Press statement

Responding to changes announced today in relationships and sexuality education.

Resist Gender Education welcomes the Education Review Office’s recommendation that the Relationships and Sexuality Education curriculum be reviewed.

We also appreciate Minister Erica Stanford’s announcement of the removal of the current RSE Guide by the end of the first term next year. This Guide presents ideological beliefs as if they are facts and parents around the country will be as relieved as we are to see it gone.

“We look forward to the development of a new curriculum that does not teach children that sexist stereotypes are what determine a person’s sex or that girls can have a penis”, said RGE’s spokesperson, Fern Hickson.

Although the ERO Report contains much useful information about the education needs of students in this era of online abuse and pornography, it also perpetuates some of the confusion and misrepresentation that has led to the current crisis and parental loss of trust in the content of RSE lessons.

Instead of investigating the beliefs being taught in schools to check their scientific accuracy, ERO has accepted “gender identity” – the concept that we all have a gendered soul independent of our sexed bodies – as fact and, worse, routinely conflates it with sexual orientation. Throughout its report, ERO incorrectly uses the term “gender identities and sexual identities” as if they are the same thing.

“Sexual orientation is not an identity,” explains Hickson. “And gender identity is not a sexuality. It is a belief system that teaches young gay and lesbian people that if they don’t fit sexist stereotypes, they are really the opposite sex and ought to modify their bodies to match the stereotypes.”

Although gender identity ideas are highly contentious and a wide range of people oppose them, including many gays and lesbians, ERO chooses to frame parental opposition as coming exclusively from religious conservatives or anti-transgender advocacy groups.

ERO reports that 87% of parents support RSE being taught in schools and there is general agreement that it is beneficial for students to learn about consent, relationships, contraception, bullying, managing feelings and emotions, and personal safety, including online safety. Division comes over the topics of “gender identity, different sexual identities, and gender stereotypes.”

As one parent put it, “Parents want to know why their daughters want to wear breast binders and escape puberty when just 10 years ago that was not a thing. Parents suspect that school lessons asking 7 year old girls to contemplate if they could be in the wrong body if they enjoy climbing trees or doing maths, could, in some cases, have something to do with this. That’s why parents are worried.”

The ERO report claims that gender identity is not being taught in primary schools, ignoring the fact those words appear in the RSE Guide for teachers at every single year level. It also claims that the RSE Guide does not “include guidance to instruct students how to change sex”, yet one of the suggested teaching topics in Science at intermediate level is to “consider variations in puberty, including the role of hormone blockers”.

“Most of the opposition to the current RSE Guide is because it introduces gender identity beliefs to five year olds and reinforces that ideology every single year,” says Hickson. “Resist Gender Education, in accord with the majority of parents, wants RSE to continue in our schools. We simply want the curriculum and guidelines to be rewritten so that they are scientifically factual and age-appropriate.”

“We are hopeful that unscientific gender identity beliefs will be removed from the draft topics to be announced early next year and that the new curriculum and guidelines will focus instead on the content that we can all agree on - understanding concepts like consent, boundaries, and respectful interactions.”