As battles rage between local school districts in California and the state District Attorney, Rob Bonta, regarding whether or not schools should notify parents if their child identifies as transgender or nonbinary at school, I (a California public teacher) think it’s strange that no one is clarifying the definitions of transgender and nonbinary. According to the California Department of Education’s Health Framework passed in 2019 (p. 353), gender identity is defined as ever-changing and ever-expanding. People assume transgender means a girl identifying as a boy or a boy identifying a girl, however according to the 2023 California Teacher trainings on Sexual Harassment, it’s much broader than this. Our trainings say, “Gender Identity is a person’s identification as male, female, non-binary, or other. Transgender involves identifying differently from a person’s sex at birth or something else”. After the training I asked my employer, “What does the word “other” or “something else” encompass? It’s so open-ended, it could mean anything and everything.” No one could give me an answer, so I researched it myself.
In my quest, I found authoritative sources telling Americans to throw rational thinking out the window in order to embrace radical group think.
The Center of Disease Control (CDC) defines Gender Nonbinary as “gender creative.” This means kids can create or make up their own gender(s).
The California Department of Education defines Nonbinary with these descriptive labels: “transgender, intersex, gender-neutral, agender, genderqueer, gender fluid, Two Spirit, bigender, pangender, gender nonconforming, or gender variant.” This long list of identities parallel the survey given Americans in crisis, of all ages, who call the 988 National Suicide Hotline. Callers are asked how they identify and are given 11+ genders to choose from. They are: Agender, Boy/Man, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, Girl/Woman, Intersex, Non-binary, Trans, Trans- Masculine, Trans-Feminine, Two Spirit, Other. The United States Hotline is funded by the Suicide Hotline Designation Act which was signed into law October 2020. It is also funded by the Mental Health Block Grant in response to the Surgeon General’s Call to Action (p. 55-56) to implement a national strategy for suicide prevention. Why is America normalizing all these genders, especially to people who may be mentally and emotionally unstable or traumatized?
The Public Health Alliance, which is a county organization in Southern California funded by the CDC to establish equitable health care, defines Gender Non-binary as an “intentional creation” of one’s own gender identity. An “intentional creation” implies anything imaginable including vampires, zombies, birds, or super-heroes. This sounds like science fiction not science.
Planned Parenthood’s definition of Gender is significant because they partner with many California School Wellness Centers that now offer “gender affirming care” such as hormone therapy. Planned Parenthood normalizes genderfluidity, saying a person’s gender can vary weekly, daily, or moment-to-moment. It seems to me this is the normalization of split personalities or schizophrenia. On top of this, Planned Parenthood says gender identities (of which there are many) can begin at age 2.
School teachers and parents are told gender non-conforming children are at higher risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide by our school climate resource created through Southern Poverty Law Center, (SPLC). The SPLC says nonbinary people exhibit a boundless range of identities that can exist beyond a spectrum between male and female. Boundless and Beyond?! Psychosis is a mental condition in which thoughts and emotions lose contact with external reality, however, our American authorities now say we must affirm non-realities as true.
Unlimited identities are now being taught to kindergartners through books in California elementary schools. The book, What Are Your Words?, says, “My pronouns are like the weather, they change depending on how I feel.” The book provides many pronouns like ey, em, ze, zir, they, them, xe xir, hir. Another book is, It Feels Good To Be Yourself. This book says, “You might feel like a boy, you might feel like a girl, you might feel like both boy and girl -or like neither. You might feel like your gender changes from day to day or from year to year” These books cause children to question their gender, and once a child questions, they are considered LGBTQ because the Q means Queer or Questioning.
After state schools intentionally confuse children, they want school personnel to hide the child’s “gender dysphoria” so counselors or mental health workers can affirm them while they decide on a gender that best suits them. The state portrays parents who do not affirm all these identities as dangerous. However, I think the harm is coming from the state and partnering agencies who is imposing extremist gender doctrines on impressionable children.
Written By: Brenda Lebsack
Public School Teacher in Santa Ana Unified School District
Former School Board Member of Orange Unified School District (2016-2020)
California Teachers Association State Delegate
Founder of Interfaith Statewide Coalition