Is this the most transparent bait-and-switch ever? You decide.
We begin with a purple “gender unicorn,” which has been around for several years now. The Gender Unicorn is a design of the Trans Student Educational Resources (TSER) activist group. And its purpose, as a training tool, is to frame any discussion about transgenderism to ensure that the trans activist community’s definitions and orthodoxies prevail.
The Gender Unicorn popped up last year at crowd-favorite U. Mizzou, home of unseemly activism. A ukase was issued to the faculty, directing that it police members for offensive language that could be non-inclusive or microaggressive. And at a workplace-diversity seminar to help the faculty and staff understand what’s microaggressive about saying things like “Where are you from?”, the Gender Unicorn was used to convey a “transgender advocacy message” to the attendees.
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Some people might kind of blow that off as a waste of big people’s time. After all, the Gender Unicorn kind of looks like Barney the purple dinosaur, and seems tailor-made for children. But shame on you for thinking that the Gender Unicorn is to be used for children. The whole model may be designed to appeal to a grade 5 level of thinking, but where it’s being used – as in the seminar at Mizzou – is for training teachers and administrators.
That’s what horrified parents in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg school (CMS) system were assured this week, after it emerged that the Gender Unicorn had come to their schools. There were no plans, said school leaders, to put the kid-friendly Gender Unicorn in front of actual kids. The purple unicorn was just used in training for school faculty and staff, back in June.
The image of a purple unicorn with two hearts on its chest is featured prominently in training materials the district used in June to show faculty and staff how to support transgender students. …
CMS declined NBC Charlotte’s request for an interview, but in a statement said, “The Gender Unicorn is a tool used nationally to help explain gender identity terminology. It was used during the principal training session for that purpose only. Our goal remains providing a safe and welcoming school environment where every student can succeed academically and socially.” …
At the CMS School Board meeting Tuesday night, officials went on record saying students will not have a class about transgender issues. Principals, however, are undergoing training to deal with transgender topics.
Now, a lot of folks out there are running with this thing, saying that the Gender Unicorn is something the CMS schools will foist on little children, maybe even as a coloring sheet with crayons (just because it happens to be available in coloring book form). No, no, no – this is a training tool for the adults. Faculty and staff.
Which means, incidentally, that the schools expect their staff to have to talk to children about transgenderism, in the cutesy terms the Gender Unicorn frames for them. (The superintendent of the CMS schools is quite determined on it, apparently.)
So the Gender Unicorn does mean the schools are eying people’s children as prey for transgender discussions, couched in terms children will understand. It just takes some abstract thought to recognize that.
But you’re totally wrong if you think anyone in North Carolina plans to put your kid in a classroom with a Gender Unicorn worksheet and call it instruction. You just go butter your butt and call yourself a biscuit.
CMS district parents are a bit suspicious, of course, since their superintendent, Ann Clark, has a history of making end runs around, well, whomever she needs to. She made waves in June by declaring that the CMS schools would defy North Carolina’s state bathroom law (HB2), and make sure biological males would have no trouble using girls’ bathroom or changing facilities. That threat was rescinded a few weeks later (on that particular point, the CMS schools will instead wait for the outcome of a lawsuit challenging HB2).
But Clark was also called out in the spring of 2016 for negotiating with state lawmakers on a bill pertaining to low-performing schools, behind the backs of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board members, whose views on the matter were 180 out from hers.
She has a notably enthusiastic history, moreover, when it comes to getting transgender instruction into the schools. In February 2015, she basically commissioned a locally produced film on trans students for use in the CMS schools:
[Rabbi Judith] Schindler traced the idea for doing the film to a meeting in February between Ann Clark, superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, and the clergy on her interfaith advisory council.
Schindler said Clark told the group that there are transgender students in CMS schools and that she wanted to develop a response to support them. That’s when Schindler volunteered to get a film made – and raise the money ($20,500) it would cost.
On Thursday [this was in October 2015], Clark will introduce the film during an 11:30 a.m. premiere at the Wells Fargo Auditorium of the Knight Theater in uptown Charlotte.
Starting Friday, the film will be also be available to stream free at meckmin.org/souls.
But mostly, “A Transgender Focus” was made for educational purposes. The plan is to eventually show it to ninth-graders in health classes at CMS. Then it will “hopefully go across the state” to other schools, said Deb Kaclik, CMS’ director of social emotional learning and behavior support.
So parents aren’t really overreacting when they see a purple Gender Unicorn that looks for all the world like something to teach kids with, and learn that Ann Clark has been deploying it in their schools.
Start a betting pool, if you like, on how long the Gender Unicorn will be restricted to adults-only usage.
The Soros funding part comes in through the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBT agenda organization and one of the major groups funded by the Open Society Institute.
Besides being the best-funded of the three main groups besieging North Carolina on the bathroom issue, HRC and its LGBT-agenda “Welcoming Schools” initiative have specifically been partners of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools since 2013, along with a local group called Time Out Youth (h/t: Lady Liberty 1885). The Time Out Youth website lists Trans Student Educational Resources, the designer of the Gender Unicorn, as a “Transgender Resources” site at its resources page.
Completing this circle, there is a specific reference here to HRC and Time Out Youth having been involved in bringing the Gender Unicorn into the CMS schools. The reference is made by a local commenter who quotes from an Ann Clark press conference in June, as well as the most recent meeting with concerned parents this week:
dontdoitcltadmin on August 11, 2016 at 10:10 am
Joshua, thank you for your feedback and our apologies if you were offended. Our comments were related directly to the year-long Gender Unicorn project that Ann Clark and CMS staff introduced on June 20th during their press conference. Clark told the media the District had been closely working with Time out Youth (A charlotte nonprofit fostering interaction, learning and affirmation for LGBTQ ages 11-20) and perhaps advice from the Human Rights Campaign as mentioned on Tuesday night. KeepNCSafe coalition’s concern is that CMS appears to have brought in outside groups to help them create this policy but our observations and review of CMS communications indicate very few, if any, parents of any boys and girls were included in the drafting of their new anti-bullying policy.
The project Clark is sponsoring is, as noted earlier, partially suspended pending the outcome of the HB2 lawsuit. But it’s an overarching policy for the schools, framed as a way to combat bullying, and it has other elements that Clark intends to implement this school year. (See the KeepNCSafe link above.) They include the ominous provision that parental involvement will depend on the student’s permission:
Involvement of parents in the plan is determined in working with the student, considering the student’s age and health, wellbeing and safety concerns.
And students will be expected to “choose their gender-based activities” however they want; i.e., boys choosing to do gender-based things with girls (including sports), if that appeals to them, and vice versa.
Plus all that welcoming and supporting of trans students by the faculty and administration, based on the Way of the Purple Unicorn.
The obsessive focus of the Welcoming Schools program on transcending gender conventions (increasing “gender-expansiveness”) makes clear that the CMS administration will not rest until at least some of the 99.7% of students who have normal, “binary” gender feelings are uncomfortable with their natural, reflexive choices.
But at least the kids won’t be handed a Gender Unicorn worksheet in class and asked to fill it out, or color it in. You’re awfully silly if you think they will.
