was simply one of a cornucopia of trendy labels on offer to impressionable tweens and teens.

At the time of that conversation, I was well versed in gender ideology—a cult-like doctrine of gender and sexuality that’s been propagandised throughout leftist-captured elite institutions by the so-called “transgender” sect and their allies. I’d supported a good friend whose husband’s mid-life crisis entailed “transitioning” to his “true self”—an actual woman and a lesbian, with the lesbian dating app to prove it. Upon their divorce, his “transition” gave him a boost in salary, freedom from responsibility (“I won’t see the children until they accept me as my true self!”), continuing celebration, more attention than he’d ever received in his ordinary white middle-class life, and a simpering audience of “allies” and other self-identified “transwomen”. He had obtained what our demented elites venerate the most: supposed “victim” status. My friend was left to pick up the pieces from the kind of man who calls his children “transphobic bigots” to their faces.

This report appears in October’s Quadrant.
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Another friend’s twelve-year-old daughter was well down the path to “transition”, having “socially transitioned” to a “he/they” (encouraged by the school for the first six months, without my friend’s knowledge), binding her breasts with a modern-day corset (as damaging today as it was in the seventeenth century), and ingesting the chemical attack of so-called puberty blockers with my friend’s eventual support. Of course, she was still allowed on the “all girls” soccer team, and welcomed at “all girls” sleepovers, because, wink, wink, she’s not really, you know … That they didn’t take the opportunity to let her feel the natural consequences of her decision shows the foolish mentality of the so-called progressive parent.

Even with this background knowledge, the insidiousness of regressive gender stereotypes and flight from biological reality in primary schools caught me by surprise. I’d endured the gender cult’s menacing self-declared “Progress Pride Flag”, hanging like a Soviet-era hammer and sickle in each classroom. (My children were carefully versed in the biblical truths that rainbows represent God’s promise to Noah, and that humility, not pride, is a virtue.) However, my radar hadn’t become finely tuned to the bureaucratic euphemisms that the permanent Green/Labor-conquered Victorian Department of Education uses to slip the new religion into the curriculum. This all changed two years ago when a friend’s son came home upset for being called a homophobic bigot. His crime? Telling the teacher that the way to determine one’s gender was to look in one’s underpants. Honestly, isn’t that the correct answer? Not in Danistan. According to the gender zealots, biological sex is a “social construct”. Being reasonable parents, my friends were furious and immediately called a meeting with the school principal. The answers they were given were unsatisfactory. No, what had been discussed—including any slides—would not be provided. No, there was nothing they could do except exclude their son from the deceptively named “health class”. (Although how long that choice will last is questionable—the classes are mandatory in most government high schools.) This seems to be a theme around the world, with one mother in London going so far as to spend two years and a court case trying to access the lesson plans her child’s school wished to conceal from parents. She ultimately failed, and still has no idea what her children were taught.

Had the “pansexual” granddaughter been taught something during a “health class”? How widespread was this? And where were they sneaking it in? It was obvious I needed to look into whatever scraps of the school curriculum I could find. What I found shocked me to my core. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages of militant extremist “trans” theology are being distilled into an attractive, colourful package, and implanted into our children’s consciousness. (I say theology because of the religion-like language and teachings, idolatrous rites and festivals, and guilt/shame transgressor punishment for blaspheming the new regime ideology, this “queer gnostic cult”.) I sifted through it all, including many of the references and resources (where they hide the bulk of the theology), and felt as if I had been slapped in the face. The twisted radicalism the Danistan regime calls “health education” (really theocratic religious instruction) forms part of the physical education curriculum! Alongside soccer and netball lessons, children are not only exposed to, but taught as fact, ultra-radical gender ideology. They don’t have to be boys and girls any more, they can be, if they feel moved by the gender spirit, a fluid mixture of “gender identity”, “gender expression”, “sex assigned at birth”, and “physical attraction”.

How did we end up teaching these confused tenets to impressionable eleven- and twelve-year-olds? I discovered that the progenitors of the gender cult, such as radical cultural revolutionary Judith Butler (“they/them”), started by spreading this nonsense throughout American university campuses. The ideas then oozed forth rapidly into Australian universities, and into the curriculum via the Safe Schools Coalition. It was no small feat: gender theo­logy seems to re-promulgate, in a warped fashion, the gender stereotypes the twentieth-century Left told us it was revolting against. Boys with long hair and effeminate characteristics who prefer the company of girls are encouraged to consider themselves to be actual girls, taught they were “born in the wrong body”. Girls who are uncomfortable with their growing breasts and the onset of their period—or simply don’t want to live life as a member of the victim-group called women—are taught they might be happier as a boy. And, they are assured, this “transition” is possible, and normal! Children are also inculcated in the belief that anyone who speaks ill of “transition” is a bad person.

