A new educational resource produced by LGBT activists and funded by the UK’s Department of Education will inform students that their biological sex is just a “label” and that the only thing that limits their gender expression “is their imagination.”
The Inspiring Equality In Education School Resource was “funded by the Government Equalities Office to help address the findings that schools often lack confidence and feel under-resourced to deal effectively with homophobic, biphobic or transphobic bullying.”
One of the lesson plans for students in secondary school (which begins at age 11 in the UK) includes a video produced by activist group Educational Action Challenging Homophobia (EACH) that purports to explain gender identity and expression to students.
The video features several transgender students who assist a narrator in answering questions such as: “Is gender a spectrum?”
About halfway through the video, the narrator explains: “Gender expression is how you present your gender, through your actions and how you dress. It’s what you wear, the pronouns you use.”
The narrator goes on to claim that “Gender spectrum is unique and individual. The only thing that limits a person is their imagination.”
“I use the pronoun ‘they,’ which is the singular ‘they,’ which is gender neutral,” one student says. “And I chose this pronoun because when people call me by my pronoun, I feel more real. I feel more like they’re seeing me for who I am, rather than just imprinting stereotypes on me based on what they think I was assigned at birth.”
“Expressing my personal gender is, like, my hat,” explains another student, who is wearing a hat with a tiger face and ears on it. “My silly hat. It’s not a conscious kind of expression of gender but it is a way of expressing gender and a way of expressing me.”
Earlier on in the video, the narrator explains that babies are “given a label of male or female based on their body parts, hormones and biology.” He contrasts this to gender identity, which “describes how you think of yourself. It’s how you feel inside. It’s how you want to be known by others.”
“What I would choose to represent my gender is silver holographic foil, the kind that reflects light and refracts it into rainbows when you adjust it with the light,” one student says.
Later on in the video, another student explains that one of the worst things he had been asked was when somebody “asked me what my birth name was.”
The video is listed as a “Required” resource in section 3.35 of the Inspiring Equality In Education lesson plans. The lesson plan states that students should learn that “Gender means something different to everyone. It is about how we identify ourselves and how we wish to be known.”
The video was produced in March but the accompanying lesson plan wasn’t published until May.
The description for the video on YouTube states it was “Created by Off the Record (Bristol) and Educational Action Challenging Homophobia (EACH) as part of the Government Equalities Office funded Inspiring Equality in Education programme.”
Follow Peter Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHasson
