A Critique of the Tasmanian Education Department's Early Years - Respectful Relations Teaching Resource 2024
Without evidence, without question: a framework driven by gender ideology, wrapped in social justice and junk science - DECYP Birth to Kindergarten Resource.
Like so much before it, this document raises serious concerns about government oversight and academic rigour.
DECYP's newly released Respectful Relationships and Consent in the Early Years document, disseminated to teachers, students and parents in February and June 2024, was ushered into the public domain, as a means to combat domestic violence, bullying and marginalisation.
Last year I shared my concerns with relevant state politicians about this document's other agendas. I have received no response.
As a teacher for DECYP, my concerns related to the resource's embrace of contested gender ideology, an ideology taught in this resource as scientific fact but without evidence and which I believe is contributing to mental health concerns in the young people I see.
Resource without scrutiny: parents and caregivers in the dark
My primary concern with the RREY document is that it disconnects and teaches to children and educators that the words ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’ are not related to biological sex and connects them instead to a sense of inner ‘gender identity’ – that is, to how a child feels themselves to be gender-wise, independent of the biological sex of the body. In this way, the document aligns itself with gender ideology, privileging this theory and ignores all peer reviewed and accepted evidence regarding child and adolescent social development.
All Respectful Relationships documents newly released in 2024, have the ideology of ‘gender identity’ now imbedded throughout them and controversially, this is presented as factual, whilst never linking it to any research or evidence.
Under Siege American Planned Parenthood used as Foundation for Tasmanian Resource
In the Respectful Relationships and Consent in the Early Years document, page 55, a link is provided for more information about ‘gender’ taking the reader to the American Planned Parenting site (currently facing law suites), where a proliferation of definitions about identity are provided without research or evidence. Just recently DECYP has disabled the hyper link shown here, but I have discovered a new URL for it and produced it below:
American Planned Parentinghood site used in Tasmanian DECYP resources
Furthermore, here is a document discussing the controversy around the current US Planned Parenthood organisation, so one wonders why our government is using it as a plausible organisation for information:
Junk science and Planned Parenthood
For over 5 decades or more, teachers like myself have studied in their university training, that children become aware biological sex is a stable part of their identity, - not fluid - that it is fixed and cannot be changed:
(Kholberg and Piaget - Gender Constancy - Sex Roles, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Concept Formation - JRank Articles) -
Piaget and Kholberg are uncontested
We know role-playing helps to concretise this sense of self, as a boy or girl: that it is necessary for a healthy stable self. There are no studies currently, to discount Piaget and Kholberg’s findings.
We have always known it is not part of normal development for a child to question their gender and disconnect this from the reality of their body, but this Tasmanian government encourages children to actually dissociate from their bodies (normally seen as a trauma response) and mandates teachers view a child's sense of self as disconnected from their biological reality:
“Who has what? A note about gender. It’s common for children to have questions about genitals and how bodies look different for boys and girls. While the simplestanswer is that girls have vulvas and vaginas, and boys have a penis and testicles, that answer isn’t true for every child. Boy, girl, man, and woman are words that describe gender identity, and some people with the gender identities “boy” or “man” have vulvas, and some with the gender identity “girl” or “woman” have penises/testicles. Your genitals don’t make you a boy or a girl” p 55 DECYP Early Years Resource
Such unfounded and corrupt ideas create a dis- ease with a child's own body, a discomfort which is causing children and parents to seek medical interventions to alleviate such incongruence. How can a government education department be instrumental in such harm and seemingly unaware of the connections? Why are we teaching children to be dissociated from their bodies, when this is a trauma response? What the Tasmanian Education Department is in fact doing, is teaching mental illness.
Stereotypes deliberately mixed up with Gender Identity
Though teachers would agree harmful sex-role stereotyping can inhibit ways of thinking about what you can become as a biological boy or girl, this Early Years document ties – without evidence - the idea that seeing biological sex as a stable identity linked to the physical reality of the body, as something harmful and the cause of harmful stereotypes. The document seeks therefore to supplant the stable biological sex identity of a boy/girl, with a non-evidence based concept of ‘gender identity’ which is fluid, and independent of their physical body. The document’s rationale being a means to free children to be their true selves independent of stereotypes, e.g, though biologically/natally a boy, the child could actually be a girl inside, with a female internal gender identity. There is no psychological evidence for this. Yet DECYP's document states -
“Gender is a way to describe someone’s identity. It is not the same thing as their biological sex. People can feel like they are male, female, both, or neither. “ P. 22 RREY
Statements like this are blatantly lies and are not supported by any academic evidence yet they appear in a government education document. Ideological and political agendas have trumped science and children’s human rights to evidence based teaching.
The document goes on to undermine and see as a negative, children’s natural development and desire to distinguish sex and their identity (as being a boy or girl ) based on their physical body- which for girls can be argued as a natural safe-guarding mechanism for themselves and their spaces. This document upends this natural safeguarding and concretising of identity by denying this and saying instead children can change gender, implying sex. This is a flagrant disruption, undermining and hijacking of children’s normal development, under the veil of getting children to avoid stereotypes. This document encourages and mandates teachers to disrupt this process by having them avoid using terms like ‘boy’ or ‘girl’. It disturbingly pressures teachers to teach children they can belong to any gender and facilitates confusion by exploiting a child’s inability to think in abstract terms, welding the word ‘gender’ and its implied fluidity over the top of the stability of ‘sex’ :
“Children can become very keen to police gender, demanding that a person is a boy or a girl, and that ‘boy’ should look and act in a particular way and so on.” Pg 19
Disrupting stereotypes should not mean denying biological reality
Acknowledging our biological sex as part of our identity, should simply be taught, as it always been for the last 80 years, that being a boy or girl doesn’t limit your educational outcomes and you can be anything you want to be. But to say a girl can have a penis, as a means to upend stereotypes, in a Tasmanian Government educational resource is malfeasant to say the least.