To be crystal clear—during the time when children’s bodies are developing (or are about to develop) in strange and new ways, they’re being taught by trusted teachers that feeling uncomfortable in their bodies might mean it’s the “wrong body”. What youngster feels thoroughly comfortable in their body? I certainly didn’t! To make these bizarre beliefs even more attractive to children, the “gender unicorn” resource is used to illustrate them. (Why do you think the activists chose a unicorn? Because little girls, and a handful of boys, love them almost as much as they love rainbows.)

As I read on, I learned from these doctrinaires that we don’t say “sex” any more, because it’s “vague and transphobic”. When I clicked on the link to show a further clarification of this statement, I was directed to this fantastical propaganda piece:

Time and time again, transmisogynists and transphobes go back to that old excuse that they are just standing up for the reality of “biological sex” when they spew their ignorance and hate. They say that no matter what a trans woman does, no matter what she believes, she’s still actually a man. Others cede the fact that trans women are women, but stop there and say “gender is what’s between your ears, sex is what’s between your legs” and therefore trans women are still males. Although this is a popular idea, it is based on a misunderstanding of biology, social constructs and anatomy, and it needs to stop.           

This is the sort of language that teachers are being told to use when they proselytise about “gender” with primary school children. My friend’s son being called a bigot by his Year 5 teacher suddenly made sense.

Even if you exclude your children from “health class”, there’s ample opportunity for the gender missionaries to attempt to convert them. In my child’s class, when the first child was baptised into the gender congregation, all the other the children were required to write down and display their pronouns or neo-pronouns (a religious rite). Failure to do so would be considered bullying and bigotry (heresy). Equally, when these ideas are presented, children were told everyone is on a neo-genderist spectrum—therefore, it is implied, “queer”—and can have their own special flag, no matter how they “identify”. How appealing for tweens! I didn’t find out about this until I was inspecting a group project on my Year 5 son’s laptop. Slightly triggered, I did my best to remain calm and ask why the “asexual” flag had appeared on the final page of the presentation. “It’s Sarah’s flag,” he said with an uninterested shrug. Upon further investigation, I learned that Sarah (not her real name) is not the only one in my son’s peer group to “choose” “asexual”, which according to gender doctrine means they are not sexually attracted to anyone. Most eleven- and twelve-year-olds are not sexually attracted to anyone, and it is inappropriate to sexualise children by discussing sexual attraction in the first place! But good luck convincing a wild-eyed true believer they are doing something harmful rather than generously and bravely liberating us all from the oppressive chains of biological reality.

Whether one’s child will be converted and “identify” into the roughly 2 per cent of the “gender diverse” isn’t easy to determine. But you can increase your odds if you label your child with autism. Children led to think they have autism are much more likely to go on to believe they have “gender dysphoria”, the diagnosis that leads to the “treatment” of “gender affirmation”. It makes sense. If the self-esteem boost of empowerment and popularity by declaring to the world you’ve “always been trapped in the wrong body” works for a self-absorbed forty-something man during his mid-life crisis, how much more potent is membership in this victimhood group for a sensitive, socially awkward child who isn’t coping well with puberty?

Once a child “comes out” as “non-binary” or “trans”, the religious rites begin: social transition, then endocrine-system-destroying puberty blockers, then iatrogenic-disease-causing cross-sex hormones, then irreversible mutilation surgery to slice them into a grotesque facsimile of what the opposite sex is said to look like. Never mind that much of Europe has woken up to the worst medical scandal since eugenics. Here in Australia, it’s very hard to get off the gender theology express train once it leaves the station. And despite the hype, the evidence that puberty blockers are “reversible” is flimsy at best, meaning children who desist will suffer lifelong effects. We may never know the true impact, however, as most academic research in the field has been taken over by gender zealots, making free scientific inquiry impossible.

