The point of the indoctrination, though, isn’t only to create more “gender-nonconforming” students. It’s to break down family structures and parental authority. The goal isn’t simply to teach and encourage transgenderism in our schools. It’s to lay claim to the students themselves, over and against their parents and families, for purposes that go far beyond the promotion of gender identity. After all, you can’t very well reshape society according to your utopian vision if something as solid as a family is standing in the way.

Evidence continues to mount that a concerted effort is underway between major hospitals and public school systems to indoctrinate children with transgender ideology and push harmful, sometimes irreversible, medical procedures on minors — sometimes without the knowledge or consent of parents.

The point of the indoctrination, though, isn’t only to create more “gender-nonconforming” students. It’s to break down family structures and parental authority. The goal isn’t simply to teach and encourage transgenderism in our schools. It’s to lay claim to the students themselves, over and against their parents and families, for purposes that go far beyond the promotion of gender identity. After all, you can’t very well reshape society according to your utopian vision if something as solid as a family is standing in the way.

In his customary muckraking fashion, Rufo has obtained insider documents from Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago detailing a collaboration between transgender activists at the hospital and public school administrators throughout greater Chicago. The primary training document, a presentation titled “Beyond Binary: Gender in Schools,” encourages teachers and school administrators to promote “gender diversity” in their districts by affirming students who mistakenly believe they are members of the opposite sex, teaching a “non-binary understanding of gender” in classrooms, and aiming to disrupt “entrenched [gender] norms in western society” in hopes of creating a more “gender creative” world.

Don’t laugh, though. As outlandish as this might sound to most people, the targets of all this are impressionable students, many of whom are susceptible to such messages for the simple fact that they are dealing with the turbulent — albeit altogether normal — emotions and angst that accompany adolescence.

It’s worth quoting Rufo at length to get a sense of how lurid this program is. At the end of the “Beyond Binary” presentation, which was circulated to teachers in at least two Chicago school districts…

the hospital recommended a “Binder Exchange Program” to assist teenage girls in binding their breasts, a “kid friendly website for gender affirming gear,” which sells items such as artificial penis “packers” and female-to-male “trans masc pump[s],” and an “LGBTQ friendly sex shop for teens” that sells a range of “dildos,” “vibrators,” “harnesses,” “anal toys,” “trans-friendly toys,” and “kink & BDSM” equipment. The links include graphic descriptions of sadomasochism, bondage, pornography, and transgressive sex.

In addition to these materials on gender theory, Lurie Children’s Hospital has also publicly released a policy guide for school administrators, encouraging districts to adopt a “gender-affirming approach” to the curriculum; provide “gender-affirming children’s books” in school libraries; and allow students to compete in athletic events, use restrooms and locker rooms, and sleep in bunks during overnight school trips in accordance with their “gender identity,” rather than their biological sex. The hospital also encourages school districts to designate special “Gender Support Coordinators” to help facilitate children’s sexual and gender transitions, which, under the recommended “confidentiality” policy, can be kept secret from parents and families.

Rufo rightly identifies part of the dynamic here is the creation of a “school-to-clinic” pipeline. A cynic might say the motive is simply profit, since every transgender patient represents a lifetime of medical interventions and surgeries.

Read More