House bill introduces trans gag order and school reading limits
This is a ‘Don’t Say Gay’ style gag order on everyone involved in the public education system, with the threat of prosecution as sex criminals for those that refuse to comply.
In what appears to be a response to Trump’s SOTU speech last night, House Republicans are expanding their push to remove trans people from public life.
By Artemis T. Douglas & Jane Migliara Brigham
A new bill introduced to the US House hours after last night’s State of the Union would bar any federally funded primary or secondary school from teaching about issues that include “gender dysphoria or transgenderism”.
H.R. 7661, the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act” would serve to prevent schools from discussing the existence of trans people, or any issues related to their lives. It also defines trans people as “sexually explicit material”, which if taken seriously, would mean that honestly discussing trans people with minors would be legally indistinguishable from sexual abuse of a minor.
Aleksandra Vaca, writing for Transitics, frames this legislation as House Republicans “answering the call” from Trump’s SOTU address last night.
In short, this is a ‘Don’t Say Gay’ style gag order on everyone involved in the public education system, with the threat of prosecution for those that refuse to comply.
Worse, it further defines a whitelist of literature for middle and high school curriculums to be defined by two specific far-right Christian ideologues who specialize in homeschooling materials, Thomas Purifoy Jr. and Mary Purifoy.
The legislation is written to codify what middle and high schoolers should read. This is implemented as a set of texts exempted from the bills’ restrictions.
This bill comes as part of a wider push to remove trans people from public life, starting with those places where children are most likely to see us.
As it attempts to ban discussing trans people, it also attempts to enshrine a specific brand of ‘western christendom’ as the basis for school reading lists. If any text or work that references a human body that isn’t fully clothed and is not whitelisted were to show up in the public classroom, that would, or could– depending on interpretation, become a federal crime.
Of course, the definition for “fully clothed” is not provided by the bill. The bill instead references this by incorporating a definition of “including any program, activity, literature, or material that exposes such children to nude adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious dancing.”
Coupled, these definitions and the whitelists are a brazen and authoritarian attempt to use the public education system as an indoctrination factory, specifically to only allow what a specific brand of far-right Christians think is correct as the entirety of the allowed books.
That brand does not allow for consideration of trans people, evolution, climate change, or most contemporary science and technology.
If passed, it would effectively criminalize knowledge and literature discussing trans people, sexuality, and sex education, and ensure the only allowed literature in the nationwide public education system promotes reactionary ideas defined by the type of Christianity represented by the Purifoys.
In 2018, Thomas Purifoy Jr., wrote a post for a Christian Blog arguing that “Genesis is the Solution for our Culture”. In that argument, he states that,
“If culture is the way people choose to order their lives, then Genesis is where God shows us His order for culture.
We all know there are strange cultural ideas being embraced today. What is rare to hear, however, is someone in the public square point to Genesis as the reason why something should or should not be done. As a result, there are a lot of people in the pews and kids in youth groups who need to hear what Genesis has to say about culture.
Take the transgender issue: if God created man in his own image as male and female, then we are essentially male and female from the beginning. Our sex can't be changed.
Or take marriage: if God created Eve to marry Adam and have children, they are the pattern for all men and women. Two men or two women cannot marry each other.
Or consider climate change/global warming: if God told Noah after the Flood He would never destroy the earth again with water, and that the seasons (i.e., the climate) would remain the same for seedtime and harvest, then there's no need to fear any future climate catastrophe.
The list goes on and on: life, economics, environmental stewardship, technology, food, science... Genesis is the ultimate counter-cultural book that provides the standard for how we should order our lives.”
In other words, Thomas Purifoy’s Christianity is anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-science, and seeks to mandate how all should “order our lives”.
It’s one thing when it’s a random blog post. It’s another thing when the text of legislation introduced in the world’s most powerful country attempts to make the ideology of the man who wrote the blog post the sole determinant of curriculum for an entire country.
That ideology is corrosive, harmful, and destructive. It also isn’t a ‘Thomas Purifoy Jr.’ problem. The authors of the bill could remove his name tomorrow, or find another curriculum list not published by the Purifoys’ ‘Christian Homeschool Curriculum Company’, and use that instead.
The issue is that the legislators are attempting to legally define the discussion of trans people in schools, or imagery or references to anything other than fully clothed human beings, as a federal crime.
The only explicit exceptions are either on a specific list of works published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1990, or on lists written by creationist ideologues and published by a for-profit christian homeschool curriculum company.
The bill’s text also defines both Purifoys’ lists to be used as it “appeared on the date of enactment of this subsection”. This means that between now and when the bill passes into law, if it does, the Purifoy’s would be empowered to rewrite the entire country’s curriculum as they see fit.
In other words, granting the power to freeze the teaching of new social developments to a couple who directly profits from Christian homeschooling materials.
Take for example the subject of economics. The Encyclopedia Britannica list for the social sciences only includes economics from John Maynard Keynes. The Purifoy lists do not mention economics at all.
When turned into the only texts allowed to be exempted from these restrictions, It doesn’t allow for critiques of Keynes, post-Keynesianism, or anything else. At least not without risk to the teachers.
The problem is not that the list itself is only filled with ‘evil ideas’, the problem is that the list exists at all and is so narrow. You could replace Keynes with another whitelisted theorist in another discipline and get the same issue.
That issue is an attempt to freeze human understanding in the United States to a specific set of ideas defined as okay to the same people who think the earth is only a few millennia old, modern science is somewhere between false and evil, and we should have a Christian Dominion for government and society.
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The enforcement in this bill is done by tying this whitelist of literature to the same set of definitions as in Title 18, Chapter 110, Section 2262 of U.S. Code. Title 18 Chapter 110 is the section of federal law governing the crimes and offenses considered “Sexual Exploitation and Other Abuse of Children”.
Further, the bill is vague enough that it’s hard to determine if it is explicitly defining literature outside the whitelist as actually legally equivalent to child sexual abuse, or potentially legally equivalent to child sexual abuse. It could be interpreted in either way.
The muddiness, according to one source, could be deliberate. “This feels to me as if it’s designed to make teachers so gun-shy of federal enforcement that they leave the public education system in droves.”
The source works for a local school district in Florida, but was granted anonymity by The Needle due to their fears of reprisal for speaking out.
The source further stated that,
“In Florida, you can’t say the word ‘menstruation’ to any student before middle school. I have a friend who started her period in 3rd grade. Are teachers supposed to literally not talk about this to their students? Why are we criminalizing this? Why would you make that a fucking crime?”
The legislation referenced by the source is called “Don’t Say Period”, and bans teaching human biology in terms of sex and sexuality before 6th grade. The source also mentioned that in Florida, “teachers are fleeing the education system”.
However, H.R. 7661’s text is unambiguous about defining material that “involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism” as “sexually oriented material”. That includes the existence of trans people.
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