Here is the fifth question we will include in our voter guide for the following election, Chairman, Prince William County School Board, At Large. This election is scheduled for November 6, 2018 (see 2018 ELECTIONS.
Do you support or oppose teaching that “sex is assigned at birth” in Family Life Education classes?
Why this question? Well, the public schools in Fairfax County, one of our neighbors, have decided to replace the phrase “biological sex” with the expression “sex is assigned at birth”. Here are some news reports.
- ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’ Will Be Taught After Virginia School Board Ignores Parents’ Concerns (christianpost.com)
- FCPS curriculum takes ‘biological gender’ out of its official language (fairfaxtimes.com)
- Fairfax County Votes to Change Sex Ed References to Sex, Gender (nbcwashington.com)
What sounds like a trivial change is actually quite ideological. Not so long ago the vast majority believed that we received our sex at conception, that each person’s sex was biologically determined. Now we have people preaching the notion that “gender” is a choice, and these people have succeeded in altering the Family Life Education curriculum in Fairfax County Schools.
What exactly do the advocates for gender choice believe? Sexual Orientation and Gender (plannedparenthood.org) offers an explanation. Here are some of the definitions they use.
It’s common for people to confuse sex, gender, and gender identity. But they’re actually all different things.
- Sex is a label — male or female — that you’re assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you’re born with and the chromosomes you have. It goes on your birth certificate.
- Gender is much more complex: It’s a social and legal status, and set of expectations from society, about behaviors, characteristics, and thoughts. Each culture has standards about the way that people should behave based on their gender. This is also generally male or female. But instead of being about body parts, it’s more about how you’re expected to act, because of your sex.
- Gender identity is how you feel inside and how you express your gender through clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. It’s a feeling that begins very early in life.
(from here)
Transgender Ideology Is Riddled With Contradictions. Here Are the Big Ones. (heritage.org) offers an opposing view, one opposing transgender activists.
They say there are no meaningful differences between man and woman, yet they rely on rigid sex stereotypes to argue that “gender identity” is real, while human embodiment is not. They claim that truth is whatever a person says it is, yet they believe there’s a real self to be discovered inside that person.
They promote a radical expressive individualism in which people are free to do whatever they want and define the truth however they wish, yet they try ruthlessly to enforce acceptance of transgender ideology.
It’s hard to see how these contradictory positions can be combined. If you pull too hard on any one thread of transgender ideology, the whole tapestry comes unraveled. But here are some questions we can pose:
If gender is a social construct, how can gender identity be innate and immutable? How can one’s identity with respect to a social construct be determined by biology in the womb? How can one’s identity be unchangeable (immutable) with respect to an ever-changing social construct? And if gender identity is innate, how can it be “fluid”?
The challenge for activists is to offer a plausible definition of gender and gender identity that is independent of bodily sex. (from here)
Because their arguments are so self-contradictory, the author, Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., doesn’t think the arguments of the transgender activists make sense.
Here are the previous posts in this series:
Prince William-Manassas Family Alliance 