As we reported recently, the Victorian state Department of Education has a secretive policy of encouraging the ‘social transition’ of children without their parents’ knowledge or consent. ‘Social transition’ meaning encouraging children to believe they are ‘born in the wrong body’, and to adopt opposite-sex names, pronouns, dress and behaviour, including being allowed to use opposite-sex facilities and play in opposite-sex sports.
That this is happening in Victoria should surprise no one: it’s not derided as ‘Wokeistan’ for nothing. It was Victoria, never forget, that hatched the original, notorious ‘Safe Schools’ programme, a Queer Theory indoctrination programme masquerading as ‘anti-bullying’. The programme was the brainfart of a Queer Theory thinktank headed by a ‘queer’ activist who wrote glowing pro-paedophilia pamphlets in the 1980s and more recently mooted the abolition of age of consent. The original author of ‘Safe Schools’ bragged that her job was to teach children “how to be gay and communist”.
But the rot from Victoria quickly spread interstate – including to Tasmania. More and more concerned parents are flagging concerns about supposed sex education materials and programmes being promoted in the state’s schools. In particular the ‘Growing Up Programme’.
As reported by Women Speak Tasmania:
The following letter was written by a Tasmanian mother who has raised serious concerns about the Growing Up Programme (GUP), delivered by Family Planning Tasmania (FPT) in public schools across the state. The parent highlights issues with transparency, the use of language in sex education, and the implicit teaching of gender identity concepts to primary school children.
For privacy and security reasons, the name of the school has been withheld.
The mother of two primary-school-aged children says that she “believe[s] sex education is important”, but that it should “reflect the reality that there are two sexes and use normal language that women and girls are female and boys and men are male”. The school, she says, offered a parent information session on GUP – at 8.30am on a Monday, on the very day the school started teaching kids the material.
The woman representing FPT at the session had a she/her pronoun badge on, which immediately led me to doubt her impartiality, professionalism and competence. She then went through what the children would be taught. The younger grades would learn very basic information about body parts and what was private. Beginning from year three, children would learn about puberty, and the two reproductive systems.
If that all sounds innocuous enough, some pointed questions soon raised red flags. Question whether the programme teaches “the fact that boys go through male puberty and girls go through female puberty”, the FPT representative immediately resorted to weasel-words and evasions.
The FPT representative said that they use language that explains the two types of puberty, but they refer to ‘people with penises’ and ‘people with vulvas’ when explaining the difference. At this point I asked if I could see the written materials they teach that stipulates this language. She said she doesn’t have a script when delivering GUP, and she would need to check with her manager.
Attempting to follow up with FPT did not clear the mud any. While the acting head of education programmes at FPT confirmed that they use weird, dehumanising language “that reduces people to body parts and functions”, rather than clear, reality-based words like boys, girls, man or woman, they would not make their actual teaching materials available.
FPT maintains, despite the above, that they do not cover ‘gender’ issues with primary school children.
Another concerned mother who contacted her children’s school, requesting access to the teaching materials used in GUP was given only general information pages – full of fluff, but no detail. The school directed her to the Family Planning Tasmania website, where she was unable to find any additional information.
The only material about GUP given out to parents. The Good Oil.
Notably, the FPT website says that its programme is “mapped to” the Respectful Relationships Teaching and Learning Package, the successor to ‘Safe Schools’. RR teaches highly contested Gender Theory concepts, such as that gender is not the same as sex, but that gender is “constructed”. “Useful language and definitions include: [Sex, Gender, Gender identity, Transgender, Sexual orientation, homosexual]”. “Classroom activities can be used to help children to explore gender identity.”
What sort of classroom activities? Anglican minister and father of two Chris Bowditch relates his own experiences.
When my wife was a teacher, before we had kids (our eldest is now 9.5), her school transitioned a year one boy into a girl. That was with parental involvement at least. But it was all driven by activists and there was nothing she or any of the staff could do about it.
Fast forward and when we sent our eldest to school, by the time she hit prep she was being indoctrinated into the Rainbow cult at her government primary school.
There’s no question Working it Out Tasmania and the state government Education Department would also love to take after their Victorian counterparts and transition kids and set them on a pathway to unimaginable harm without the involvement of pesky parents who actually love their kids and want to protect them.
All of which raises questions for the Tasmanian government. Women Speak Tasmania are challenging both Premier Jeremy Rockliff and Education Minister Jo Palmer to come clean on whether they approve of government-funded materials teaching contested notions of ‘gender’ in the state’s schools and apparently being withheld from Tasmanian parents.
