Pro-Family Advocate Blasts Schools Allowing Cross-Gender Enrollment
by Jim Brown
October 25, 2006
(AgapePress) - - Some schools in Florida and California are permitting young children who are perceived to have gender identity disorder to enroll as the opposite sex and to cross dress, but a spokeswoman with America's largest public policy women's organization is condemning the phenomenon.
Dr. Janice Crouse, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, a think tank for the organization Concerned Women for America (CWA). She condemns the phenomenon of allowing children deemed "gender-confused" to enroll -- the young boys as girls and young girls as boys -- in public and private schools in California and Florida. According to Crouse, such schools are changing standard operating procedures and even curricula to accommodate these purportedly "transgender" kids.
The CWA spokeswoman believes this school policy trend has terrible ramifications for young, developing minds as well as for society. "What we're seeing is a group of so-called professionals saying that we have to provide an environment that will maximize a child's potential to learn and grow, regardless of how they view themselves," she says. "This, of course, is part of a broader agenda."
What that agenda involves is an attempt by liberal activists to single out some children as members of a "sexual minority," Crouse explains. "And by that, they're looking at children as young as kindergarten, perhaps younger than that," she says, "and I view all of this as part of the whole effort to say that children are sexualized."
The LaHaye Institute fellow feels this unfortunate agenda is a component of a broader postmodern campaign by radical feminists, who promote the idea that sexuality is a socially constructed reality and gender is something that is fluid rather than fixed. "And this is something that has been driven by the left for a number of years," she says.
For years, radical feminists and their liberal allies have been "trying to convince people that they ought to experiment with their sexual identity," Crouse contends. "Now we're moving it down to children," she says, "and this, to me, is a breathtaking shift in the way we view sex, sexuality, gender -- all of those facts."
Crouse feels it is unfortunate that gender issues are even being discussed in the classroom with such young students, including elementary school and even kindergarten-level children. And it is detrimental, she insists, for schools to "accommodate" the confusion of youngsters believed to have a gender-identity disorder by referring to those students by unisex names, allowing them to cross dress, or creating unisex bathroom facilities for them.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
