A California school district that serves thousands of students from preschool through high school created elaborate lesson plans and resource lists aimed at pushing gender theory and normalizing child transgenderism, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Wire.
Hayward Unified School District (HUSD), which is located in California’s Bay Area and serves over 19,000 students from preschool to high school, is directing students to watch films that promote transgenderism and highlight how treatments such as puberty blockers work.
One of the documents created by the district gives a guide to “LGBTQ Inclusive Films,” including one for those in 5th grade and up that aims to showcase “the diversity of experiences of gender” and centers around a 12-year-old girl who is “not sure if she wants to be a girl, a boy, or something in-between when she grows up.”
“To give her more time to decide, her doctor has put her on a medication that will suppress the hormones that are causing her body to change before she’s ready,” a synopsis of the film reads.
The pro-trans lesson plans come amid a broader national uproar over schools pushing gender ideology on children, with some even encouraging so-called “social transitions” among students without parental approval.
HUSD also pushes a film, titled “Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up,” that criticizes traditional understandings of sex. The film’s trailer opens with an individual saying “I like to play with gender roles because it confuses people” and “I like it when a guy thinks that I’m a girl and then figures out that I’m not a girl, I love that.”
The district’s “safe and inclusive” books program for elementary school students focuses on stories that “include a range of themes including different family structures like two moms or two dads” and “gender identity.” A four-page document on “Inclusive, Anti-Biased, Anti-Racist, LGBTQIA+ Titles & Vendors” for K-12 students states that the district strives to be “actively anti-racist” by spending money at “BIPOC-owned, women-owned and LGBTQIA+-owned businesses.”
The document directs readers to LGBT book lists aimed at young children, ranging from “Rainbow Reads: LGBTQ+ Picture Books” to “Fantastic Bi- and Lesbian books by Black authors.”
HUSD even created a “Template for Pride Flag Ceremony” which specifies how to properly raise a pride flag for pride month, with speakers addressing the history of the celebration and what it means to be an ally, while staff hands out rainbow bracelets and “take pictures together with allies at the flagpole.”
A separate guide was created by the district to inform teachers of “SWAG Ideas for Pride Month.” It reads “Here are some suggestions of possible swag you can provide and offer by invitation to students or staff to use to show their allyship” before suggesting “pride/ally ribbons” and “mini pride flags.” Staff members are also encouraged to buy themselves t-shirts that read “protect trans kids.”
There’s also a much broader document from HUSD on “LGBTQIA+, Gender, & Pride in HUSD” that contains over 90 different pro-LGBT resources, ranging from “Lesson Plans to Create Gender Expansive Classrooms” to “Trans-positive picture books” for children in kindergarten and up.
One such lesson plan on “gender and identity” is aimed at K-12 students and argues that “Understanding gender and identity requires an appreciation of their multifaceted and dynamic nature,” adding that “People should be respected and supported in their self-identified genders.” It also advertises a “focal text” about the use of gender neutral language, such as the pronoun “they.”
But HUSD’s promotion of transgenderism and gender ideology is just one facet of the district’s broader agenda. HUSD pledged a whopping $40 million in 2021 to develop and implement an ethnic studies curriculum, and more recently agreed to spend over $90,000 on a “Liberated Ethnic Studies Curriculum” with an organization that openly embraces Critical Race Theory and hopes to develop students’ “critical consciousness” through “anti racist and decolonial pedagogy.”
An investigation from The Daily Wire revealed that the district drafted a lesson plan that presented the Black Panthers as a misunderstood civil rights group despite the Marxist organization openly calling for the use of guerilla warfare tactics against the United States.
HUSD also spent $57,000 with an organization called “Woke Kindergarten” that taught Critical Race Theory and aimed to “disrupt whiteness” and another $23,000 with Quetzal Education Services, an organization that taught “anti-racist math pedagogy.”
The district dropped another $43,000 on training from Race Work, an organization that teaches students to become Critical Race Theory activists and was recently awarded another contract by a different Bay Area school district.