A former Duluth public school employee is blowing the whistle on a lesson that he says forced him from the school district.
Adam Becker was hired by Duluth Public Schools to become a District Wide Paraprofessional Job Coach in 2024.
He’d worked for a couple of months but a lesson about “gender mapping” put a stop to his teaching career.
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“At this professional development day, the first course that I had been signed up for by my supervisor was one on racial equity—and right off the bat, all of this stuff was pointing towards the big bad billionaire capitalists as the villain … it all was pointing towards the answer to racism being socialism and bringing back this ideology. I just kind of sat back and was thinking, ‘Am I in a liberal arts school in Colorado or am I in high school in northern Minnesota?’” Becker explained.
But it’s the lesson in “Gender and Pronoun Inclusion” that was enough for him.
Becker said, “It was pronoun training. And so I just figured it was going to be about learning how to say they, them, and don’t call someone a boy, girl, all of that kind of stuff. But it really quickly went into a whole other agenda.”
“Then as they were explaining the myriad of genders and this kind of confusing soup of letters and stuff, they said that the way that you can teach this is with a ‘gender map,'” Becker said.
The ideology and techniques of ‘gender mapping’
Becker explained some of the ideologies and the techniques behind “gender mapping” that he was told about that day.
“They pulled out a coordinate plane, which is an X and a Y axis … and then you label one side male and one side female,” Becker explained.
“This is the key part … you close your eyes … and find your feelings—and then you mark down, how much did that feel male? Was I about a five male in there right now? And then maybe I was feeling pretty dang female, so I’m going put a nine. And then you find your coordinate on the map, and that’s where you are in that moment,” Becker said.
He also emphasized that according to what he was being told, “that’s for that moment because gender in this radical ideology is fluid as a concept. And so you might start feeling different later and want to check in and get out your gender map and say, know what? I got a little bit more male right now and a little less female. And then you can kind of make yourself a little grid and you can track your gender on this little map.”
Gender mapping: for young students and kindergartners
But it was the next part that left Becker speechless: “And then they said that you can start teaching this—and mind you, this is my first year teaching at a public school. I’m in Duluth, Minnesota, and I’m just like jaw dropped—and I hear this person say, you can start teaching this to your students as early as kindergarten.”
“That’s when I checked out. That was the moment when I thought, my kids will never come here. I’ve got three beautiful girls and I just can’t imagine them being taken for a ride like that, where they could be something so fundamental to their identity, being subjective and I can’t imagine them having to navigate something like that so early,” he said.
Becker wants parents to be informed
Beyond concerns for his own family, Becker believes that the parents of the 8,500 students enrolled in Duluth public schools likely have no idea.
“That’s why I’m talking about it right now. It’s something that when I thought about how many parents in Duluth that have their kids in the public school would have the chance to even know this, it seemed like statistically, it was unfair,” Becker explained.
“It seemed like the only responsible thing to do was try to get the word out to more parents so they can decide for themselves,” he said.
Alpha News made multiple attempts to reach out to the Duluth public school district and did not receive a response.
Liz Collin
Liz Collin is a multi-Emmy-Award-winning investigative reporter, news anchor, and producer who cares about Minnesota. She is the producer of The Fall of Minneapolis and Minnesota v We the People documentary films, and author of the Amazon best-selling book, They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and The Death of George Floyd. Her work has prompted important state laws. Yet perhaps most of all, Liz has been giving a voice to the truth—and helping others tell their stories—for more than 20 years.
Dr. JC Chaix
Dr. JC Chaix is an editor, educator, and an expert in media studies. He wrote and directed the Alpha News documentary "The Fall of Minneapolis" and "Minnesota v We the People."
