The state of California has awarded a nine-year grant to a group that encourages students to identify as a wide variety of bizarre genders, including “foxgender,” and teaches school districts how to hide it from parents.
The California Department of Public Health has awarded a total of $2.3 million to a nonprofit called Gender Spectrum for activities such as developing “concrete strategies for applying the lens of gender diversity to school practices,” according to an investigation from the watchdog group OpenTheBooks.
The grant is intended for Gender Spectrum to conduct a “rigorous evaluation” of whether its own programs work.
Among those programs is the development of a six-page form for students to submit school districts their pronouns and whether school staff needs to hide their use of those pronouns from their parents.
“It’s not always the case that caregivers are supportive of their child’s gender, their gender journey, in that case, if parents are not supportive or if the child is not out, that’s not necessarily someone who will be part of the gender support team,” said Director of Training Carla Pena at the group’s annual Gender Spectrum Family Conference last year.
Naomi Cruz, the group’s manager of family and educational programming, gave a presentation at the conference called “Intro to Neoidentities and Neopronouns.” The presentation said pronouns may “describe gender as a personal, aesthetic, synesthetic, or head-space oriented experience.” They include “noun genders” like “foxgender, moongender, and rockgender,” and even “emojiself pronouns,” such as “:)self.”
Cruz said “foxself” describes someone who identifies with “aspects of a fox, whether that’s their appearance, their personality, or how they’re viewed in society.”
“Our youth are becoming more and more independent regarding their self expression. Instead of trying to fit into premade boxes, they’re using their unique identities and forms of expression to create terminology to describe themselves,” the presentation said.
The presentation said that youth are on a “gender journey” and their genders will likely change over time, but that parents should “affirm” those identities — unless, of course, those identifies appropriate a “racial, ethnic, religious or disability group they are not part of.”
In that case, parents should say, “I understand that this term means something to you, but perhaps we can create another term or another pronoun that also has a meaning to you, but isn’t specific to a certain racial, ethnic, or other group where there are closed identities and pronouns.”
It is unclear why youth do not have to gain permission from foxes before appropriating them.
Though Gender Spectrum wants to push its programs on children across the country, it appears to have taken down its website after it attracted attention.
California previously awarded $1.1 million to the group for a “pilot project” between 2017 and 2022, before extending it to 2026, and doubling the fee, last year, OpenTheBooks found.
“As a result of our work, students who fall all along the gender spectrum will see their experience recognized and affirmed in their school,” the initial grant application said.
The premise is that doing so would reduce mental illness among LGBTQ children. “41.5% of transgender youth have seriously considered attempting suicide,” the application said.
It said as a result of the program, “cisgender young people will have a greater understanding of gender (knowledge, beliefs and attitudes) leading them to be more comfortable with their own gender expression.”
Asked on the application what evidence suggests that the program is effective, it said that it didn’t have the resources to measure the impact of its trainings.
“In the past year we implemented pre and post surveys to measure the impact of our school trainings. We have not had the resources to aggregate this data, but the initial findings from individual schools show positive results” in the form of “substantial changes in participants’ report of their knowledge, intent to use gender inclusive practices, and recognition of the importance of becoming a gender inclusive school.”
It does not say whether students became less suicidal.
Gender Spectrum previously was involved in the “National Sex Education Standards,” which say that by second grade, students should be able to define gender identity, and by fifth grade, they should be able to describe the role of puberty blockers, OpenTheBooks said.
Even though having nontraditional gender identities is associated with higher suicide rates, Gender Spectrum official Kim Westheimer said at the 2022 conference that “giving young people more permission to explore their identity and maybe to try on new identities” is “a good thing, not a bad thing.”
The group also received $297,000 in coronavirus loans from the federal government, OpenTheBooks found.
“How many taxpayers can tolerate paying for their children to be confronted with such controversial and confusing material?” OpenTheBooks founder Adam Andrzejewski told The Daily Wire.
California lawmakers recently introduced a bill titled “Instructional materials: removing instructional materials and curriculum: diversity” that would prevent local school boards from declining to teach radical content.
Those could include gender materials produced by California’s Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wife, who has earned money producing content which is later used by the state’s schools.
This week, a Virginia mother sued a school district for facilitating and hiding a 14-year old’s gender transition, alleging that it led to her being sex-trafficked to Baltimore and held in a locked room by a registered sex offender.