Don't stop now

Five more ways to help expel gender ideology from NZ schools

Thank you if you submitted to the public consultation on Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE). But that is just the beginning of removing the insidious influence of transgender ideas from our classrooms. As NZ schools are self-managing entities, many decisions are made at the local school board of trustees (BOT) level where the government is unable to intervene, meaning parents must take up the challenge. Here are five more actions parents need to take before we can be sure the transgender dragon is dead:

1. Kick out InsideOUT

In a recent win for sanity, after complaints from parents, Hobbsonville Point Secondary School cancelled its Lil Gay Out event, something it had held for several years as part of Schools Pride Week.

Another win was achieved this month by one of our supporters who managed to stop her primary school from donating money from Pink Shirt Day to InsideOut. She went armed with accurate information and found the principal already had his doubts but, initially, nothing changed because an activist teacher on the staff was pushing for InsideOut. It was our supporter’s perseverance, with support from another parent, that finally prompted the principal to take action and remove InsideOut from the school’s advertising.

Notably, the two mothers informed the principal that their children would not be attending school on Pink Shirt Day if Inside Out was to benefit. Now that schools have their attendance levels closely monitored by the MOE, withdrawing your child from inappropriate lessons has become quite a powerful lever.

Schools Pride Week

This is an annual event promoted by InsideOut and is being held this year from June 2-6. Now is the time to find out if your school is involved and to make your opposition known. We have written previously about Schools Pride Week and the same dubious activities are on offer this year.

However, there is a new item on their website - a template letter for schools to use in response to complaints from parents. It begins predictably by defending Pride activities in schools with the falsehood, "…there is nothing sexual or inappropriate about learning about the existence of different family structures, relationships, body variations and gender expression”. A quick look at the Out on the Shelves campaign that runs concurrently with Pride week proves that indoctrination into trangender ideology is the purpose of most of the books InsideOut recommends.

The letter ends by openly threatening consequences if children are kept home from school during Schools Pride Week:

Students aged 6-16 years old are legally required to attend school every day - a school affirming their support for rainbow communities is not a valid reason for keeping your child home from school. Schools’ Pride Week does not disrupt our usual curriculum or academic programme, but keeping your child home will. If you choose to keep them home for this reason, it will be considered an unjustified absence. Most schools have a 90% attendance policy, and students who don't achieve this often can't attend things like school balls and sports outings etc.

Parents should not succumb to this threat. Under the Bill of Rights Act everyone has the right to hold and express their own personal beliefs and you are within your rights to protect your children from a week of propaganda about a belief system with which you do not agree.

2. Cancel Navigating the Journey

Navigating the Journey (NTJ) is a commercial resource published by Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa (fomerly Family Planning) that schools purchase to use in their RSE lessons. It is replete with transgender ideology, right from the age of five.

In the NTJ Level 1 lesson plans, after teaching 5-7 year olds the correct names for their genitals, teachers are scripted to say, “Some people’s bodies don’t have typical “boy” or “girl” parts and that is OK.”

Having only just learned the correct name for a penis, young children are immediately given the very confusing message that someone with a penis might be a girl. “Encourage students to recognise that some peoples’ biological sex is different to their gender identity. For example, someone born with a penis may identify as a girl.” (p52 NTJ, Y1-2)

Read more about the unscientific and inappropriate content in NTJ in our submission to the ERO review of RSE last year. For secondary students, refer to Rodney Hide’s attempts to engage the BOT at Wakatipu High School about the explicit content in the NTJ lessons for Year 9 (12-14 year olds).

After the RSE Guide was removed in March, the Minister of Education directed schools to follow the 2007 RSE curriculum in the interim before the new curriculum is set in Term 4, 2025. NTJ categorically does not meet the 2007 curriculum and it should have been dumped at the same time as the RSE Guide it was based on.

However, Sexual Wellbeing Aotearoa has informed schools that NTJ complies with the 2007 curriculum and many schools are continuing to use this resource. If your school is one of them, parents need to put pressure on the BOT to have it removed.

The 2007 RSE curriculum

What does the 2007 Health curriculum say about RSE? There are four strands in Health eduction: A - Personal growth and physical development, B - Movement concept and motor skills, C- Relationships with other people, and D - Healthy communities and environments.

