June 2023
Resist Gender Education's newsletter
Toddler training
Schools’ Pride Week was held from 12-16 June as part of the whole of June Pride Month. The indoctrination of gender identity beliefs in education starts with toddlers and is relentless throughout the school years, as these two photos illustrate. The first was taken in the Queenstown Children’s Library and the second in the library of a large Auckland secondary school, in June.
The sheer volume of Pride events is beginning to annoy students and parents alike. One parent called on students to attend a Pride parade at Mount Aspiring College wearing black as a protest. Unfortunately, the news media and the school immediately interpreted the call as being anti-gay when it was more likely to be anti the transgender propaganda that is now the mainstay of Pride events.
There is still a widespread misunderstanding that transgender demands are the next step in liberation for gay people. In fact, there is no link between the two. Gay and lesbian rights and marriage equality are quite separate from transgender activism, which is not a gay rights movement. Being transgender is an identity whereas being gay is a sexual orientation.
Gay rights allow lesbians and gay men the freedom to be open about themselves and have their relationships legally recognised. Nothing is expected from the rest of society. In contrast, transgender activists aim to force everyone else to deny reality and enact a belief system in accordance with sex denialism ideas. They are coercing the rest of society into adopting convoluted, inaccurate, and sometimes offensive language and policies in order to assuage the feelings of a tiny minority of people who believe they are the opposite sex.
Sex self-ID
The BDMRR Act came into effect on 15 June. This Act allows anyone to make a simple statutory declaration and have the gender marker changed on their birth certificate, with public access denied to the original certificate. The Act was passed unanimously in Parliament in 2021 despite 73% of the submissions to the select committee being against the Bill. RGE has written previously about it here.
In this opinion piece published on the Platform on 21 June, Yvonne van Dongen points out another overlooked aspect of the BDMRR – that parents can choose whether they are named as mother, father, or parent, on a newborn’s birth certificate so that a baby may well garner two mothers or two fathers, or even a ‘mother’ who is a man and a ‘father’ who is a woman!
The results of a Curia research poll commissioned by Speak up for Women were released on 8 June: The majority of New Zealanders do not support sex self-ID, which was voted into law by all NZ political parties in 2021.
School fails in its duty
A NZ teacher has been de-registered for ‘misgendering’ a student. A student was transitioning from female to male and asked to be called by a male name, but the teacher refused because of his religious beliefs. The student complained, and when the teacher subsequently resigned, a mandatory report was sent to the Teaching Council, resulting in a Teachers’ Disciplinary Tribunal hearing.
RGE believes the Tribunal’s decision to cancel the teacher’s registration is unwarranted and sets a disturbing precedent. Although Mr X has certainly made some errors of judgement and has inappropriately questioned a student’s beliefs, the school involved failed in its duty as an employer to permit the teacher his own freedom of belief.
We recommend that schools allow students to use preferred names or nicknames, with parental knowledge, but that correct biological pronouns continue to be used for everyone. Asking other students and teachers to use opposite sex or neo pronouns is confusing for those with language or learning difficulties and is discriminatory to those who do not believe people can change sex by wishful thinking.
Read about the case in more detail on RGE’s substack here.
Furries being affirmed?
There has been a flurry of claims that animal identities are being affirmed by teachers in UK schools, after a video emerged of a teacher saying “How dare you, you’ve just really upset someone” to a student who expressed the belief that someone identifying as a cat is “genuinely unwell”. When other students asserted that there are only two sexes, the teacher said the idea was “despicable”.
Since the release of the video, the school involved has denied having any students who identify as cats, however, parents and teachers from across the country have made further claims about “furries” in multiple other schools.
The Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, has ordered an urgent visit to the school and has commented, “The classroom is a place where fact should be taught as fact and opinion as opinion. Children should be able to indulge their imagination in the playground, especially when they’re little, but it goes without saying that absolutely no child should be forced to affirm a classmate’s identity as an animal or inanimate object.”
Lucy Marsh, from the Family Education Trust, accurately described the issue: “This is a growing problem because children are being celebrated and affirmed in schools when they identity out of reality.
“When teachers are teaching children that they could have been born in the wrong body, it’s a logical step for children to believe that they could have been born the wrong species.
“The fact that being a ‘furry’ is actually a niche, adult sexual fetish with a dark online community seems to have escaped a lot of teachers and parents. It should be an immediate safeguarding red flag if a child starts pretending to be an animal. The government needs to ban schools from allowing pupils to socially transition — whether that’s pretending to be the opposite sex or pretending to be an animal.”
In New Zealand, too, there are multiple rumours circulating about cat identities being affirmed in schools but no concrete evidence has so far been provided. If you have any evidence of this practice, please pass it on to RGE.
Students speaking out
Two fourteen year-old girls have written an open letter to the UK education minister Gillian Keegan ahead of the forthcoming Department for Education draft schools guidance on transgender students.
“There is a lack of student voices on this issue, and it’s vital to have some perspective of what it’s like in a school environment where dissenting voices are stifled, extreme ideologies are presented as fact, and girls are injured by boys in mixed-sex sport.”
Another student, Brandubh, has spoken out on gender ideology teaching in Ireland and is damning of her school and her fellow students. “I was not an activist when I started at that school, but I definitely am now,” she says.
Place an order
Information booklets for parents to take to school principals or Boards of Trustees are now available. They contain advice on how schools and parents can navigate through the demands being placed upon them by popular confused ideas about sex and gender. To order, please email info@resistgendereducation.nz with your name and address and “Information Booklet” in the subject line. There is no charge but a donation would be gratefully received.
Recently added to the RGE website
RGE’s spokesperson, Marg Curnow, spoke on our behalf at a rally outside Parliament on 8 June and on Reality Check Radio on 31 May.
New testimonials from teachers and parents.
Don’t take Pride in promoting Pseudoscience by Colin Wright. Colin is a biologist who clearly explains why sex is not on a spectrum.
Saying no to school transition. In this article, UK MP Miriam Cates, explains why new Education Department policy should ban schools from socially transitioning a child, even with parental consent.
Joyce Activated Issue 51 by Dr Helen Joyce. In this open to the public article, Helen describes the harms of gender ideology and how proposed hate speech laws will silence any opposition.
“It’s particularly harmful to children, because children believe what adults tell them. They’re suggestible, their identities are still in formation, and the idea that you can really be a member of the opposite sex is a seductive one for quite a lot of them. Disproportionately the ones who are going to grow up gay, the ones who have autistic-spectrum disorders, the anxious or self-harming or depressed ones, the ones who are being abused.”