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  • 2016-06-03 (xsd:date)
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  • Washington State to Teach Transgenderism to Kindergartners (en)
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  • On 1 June 2016 the web site Daily Caller published an article reporting that schools in Washington state planned to begin teaching transgenderism to Kindergartners, based on updated state curriculum guidelines released online. The article didn't quite manage to connect the dots between the linked curriculum update and teaching transgenderism to Kindergarten students, save for a reference to an expectation that Kindergarten students would understand there are many ways to express gender: Subsequent portions of the article hinged on the selective quoting of responses from Nathan Olson, communications manager for Washington's Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to Daily Caller. Olson was quoted only in part, and the precise wording of the questions posed to him was not provided by the Daily Caller: We contacted Nathan Olson ourselves, and unlike the Daily Caller, we're reproducing his response in full rather than selectively editing it to support a preconceived bias: The Daily Caller linked to Washington State's Health and Physical Education State K-12 Learning Standards [PDF] as evidence in support their reference to teaching transgenderism to Kindergartners. Page 29 of that document contains the state standards for sexual health, and for Kindergarten and First Grade students the listed benchmarks are Understand there are many ways to express gender and Explain that there are many ways to express gender respectively. The word transgender isn't mentioned in the guidelines until the Glossary portion: At the Grade Five point in the table, Identify trusted adults to ask questions about gender identity and sexual orientation appears as part of the sexual education curriculum standards, but no wording suggests that teaching transgenderism is part of those guidelines. A 2 June 2016 press release from anti-LGBT group Family Policy Institute of Washington cited the Daily Caller article in a piece that jumped to numerous imaginative conclusions about what young schoolchildren in Washington might be learning about gender under the purported new standards: Much like a previous controversy pertaining to gender identity and curriculum in Fairfax County, Virginia, the claims about Washington State's OPSI, gender, and curriculum hinged on unsupported assertions that changes had been made to existing guidelines to more assertively include transgender topics in education for very young children. (en)
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