ETFO Recommends Gender Lessons for Your 5 Year Old

This is a guest post written by former teacher Chanel Pfahl.

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I recently came across a collection of lesson plans for K-8 teachers. I didn’t intend to spend hours rummaging through them, but one thing led to another.

Created in July 2022, the lesson plans are featured in a “Back-To-School Kit” on a website called “Welcoming Schools”. The site is produced by the HRC Foundation — the largest LGBTQ advocacy group in the United States — and it is recommended as a resource for educators by the Ontario elementary teachers’ union (ETFO).

As a former teacher who is currently being subjected to a formal investigation by the Ontario College of Teachers for voicing what I believe are reasonable concerns about indoctrination in schools, I am drawn to these kinds of resources because however depressing their existence, they also carry hope. Hope that thousands more fellow Canadians might awaken and help put an end to this nonsense.

I’d like to believe most of us have a breaking point when it comes to this illiberal ideology that calls itself inclusive and compassionate. My wake up call came from seeing a respected professor denounced by the university community and ultimately canceled for an innocent comment made online.

Others might start to think about this “gender” and “race” fanaticism in a different way when they come across a 19 year old who has had her breasts removed, her voice permanently altered, and her fertility stolen from her because as a teenager, she was led to believe that she was born “in the wrong body”, and later realized it was all a giant, irreversible error.

For some, evidence that the teachers’ union considers these lessons appropriate for kindergarteners might just be the drop that makes the glass overflow.

This particular lesson is based on the book “They, She, He, easy as ABC”, by queer activist Maya Gonzalez. The story introduces 26 characters — one for each letter of the alphabet — each one referred to by special “pronouns”.

The first page of the lesson plan shows it is in line with some legitimate “academic standards” (see below). This 40 minute lesson, which also requires “1-2 periods for the art project”, corresponds to the curriculum expectations, in other words.

Nowhere does it mention any connection to the Health/Phys Ed curriculum, where these concepts might be explored with some degree of transparency in later years, however. Instead, the lesson seemingly aligns with the “Common Core State Standards” for English language arts (CCSS.ELA) — standards that are used throughout K-12 education in the US.

In fairness, the students are indeed interpreting a story and participating in conversations about it.

Then again, concepts such as gender identity are clearly developmentally inappropriate for elementary students, not to mention pseudoscientific. These ideas downplay or downright ignore biological reality — a child’s physical body — in favour of stereotypes and feelings, leading some to believe their body might truly be a monumental mistake. What exactly could be good about that?

And yet it appears this politicized story time is getting the green light.

If you don’t like it, you’d better have a strong capacity to withstand cognitive dissonance or very thick skin.

The next page of the lesson plan (above) says the students—aged four to seven—are asked to “list pronouns and write them on a piece of chart paper” before the book is read.

They are told to pay attention to pronouns in the story, and reminded that we can’t tell “if someone is a girl, boy, both or neither by how they look”. (Again, we are promoting an idea that is untrue, namely that more than two sexes exist. Human beings are a sexually dimorphic species: this is a well-established fact.)

The teacher starts reading. The first character introduced uses the pronoun “they”.

The second one has no pronoun. The teacher asks for a pronoun anyway. Oups, tricked ya — Brody only goes by Brody, kids.

Then we learn about Diego: “Diego drums and dances. Tree has all the sounds”.

“What pronoun does Diego use?”, asks the teacher.

Tree? Good job!

So it continues… One character uses “ze” pronoun, another uses “more than one” pronoun, and one uses “all” pronouns.

Then students are asked to write their name and pronoun on a sheet, and draw a self-portrait.

As if this wasn’t enough lunacy for one day, the teacher is also instructed to “let students know that if they have always wanted to wear a bow tie with rainbow suspenders, that they can draw themselves this way”, or that they can “change their hair to a style that represents their true selves”.

Their true selves. Hmmm.

What can I say?

This all ends when enough of us choose to speak the truth.

“The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil.” — Fulton J Sheen.