Who died and gave Irving Middle School or Superintendent Joel the authority to impose this philosophy (epistemology) on children and families? I suppose that most of the parents who send their children to Irving or to any other LPS school believe that sexual identity is not just a preference or a choice and that, in the nature of things, humans are born male and female. Parents do not send their children to school as boys or girls only to have them re-programmed or assigned to another sex or to no sex at all at school.

Until now the only thing for which Irving Middle School has been notorious was that the infamous spree murderer Charlie Starkweather (1938–59) attended there, in the 1950s, when it was a Junior High School. It is in the news today, however, because of the revelation of a teacher-training document which instructs teachers to avoid using sex-specific language when speaking to children. They are no longer to be described as boys and girls or ladies and gentlemen. Instead, children are to be categorized according to odd and even birth dates and when necessary to refer to their sex to say, “boy, girl, both, or neither.” One might think that, when this training document came to light, that saner heads at headquarters (the Lincoln Public School District) would have rebuffed this overzealous inclusiveness but one would be wrong. LPS Superintended Steve Joel says,

“our position, ours is inclusiveness. … We know that there’s a correlation between bullying and gender, as well as sexual preference, and so you know, as a school district, we’re just trying to provide information for our folks to understand that a little bit better, and I think that’s what they’ve done, and I think they’re doing a great job with it.”

We must deny the existence of two sexes and insinuate to impressionable children (6th, 7th, and 8th graders) that there are more than two sexes or that some of their schoolmates belong simultaneously to two sexes (however that works) because of bullying? Nebraskans are a nice people. They are among the nicest, most helpful people you will ever meet. If your car breaks down on a Nebraska highway (other than I-80) a local is likely to stop to ask if you need help. If your hands are full someone will open a door for you. Little old ladies have been known to help younger men across the road (true story). We (I am one of them) are raised to be helpful, to be friendly, to be welcoming but sometimes, when infused with political correctness, niceness can get out of hand.

Let’s get a few things straight (no pun intended) here:

• Considered biologically, human beings do not have a gender. We need to stop speaking this way. Gender is a grammatical not a biological category. In Greek, Latin, English, and other languages, nouns are assigned, often arbitrarily to a gender but the same is not true humans. It is a mistake (or worse an intentional ploy to destroy the very idea of sexual differences) to confuse the two.
• It is a fact of biology that ordinarily human beings are born belonging to one of two sexes: male or female. It is true that a small percentage of humans are born sexually indeterminate but that is the exception that tests the rule. Exceptions do not obliterate the rule. Were it otherwise the species would have died out but we have not.
• Is the district planning to continue teaching biology and human physiology? If so, pedagogical coherence will quickly become a problem. Biology and physiology teachers cannot very well stand before students and talk about the sexual differences of this or any other species and then turn around and imply that, when they line up to go to lunch, that there are no such things as the male and female sexes.

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