None of this is helped by self-styled progressive parents who I’ve watched delight in their newly “trans” or “non-binary” child. In fact, there’s a term for the phenomenon: transhausen by proxy. These parents spread the religion by posting gender theology on Facebook and have ceremonial bonfires to rid the house of all non-affirming (blasphemous) items, including Harry Potter books (purge that TERF J.K. Rowling!). They chastise (as heretical bigots) anyone who “misgenders” or “deadnames” their precious ticket to sympathy and victimhood points in the endless parade of faux victimhood that modern Australia has sadly become. And they will hold on to their beliefs for dear life.

Unlike such true believers, most parents are bewildered and shocked that their previously pink-loving princess has cut her hair, chosen a new boy’s name (usually ridiculous, given the age group), and has a “gender clinic” appointment booked, thanks to their “supportive” teacher. The parents often don’t understand their child has been shanghaied into a religious cult, and short of de-programming them, they’re left with few options. Parents who push back will be labelled transphobic bigots (heretics) in need of re-education (conversion). Terrifyingly, attempting to stop this tide is forbidden, and is unironically considered “conversion therapy” by the ruling regime, increasingly punishable as a crime. Naturally, only one direction of “conversion therapy” can be punished—the gender god is a jealous one, and conversion to the gender religion is cause for celebration. In some Australian states, you can look forward to your child being branded by the state a “mature minor” which allows your parental rights to be taken away if you push back too much. The forced obeisance is soul-destroying and punishes the natural protective instinct parents have for their children.

A new book, Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans, catalogues sobering stories of despair from parents around the world, including Australians, who were often caught unawares and unprepared by their child’s “transition” (initiation). Many have been shunned by their children for refusing to affirm their choices. Others, including many who have putatively “accepted” their child’s transition in order to keep them close, worry about the physical consequences for their children’s bodily health—the very real risks of blood clots, stroke, dementia, heart attacks and the other known effects of Frankenstein-esque cross-hormone guesswork. It makes heart-breaking reading and becomes all the more Kafkaesque when we consider the government is silencing and criminalising dissident voices, along with the ultimate insult of calling this government repression “inclusion”. There are countless books and articles on this phenomenon. (If you want to learn more, start with Binary Australia, www.binary.org.au.) However, few seem to appreciate how the medical profession became an ideologically captured handmaiden of gender theology. The answer is in the origins of the original “disorder”.

In the before times when psychiatry branded homosexuality a “disorder”, transsexualism was not a cultural norm. The term “transsexualism” was coined by Harry Benjamin, a German-born American endocrinologist and sexologist, in the 1950s, and was later picked up by psychiatry in its 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) in the category of “Gender Identity Disorders”. Gender theology and Big Psychiatry are sympatico because the diagnosis (of psychiatric disorders) or categorisation (of gender) rely on subjective, feelings-based theories. They share some common ancestry from psychoanalytic theory. Both are buoyed by well-meaning professionals and supported in schools. Both are heavily criticised, and yet somehow remain above criticism. Those harmed by each either remain silent or tend to be drowned out and ignored when they speak up.

Pathologising feelings of dissatisfaction with the body diverges from pure gender theology. But it is necessary to pathologise those feelings if a person wishes to realise their “true” gender through any medical intervention. Helpfully, psychiatry has a range of categories—“body dysmorphic disorders” cover a fixation on something that the person believes is wrong with their body; “body integrity disorders” include those who wish to amputate a healthy limb; and of course “gender dysphoria” (the rebranded term for transsexualism) covers those whose gender and “sex assigned at birth” are said (by the gender theologians) to be mismatched. Regardless of how these powerful elites engage in their classifications, the overarching message is clear. If a person is dissatisfied with his or her body, there is something wrong with his or her brain (or body) that needs to be—and should be—fixed. Indeed, about twenty years ago in Scotland, an obliging surgeon decided to take treatment to its logical conclusion and amputated the healthy limbs of some psychiatric patients in a well-meaning yet demented attempt to relieve suffering.

Not so different to the 1949 Nobel Prize-winning lobotomy (called leucotomy in Australia), where the part of the brain thought to be causing the problem is surgically disconnected to relieve suffering. Lobotomy is an absurdly destructive “treatment” (still practised today in some forms), but it is a comparably heavy-handed psychiatric “treatment” to the chemical and literal castration of children through puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries like hysterectomy, double mastectomy, gonadectomy, and the excision of perfectly healthy tissue and other procedures to help children appear as the opposite sex—or as an ambiguous or designer gender. This butchery is similarly irreversible and has about the same evidence base and long-term success rate. To quote an excellent review of leucotomy in Western Australia: “the troubling lack of criteria for measuring leucotomy’s outcomes reminds us that the history of psychiatry is peppered with treatments that lacked a robust clinical evidence base”.

