Radical Feminism in the Classroom

Radical Feminism in the Classroom
Ashley Herzog
Monday, August 24, 2009

Feminist proponents of “comprehensive sexuality education” like to portray themselves as advocates of science, bravely battling religious conservatives who preach bigotry and gender stereotypes to schoolchildren.

Don’t be fooled. If you have a child in school, you should read “You’re Teaching My Child What?” by Dr. Miriam Grossman. Rather than learning just the facts, students are schooled in gender politics and feminist ideology—an ideology that is highly dogmatic and scientifically unsupported.

Planned Parenthood, for example, wants to teach your kids that “All people are ‘gendered beings’ by virtue of the fact that we are socialized into a heavily gendered culture.” In other words, differences between boys and girls are the result of socialization, not biology. The feminist sex-ed web site Scarleteen claims that “gender is a man-made set of concepts and ideas…What our mind is like—the way we think, what we think about, what we like, what skills we have—really is not, so far as data has shown us so far—about gender or biological sex, period.”

To make a long story short: they’re lying. There’s a mountain of scientific evidence showing that biological sex does indeed influence “the way we think”—evidence that Grossman presents in her book.

For example, when researchers in Japan examined the drawings of 252 kindergarteners, “They found significant differences between the drawings of girls and boys. Among them: boys drew a moving object twenty times more than girls. Girls included a flower or butterfly seven times more than boys…Overall, girls decidedly preferred pink and flesh colors. Boys used two colors more than girls: grey and blue.”

That’s because girls are socialized to like flowers and pink, the feminists will respond.

Not true. As Grossman writes, “To control for [socialization], the researchers analyzed the drawings of a third group—eight girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic disorder in which the fetal brain was flooded with high levels of male hormones. CAH girls drew cars and buses, not butterflies. And the cars were blue, not pink.” Girls whose brains had been flooded with male hormones in the womb also showed a preference for male playmates and toys typically associated with boys.

Even monkeys—who are presumably oblivious to “man-made” gender roles—display sex differences early in life.

“Juvenile male monkeys, both rhesus and vervet, prefer playing with balls and vehicles,” Grossman writes. “Female monkeys like dolls and pots.” For good measure, Grossman includes a picture of a female monkey cradling a baby doll.

Recently, feminist bloggers praised a lesbian couple in Sweden who are attempting to raise a genderless child, calling the child “Pop” and keeping his or her biological sex a secret.

“Do me a favor…all of you people who are thinking about having kids in the future? Think about raising your kids this way,” a writer for Feministe advised. “The world would be a better place for it.”

However, if feminists looked at scientific research, they might conclude that these parents are doing their child an enormous disservice. Consider the case of Bruce Reimer, who was castrated in a medical accident when he was eight months old. Psychologists—steeped in radical 1960s ideology—assured Reimer’s parents that gender was socially constructed, and he could be raised successfully as a girl.

Reimer, who eventually committed suicide, recounted his life of misery in the book “As Nature Made Him.”

“Far from accepting the gender reassignment, he fought against it tooth and nail from the very beginning,” Grossman writes, “refusing to play with dolls, preferring wrestling over cooking, and even urinating standing up whenever possible.”

When finally told he had been born a boy, Reimer said he was relieved: “Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did.” Coming from someone who knows, gender isn’t as fluid and changeable as feminists want it to be.

In fact, teaching schoolchildren that gender differences have no biological basis is the anti-scientific position—one based in faith and social dogma. As Grossman explains, the more we learn about endocrinology, neurology, and embryonic development, the clearer it becomes that many gender differences are set in the womb.

For males, “the boy-brain trajectory is set at eight weeks. Not eight weeks after birth, eight weeks after conception—seven months before the pink or blue blanket,” she writes. “A fetus has a boy brain or a girl brain when it is the size of a kidney bean.”

Still, in 2009, the progressive sex-ed group Advocates for Youth instructs students that gender is “culturally assigned.”

The next time you hear sex educators reciting canards about “science, not values” and “teaching kids the facts,” remember that this is what they mean.