On "Radical Indoctrination In K-12 Schooling"
Part I - "Dangerous Gender Ideology"
On 29 Jan 2025, the new administration released an(other) Executive Order titled "Ending Radical Indoctrination In K-12 Schooling." The Order directs the Department of Education, and various other federal agencies, to assess the extent to which schools that receive federal funding run afoul of the various odious policy prescriptions outlined in it. The overall effect, in the words of Chris Geidner (whose Substack newsletter, The Law Dork, is indispensable reading for following legal developments affecting the LGBTQ community), is to "encourag[e] the very worst actors to act even worse."
Its major themes include:
That trans people are aberrant, deviant, undesirable, and should be treated as something less than human;
That primary and secondary education in America is insufficiently "patriotic," even describing several ideas as "anti-American" (including, say, that trans people should be accorded the same dignity and respect as anyone else, or that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow is still widely felt today.);
That children are being taught (nay, indoctrinated with) "dangerous gender ideology," even implying that some teachers, counselors, or other school officials are "unlawfully practicing medicine by offering diagnoses and treatment without the requisite license." (This part is truly bat-wacka-looney-doodle-shit-tunes insane, the notion that school officials are not only actually diagnosing children with gender dysphoria, but providing treatment. Such treatment is referred to throughout the Order as "surgical and chemical mutilation." It seems eminently safe to presume that no K-12 school is prescribing and/or dispensing hormone therapy, or performing transitioning surgery.);
That children are being "compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics." This gives voice to the upswell in complaints in recent years (mostly by middle-to-upper class white parents) that learning about the unvarnished history of slavery and its disgusting discriminatory legacy in America makes their children feel bad or guilty, intentionally;
That schools are "demanding acquiescence to “White Privilege” or “unconscious bias,” [which] actually promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity." Ah, yes, the old political right's hobgoblin of invidious "reverse racism." 🙄 We may presume they actually mean that schools are demanding acquiescence to the existence of those things, not to the phenomena themselves; the problem these concepts seek to address is, quite literally, society's long acquiescence to their reality. (Well written these Executive Orders are not.)
That this veritable parade of horribles may, in some cases, violate federal law, including "the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), and sex-based equality and opportunity, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX)."
This essay addresses principally the elements of the Executive Order addressing gender, with a future installment, Part II, to cover the subject of racial discrimination.
The Order directs the Secretaries of Education, Health and Human Services(?), and Defense(??), and the Attorney General each to develop an "Ending Indoctrination Strategy." The key features of each such strategy are to include:
Identifying all "federal funding sources and streams" that may go toward "promoting gender ideology" or "discriminatory equity ideology."
Enumerating each agency's process for preventing or rescinding federal funding for said "ideologies," or supporting the "social transition of a minor student."
Identifying possible violations of PPRA, FERPA, Title VI, or Title IX.
Further, the Order directs the reestablishment of the "President's Advisory 1776 Commission," comprising no more than 20 unpaid members, for two-year terms. The Order provides for further "patriotic education" activities, which appear to be largely innocuous. The commission, as described in the Order, may (hopefully) rise to a level no worse than Mostly Harmless.
The real meat of the Order concerns its definitions of "dangerous gender ideology" and "discriminatory equity ideology."
Concerning "gender ideology," the political right, and now the presidential administration, loudly and unequivocally proclaims that every child is born unambiguously female or male. This is, of course, simply not true. Somewhere between .02% and .05% of annual births are intersex children. Using the 2023 number of births in the US of roughly 3,600,000, and an intersex birth rate (using a Solomon split down the middle) of .035%, something like 126,000 intersex children are born annually in the US. This undeniable reality undercuts the foundational assumption of the anti-trans community that all people are either female or male, no exceptions. ("God created them, man and woman. And God doesn't make mistakes.")
This calculation doesn't even account for the number of people (some born intersex, many not) officially diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a formal diagnosis in the American Psychiatry Association's DSM-V. From 2017-2021, an average of about 24,400 individuals aged 6-17 received the diagnosis. Of course, not all people diagnosed with gender dysphoria undergo transitioning treatment. For 2022, the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute found that there are about 1,600,000 Americans who identify as transgender. Vox reports that the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 61% of trans and gender nonconforming respondents have medically transitioned (e.g., via hormone treatments, what the Executive Order disparagingly calls "chemical mutilation"). The survey found that 33% of respondents indicated that they had surgically transitioned (i.e., the Order's so-called "surgical mutilation").
We might wonder why such a relatively small (though certainly significant) percentage of the population provokes such rabid fear and hate on the political right. One explanation is that Americans, on average, wildly overestimate the percentage of the population that is trans. Jonathan V. Last, on 22 Nov 2024, published an illuminating article analyzing this, and other, gross misapprehensions by the general public. Last informs us that, in a survey released on 15 Mar 2022, YouGov reported that, on average, respondents estimated the trans population to be 21% (not a typo) of all Americans. The actual figure is just under 1%. (For context, note that respondents also estimated the Black population at 41%, which is actually 12-13%. They also estimated the Jewish population to be 30%, rather than the actual ~2%.)
All that said, irrespective of the size of the trans population, these are all human beings, Americans, who have suffered from a medical condition that's been formally recognized for decades. Each deserves all the respect, every courtesy, that we extend to any other of our fellow citizens. Still, one can get a sense of the why the hateful reaction against trans people has reached its current level in our country--people believe that 1 in 5 Americans is trans. And, the political right is in large measure convinced (as it has been for decades with the gay community) that trans people are out to find converts, to convince unsuspecting schoolchildren that they should "become" trans, abetted by school officials themselves. This notion is, in a word, poppycock.
This official sanctioning of hate toward a vulnerable minority is not only vile and disgusting, but a standard authoritarian tactic. When times are tough, we, all of us, tend to look for scapegoats, the people whose fault it is that interest rates are high and groceries too damned expensive. The demagogic authoritarian exploits that tendency to direct society's ire at one or more out-groups. The noblest among us resist this hateful reflex. Let us all increasingly ennoble American society by refusing to castigate such out-groups, rendering them even more vulnerable to discrimination, hate, and even violence.