There are two ways to be subjected to the preposterous awkwardness of elementary sex education: sitting through it and then sitting through the school meetings at which it’s discussed.
I’ve managed to experience both. Between fifth and 12th grades, I wasted hours of my life watching laughable videos on human sexuality and listening to teachers preach the gospel of permissiveness: As long as it was consensual and legal, it was OK and you were perfectly fine. Seriously. Don’t judge and don’t consider yourself judged, either by your parents or by any higher power. You’re doing great, really.
Then, for a brief period in high school, I attended some of the meetings where this curriculum was discussed. Parents, you may not be surprised to learn, weren’t thrilled about this. On perhaps the most sensitive topic a parent has to deal with, liberal value judgments were being imparted by educators who decided they got to act in the place of parents because kids might not otherwise get this message at home. This being the pre-YouTube days, things didn’t get performatively shouty, but the mood was tense — for good reason.
Those were different times, though, and the permissiveness being discussed — the mechanics of the coital act, how to get birth control, homosexuality — seems positively quaint nowadays, at least by the standards of the school that podcaster and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly sends her kids to. There, 8-year-old boys get to discuss taking puberty blockers, getting castrated and becoming women.
On Wednesday’s show, Kelly had middle school teacher Ramona Bessinger on. The Providence, Rhode Island, teacher was suspended earlier this month over an alleged lapse in safety protocol on her part, according to Legal Insurrection.
However, given the fact Bessinger has been an ardent critic of critical race theory and other left-wing pedagogy in Providence’s curriculum, this seemed like little more than a flimsy pretext to remove a fly in the ointment.
The Providence School District is calling me in Wednesday for my show-trial. “Pre-disciplinary hearing”. They do not like teachers that expose them. @Renny920 @AInfanteGreen @Nicoletta0602 @re_schools @CBHeresy pic.twitter.com/X88MXB2DPE
— Ramona Bessinger (@RamonaBessinger) October 11, 2021
During her interview with Kelly, Bessinger said Providence had gotten caught up in “this whole push to embrace any child who wants to be pansexual, transsexual, multisexual, who the heck knows?”
“As a teacher, I’m not interested in talking to children about their sexual preference, especially at the age of 12,” Bessinger said, adding she felt the school was encouraging impressionable children to take on identities they wouldn’t otherwise consider.
“Developmentally, middle school children want to fit in — more so than probably elementary or secondary” school children, Bessinger said.
“And so they’re preying on that psychological phase that kids go through. They want to fit in, and if they feel it’s going to please an adult, they may even pick a pronoun so that that adult applauds them.”
If you think things are bad in Providence, though, wait until you hear what’s apparently happening in Kelly’s kids’ school — which she said “was one of the top all-boys schools … one of the top schools in the country” and which she chose “because it was … more traditional, it wasn’t this far left.”
Kelly said her third-graders were subjected to an “experimental transgender education program,” which they found out about after she and her husband “went to parent-teacher night.”
“And we were sitting there, and one of our fellow parents — a man — raised his hand and said, ‘Why did my son come home’ — these are third-graders, 8- and 9-year-olds — ‘my son come home and ask if it’s true that he can take a pill to prevent puberty, and then, when he turns 18, can have his penis chopped off if he wants to become a woman?'”
“We were all like, ‘What? Say what?'” Kelly said.
“Trust me, we were angry, and the teacher acknowledged it. She didn’t deny it. She said, ‘Because we take the conversation where the boys want to take it’ — and of course, we were like, that’s bull, no 8-year-old was asking that question.”
Kelly added that discussing these topics with children just hopelessly confuses them — and she’s right. Are we to be shocked, though? That’s not a bug in the system. It’s a feature.
We live in the era of Drag Queen Story Time. In Washington state, an elementary school featured a book for LGBT pride month this year in which an underage character who received “top surgery” — the removal of breast tissue from women who identify as men to appear more masculine — appeared on the cover.
And if your public school district doesn’t play along, expect to pay. In a back-to-school message in August, the Biden administration’s Kristen Clarke, the Department of Justice’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, told transgender students they could file a lawsuit if their school was (among other things) stopping them from “receiving the supportive and life-saving care you may need.”
Talking to 8-year-olds about castration is supposedly part of the new awkwardness students and parents have to navigate, all thanks to educators with an agenda who think their values are better than yours — and want to make a mark on impressionable children. If you don’t believe the slippery slope is real, wake up.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
