(LifeSiteNews) — Educators were caught during a video call this week chatting about how to help keep children’s gender “transitions” secret from parents and work around state laws, according to a report by DailyMail.com.
The UK-based outlet said Monday it had gained access to an online meeting hosted by the U.S. Department of Education-funded Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center (MAP).
During the four-hour session, roughly 30 educators from a swath of midwestern states including Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio, shared strategies for working with transgender-identifying students, and blasted laws in Republican states that uphold biological reality and parental rights against transgender ideology.
One of those educators suggested that acting “subversively” may be necessary.
Shea Martin, whose biography on the “socialist, feminist, and anti-racist” journal “Radical Teacher” describes her as a “Black, queer, gender-expansive scholar-teacher,” told fellow educators during the call that the “stakes are very high for trans youth” and that she has personally pushed against “laws that prohibit or restrict trans advocacy.”
“I think that requires working subversively and quietly sometimes to make sure that trans kids have what they need,” she said.
Kimberly Martin, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) coordinator for Royal Oak Schools in Michigan, shared that her team is working to help prevent parents from finding out about their child’s transgender identification.
She said they have been “working with our record-keeping system so that certain screens can’t be seen by the parents … if there’s a nickname in there we’re trying to hide.”
DailyMail.com noted that Martin later went on to talk “about teachers addressing ‘sexuality’ with elementary students, who are aged between five and 10,” according to the outlet. She also reportedly advised teachers not to present “reinforced heterosexuality as the norm.”
School districts across the nation have been found to keep children’s divergent “gender identity” a secret from parents, including by calling the child by a different name and using alternate pronouns while at school. Roughly 6,000 schools across the nation reportedly conceal children’s alleged “transgender” identification from parents. The revelations have sparked legislation to require schools to notify families of a child’s gender confusion.
Also during the call, Jennifer Haglund, a counselor for Ames Community Schools in Iowa, “complained” during the meeting “about Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds in March signing a law that bars biological males from competing on female sports teams.”
To date, nearly half of all U.S. states have passed laws prohibiting gender-confused males from competing on female sports teams. Gov. Reynolds signed a law protecting women’s and girls’ sports early last year, arguing that “[f]orcing females to compete against males is the opposite of inclusivity and it’s absolutely unfair.”
Haglund, who also “bragged about her ‘own activism’ and of taking part in protest marches,” according to DailyMail.com, additionally suggested that her own views sometimes trump state laws.
“I know that I have my own right code of ethics, and that doesn’t always go along with the law,” she said.
Yesenia Jimenez-Captain, who heads up educational services at Woodland School District in Lake County, Illinois, also attacked conservatives in a nearby district for pushing back against moves to put feminine hygiene items in boys’ bathrooms.
Jimenez-Captain described controversy at a nearby school board meeting as having “exploded in violence” over the issue, something that was “sickening” because “the individuals who were involved are also educators.”
DailyMail.com observed that “[a]t no point in the session did any teacher say parents might know what’s best for their own kids, nor question whether affirmation-on-demand was the only way to help a trans-identified student.”
In addition to the fact that so-called “affirmation” asserts a false reality that one’s sex can be changed, long-term studies do not support the claim that destructive “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries benefit the mental health of their recipients, something advocates frequently allege without evidence.
Moreover, research indicates that some 80 percent of children suffering from gender dysphoria will naturally outgrow it by late adolescence.
Despite this, young children in many public school classrooms are actively being encouraged to deny their biology and live as the opposite sex or adopt “gender-fluid” or “non-binary” identities. Transgender identification among children has risen sharply in recent years, and the rates of surgical mutilation for minors have spiked.
Ashley Sadler
Ashley Sadler is a California-based journalist for LifeSiteNews. She has a deep love of American history and the Traditional Latin Mass. In her free time she enjoys mountain-biking, taking road trips, and reading classic literature. You can follow on her on Twitter @asadler216
