A Nevada school district approved a sex education curriculum this week for elementary school children that defines males and females in terms of their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
The school board for the Washoe County School District in Reno approved the new sex ed curriculum for fourth and fifth graders in a 5-2 vote on Tuesday.
The curriculum contains lessons that include the terms “boys and people with a penis” and “girls and people with a vulva,” a reference to trans-identifying people having the genitalia of their biological sex, but identifying as the opposite gender.
The school board vote followed several hours of public comment, where members of the community weighed in on a fourth grade lesson called “Understanding Our Bodies,” which referred to people having a “body with a penis” or a “body with a vulva.”
The fourth grade curriculum will teach kids about body parts, including the vagina, vulva, penis, urethra, scrotum, anus, clitoris, and nipples, along with cartoon diagrams of both male and female genitals.
In fifth grade, students will hear the terms “assigned sex at birth (male)” and “assigned sex at birth (female)” as part of the curriculum. Their lessons include learning about the reproductive system.
School board member Jeffrey Church voted against the new sex education curriculum and told the board it would “alienate and marginalize half or more of the community” and “ignore constitutional religious beliefs.”
“The proposal goes well beyond that by including LGBTQ+ material and changing male and female or boys and girls to for example ‘Girls and people with a Vulva,'” Church told the board.
“Send this back as I have asked please. Retain boy-girl,” he said. “Remove misleading references to false national standards. Follow or change the regulations but don’t violate it.”
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School board president Ben Smith said parents will be given the choice to “opt in” to the sex education lessons.
“The Washoe County School District recognizes that there is a wide range of valid and varying perspectives on the topic of sex education. Nevada protects and prioritizes parental choice, as does the school district. As a result, WCSD families make the final choice about the sex education curriculum their children learn and families are given the opportunity to ‘opt in’ to the lessons,” Smith said.
Some members of the community who submitted public comments on the sex education curriculum said they were taken aback and think it will sexualize elementary schoolers.
“My brief review of elements of this curriculum, as a mature adult, made me gasp,” one person wrote. “Portions of this curriculum are infantile, ignore biology and would sexualize these school age children (4th‐5th graders).”
“Your job is education. PERIOD. Educate these kids with the facts. There is male and female. That’s it. You can’t change your chromosomes. You can call yourself whatever you want. You can pretend to be a volleyball. That doesn’t make it true,” another person wrote.
In recent years, parents across the country have sounded the alarm about what they view as inappropriate sexual content in schools. Many have shown up at school board meetings to demand that such content be removed from curricula and school libraries where it is accessible to their children.