What we have presented in this DECYP document is the idea that the antidote to stereotypes is to make the idea of being a boy or girl fluid, and not tied to the body. Nothing supports this hypothesis. It’s a dangerous solution to the problem of stereotyping.
A Mr Potato Head approach; a fertile bed to grow dis-ease with a child's own physical body
This RREY document dismantles biological reality by putting forward the idea any child can actually feel like ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ inside, regardless of their observed sex at birth. This document plainly states this:
“Gender is a way to describe someone’s identity. It is not the same thing as their biological sex. People can feel like they are male, female, both, or neither…"P22
Family Planning Tasmania who enters Tasmanian primary schools to teach the 'Growing Up Program' references this very DECYP document to justify its own bizarre and non evidence based curriculum to students.
But what does it feel like to be a boy or girl? This Early Years resource never defines what this feeling is. Presumably it’s part of a binary of a 'girl/boy' concept and alludes therefore to, paradoxically, harmful stereotypes.
Despite privileging gender ideology and ‘gender identity’ throughout the document, it bizarrely provides no definition of ‘gender identity’ in its glossary of terms at the back of the text .
As seen here on page 62, it lists terms like ‘gender’ ‘sex’ ‘body autonomy’ and an urban term of ‘cisgender’ but astoundingly leaves out the definition of the term ‘gender identity ’ which has been used throughout the document.
No explanation is ever given about what it is to to feel like a boy or girl, yet this is the basis upon which this text’s educational rhetoric around stereotypes and identity is based.
Furthermore, the RREY document (p55) goes onto conflate and justify its rationale by bringing in a mentioning of intersex conditions - which is not a gender identity – it is a difference in sex characteristic development and remains at around 1.7% of the population.
Gender Identity
The metaphysical concept of a gender identity is woven throughout the new Respectful Relationships texts (up to the year 11 and 12 course documents) yet it is a contested ideology that is now being withdrawn from school curriculums around the world. UK schools steer away from teaching gender ideology
" While the simplest answer is that girls have vulvas and vaginas, and boys have a penis and testicles, that answer isn’t true for every child. Boy, girl, man, and woman are words that describe gender identity, and some people with the gender identities “boy” or “man” have vulvas, and some with the gender identity “girl” or “woman” have penises/testicles. Your genitals don’t make you a boy or a girl.” P 55 DECYp RR Early Years.
This document needs to label ‘gender identity’ as a subjective ideology and just one way people could see themselves - or remove it altogether. It's negligent to teach this to children, parents and DECYP staff.
Further to this, despite the lack of evidence for gender identities, the DECYP Early Years RREY document provides a link directing teachers to affirm ‘gender identities’ expressed by children, even if the identity does not align with their biological sex, and even if the child is as young as 3-
“Use the names and pronouns that the child expresses (rather than those they were assigned at birth).” P 29 RREY - *Trans-and-gender-diverse-children.pdf
They state unequivocally that there is limited evidence around efficacy and safety of affirmation of gender identity. #154 – Dr Andrew Amos on the Concerns with Gender Affirming Care - A Psychiatrist's Perspective | Strategic Psychology Canberra - Dr Amos
The American doctor and psychiatrist - Miriam Grossman - specialising in gender dysphoria puts forward the following opinion - that this is blatant fraud and medical malpractice. Dr Miriam Grossman
Making it up as you go - hijacking language and making up definitions
As a teacher, it’s not acceptable to redefine the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ‘boy’, ‘girl’ in such a DECYP document to mean instead ‘gender identity’ and not biology. There is not even a dictionary that has this new definition of ‘gender identity’ linked to the words ‘boy, girl, man, woman’. There has been no debate with teachers, parents or the general public about this redefining of terms either. It's incomprehensible the Tasmanian government can write: "People can feel like they are male, female, both, or neither…Avoid creating strangeness or otherness between boys and girls: when we persistently group children based on two genders, we are reinforcing that you can only belong to one group or the other. " P22
In order to truly safeguard children in relation to health screening and abuse, it is necessary for children to understand who a man, woman, boy or girl actually is in relation to biological reality, and to use the terms accurately, as they relate to biology and the real world.
I am also concerned about the fact the RREY document discourages the use of words ‘mother’ and ‘father’, encouraging them to be replaced with ‘caregiver or families’, when a more inclusive approach would be to use these terms alongside each other,
“Gender is a way to describe someone’s identity. It is not the same thing as their biological sex. People can feel like they are male, female, both, or neither…Avoid creating strangeness or otherness between boys and girls: when we persistently group children based on two genders, we are reinforcing that you can only belong to one group or the other. Small changes, like saying ‘children’ instead of ‘girls and boys’ or ‘parents and carers’ or ‘families’ rather than ‘Mums and Dads’ can help to affirm the things we have in common rather than only our differences.” P22 Respectful Relations and Consent in the Early Years - Department of Children and Young People.
Gender dysphoria in young people is rising—and so is professional disagreement
Over the last 5 - 10 years concurrent with these concepts being put into the curriculum of Australian schools, there has been a rise in young people and children with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and children presenting with new identities, who are distressed about their biological sex and which parents and educators are then directed to alleviate via the psychosocial interventions of affirmation. This is accompanied by the medical fraternity all affirming gender identities with doctors in Tasmania using medical and surgical affirmation to 'help' distressed youth. stats for gender
Resource:
Respectful Relationships Teaching and Learning Package: Early Years (PDF, 7MB) – New release (June 2024)
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