The official Australian Standards of Care for children and adolescents declared by the gender theologians to be “trans and gender diverse” requires a rubber stamp diagnosis of “Gender Dysphoria in Adolescence” before any “treatment” can commence. Without a diagnosis to legitimise it, such medical intervention in healthy children would be as unjustifiable as female genital mutilation for (other) religious reasons. The gender dogmatists now wish to have the diagnostic criteria removed altogether, finally smashing the “heteronormative binary” and plunging us into a world where “gender queerness” is the unquestioned norm. But they’re not there yet. In the meantime, with the combined power of Big Psychiatry’s disorder-treatment paradigm and the activists’ relentless march of queer theological propaganda through the school curriculum, there’s little to be done to stop it when children truly believe they were “born in the wrong body”. The troubles caused by a life situation, hormones, emotions and learned ideology remain after transition. The effects of the “treatment”, let alone the lifelong dependence on the medical and pharmaceutical industries, cannot be fully comprehended by a child. Even if these ruinous long-term effects could be grasped by the child or teen, we must remember that the gender-cult-captured child is a true believer. Many see their future bodily damage as the price worth paying for “gender” salvation. There’s no way to explain to your child the cognitive dissonance that may arise when maturity eventuates, causing great distress, painful regret and detransition, if not suicide.

Having the scales peeled from my eyes has been an unsettling experience. Now I’ve learned we are under constant assault from hostile, faux-religious ideology, I’m forced to scrutinise everything, for each of my children. At our school’s Book Week, I must intercept the flood of “inclusive” books and pray a drag queen doesn’t make an unannounced appearance. Theatre excursions require investigation—who’s running it and what’s the theme? As for the endless post-Covid “wellbeing programs” … honestly, I’m thankful when it’s just another ex-footballer spruiking more generic self-help positivity! Ultimately, I’m not concerned my children will turn up one day with an appointment to the “gender clinic” house of worship, as I’ve done my best to inoculate them against the poisonous colourful candies the LGBTUVWXYZ+ wing of Danistan’s regime is selling to minors. I’m more concerned my children could buy into the less extreme elements of this joyless, puritanical religion of self-obsession, and either pick “their own” ridiculous flag or spend their youth as (gulp) “allies”. (A friend’s nineteen-year-old daughter is an “ally”, and it’s like living with the self-loathing lovechild of Greta Thunberg and an Antifa fanatic.)

Many of my fellow parents have opted out of the public school system, either home schooling or sending the children to conservative Islamic or Christian schools (which is probably the only sensible response, and in line with current trends). At least those choices remain—although for how long may depend on the outcome of the Australian Law Reform Commission’s report on Religious Educational Institutions and Anti-Discrimination Laws, due at the end of this year. Don’t expect much pushback from our elected politicians. Only a handful have the backbone to stand up for children’s rights, let alone safeguard them from radical trans indoctrinators. I’ve spoken with state and federal conservative MPs who wholeheartedly agree with my concerns but do nothing about it. (Don’t worry, their children are safely tucked away at conservative private schools.) I can understand their hesitancy—those who do take a stand are ostracised and often fired. Instead, it’s left to parents and grandparents, whose vigilance is mandatory.

When I was growing up, I had a friend (a twelve-year-old girl), who for about a year assured me and anyone who would listen that she was a boy. There was no hysterical “affirmation” mandate in the culture then. We just accepted she was like George from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, and that was okay because we had other things to think about. She desisted in this odd belief and grew into a happy lesbian woman. Thirty years on, with puberty blockers, breast binders and affirmation, any such similar young girl is at grave risk of being robbed of the opportunity to grow comfortable with her body and accept her natal sex. Heartbreakingly, this is so with a friend’s daughter, now fifteen years old, who’s about to commence testosterone. Soon she’ll have facial hair, a strange faux-male voice, and the male pattern baldness of her father. Social proof, affirmation and celebration have locked her into a path most cannot deviate from, even when they realise they’ve made a terrible mistake. Primary schools becoming the delivery mechanism for these religious cult-like ideas is but one of the escalations in the endless cultural revolution fomented by the Left.

Margot Pearce is a suburban mum who remains in Danistan due to extended family ties and inertia.