Translated into teaching topics, the concepts in strand A to be taught to seven year olds (Level 2) are straightforward and simple:

Note, the discussion is student-led and about personal qualities, not the contested idea of identities as pushed in the removed RSE Guide, below.

The 2007 curriculum also pays heed to the beliefs and feelings of other people, as in strand A for Level 3 (9-11 year olds):

This is in stark contrast to NTJ which teaches as fact a set of beliefs held by a minority. The resource for Level 3 suggests teachers use language like this when showing reproductive organs without male or female labels (p62):

• About half the people in the world will have something that looks like this (show female reproductive system).

• About half will have something like this (show male system).

• Some people will have a different combination of ‘male’ and ‘female’ reproductive parts and genitalia. These people are called intersex.

• Do our body parts define who we are? (No. Some people with penises might feel more like girls and some people who identify as boys might have female body parts.) [Emphasis added.]

Teaching children about intersex conditions and transgender ideation is scientifically inaccurate and not appropriate for their age. It is introducing children to concepts that are beyond their cognitive and emotional ability to fully understand and thereby creating anxiety, disaffection, and the potential to generate very serious mental health disorders.

The new draft RSE curriculum does not contain any reference to gender identity and correctly identifies the binary reproductive system in humans.

Navigating the Journey is not compliant with the new direction of RSE and should no longer be in use in any schools.

For an effective complaint to the BOT, keep IGCP in mind - Investigate, take Group action, stay Calm, Persevere.

• Be well-informed. Investigate the resources supplied by NTJ that are being used at your school and be specific about your reasons for objecting to them.

• Gather some other parents and go as a Group to make your complaint.

• Stay Calm and polite and keep a record of your meeting.

• Persevere. Follow up if no action has been taken or, if your request is declined, gather more evidence and more parents and try again.

3. Interrogate school policies

Are your school’s policies and practices legally compliant? Policies can usually be found on the school’s website and should clearly uphold the Human Rights Act and the Bill of Rights Act, in particular by:

• Allowing all students, staff, and parents to hold and express their own personal beliefs, without the fear of censure.

• Not modelling or enforcing the use of preferred pronouns, as that denies the right of others to express the fact that sex is an immutable characteristic.

• Protecting single-sex spaces, sports, and opportunities for the intended sex and providing a third space for the few students who prefer not to be accommodated with their sex.

• See our Guidelines for Schools for other key recommendations for school policies.

If you find school policies or practices that do not comply with these principles, please contact resist@resistgendereducation for advice on how to challenge them.

4. Balance the books

See our recent substacks (Picture Book Propaganda) about the professed policy of libraries to have a balanced collection based on neutrality and the reality of heavily biased collections, often with no books critical of transgender ideation.

• Ask why your school library is so one-sided on gender identity beliefs, in contravention of its “wide range of opinions” policy.

• For primary schools, ask for these sex realist picture books to be purchased:

  My Body is Me by Rachel Rooney

  Love your Body by Jessica Sanders

  Be Exactly Who You Are! by Laura Gehl

  Mabel by Rowboat Wilkins

  Keith Among the Pigeons by Katie Brosnan

  Don’t fall for the Trick by Jennifer Bain

• For secondary schools, ask for these gender critical books to be purchased:

  Trans by Helen Joyce

  Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier

  The Detransition Diaries by Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell

  Detrans by Mary Margaret Olohan

• Ask for the books in the school library to be supportive of the school curriculum and for any books that peddle the false idea that sex is on a spectrum and can be changed at will, or that glamourise transgender ideation, to be permanently removed.

• Check that the old RSE Guide along with all the policy booklets supplied to schools by InsideOut, Rainbow Youth, Gender Minorities etc, have been fully removed from the school and are not still sitting in a backroom ready for continued use.

  

5. Participate in BOT elections

In September 2025, elections for school boards will be held. Why not stand?

• Learn about what is involved here.

• Go along to your school’s next BOT meeting as an observer to see what it is like.

• If you can’t put your name forward, can you nominate someone else who opposes transgenderism in schools?

• If nothing else, do go along to any candidates’ meetings that are offered and ask these pointed questions, so that everyone hears the answers:

Do you think that children should be taught that they can choose their sex?

Are you aware that the Cass Review warns against social transition in schools and do you agree that it is not the school’s role to affirm a child’s transgender ideation?

Will you preserve single-sex spaces, sports, and opportunities at school for the sex for whom they were intended?