If Your Child’s School Can’t Tell Boys From Girls, How Can You Trust Them On Anything?

Last Thursday afternoon, time expired for parents to provide comments on proposed changes to sex education in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), one of the largest school districts in the country, with a population of about 180,000 students. As The Federalist reported last week, the proposal includes labeling boys and girls, respectively, as “assigned” males and females “at birth.” It also includes curricula on “sexual orientation and gender identity” that involves watching a pro-transgender PBS video telling kids they can have “intermediate” private parts.

If you think FCPS officials will carefully consider comments and complaints from parents worried about exposing their prepubescent children to transgender ideology, and perhaps even rethink their plans, I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to sell you. As we have seen from earlier examples of Fairfax County “welcoming comments” on proposed changes to road names, this public survey is nothing more than an empty, perfunctory bureaucratic procedure aimed at pretending that parents have a say regarding what happens during the school day.

Yet even more saliently, FCPS’s willingness to embrace this radical gender ideology and foist it upon thousands of Northern Virginia youth provokes a more important question: If our public schools can’t differentiate boys from girls, what wisdom and knowledge can they impart?

Ignoring Basic Biology in Favor of Gender Studies

I confess a certain embarrassment to be the one writing on this. When I worked in FCPS, I taught high-school history, not science. Years before that, I earned a respectable but certainly not impressive “B” in my ninth-grade FCPS honors biology class. But I’d like to think the lessons my teacher offered on the rudimentary realities of male and female biology — which of course apply not only to humans but the entirety of the natural order — are still in effect, even if it’s been 24 years since the last time I took a test on stamens, pistils, and gametes. I can still remember us boys immaturely chuckling when our teacher discussed ova and sperm.

But this is no laughing matter. School administrators and educators across the country have dispensed with these basic truths of biology in favor of the latest “findings” from politicized university sociology and “gender studies” departments. Schools take their directives not from biology — or, God forbid, classical philosophy and its articulation of the teleological nature of the human body, oriented, as ova and sperm are, toward the creation of new life — but from politically motivated journalists who attack the few teachers courageous enough to take a stand.

The new FCPS directive — which other school districts will undoubtedly follow —  rejects stable and universal distinctions between large and small gametes and the fact that sexes can now also be determined at conception through the SRY gene (resulting in male gametes), or its absence (female gametes). They expound endlessly on “intersex” persons who supposedly undermine “binary norms,” neglecting to note that such persons are incredibly rare: Sex is readily recognizable at birth for 99.98 percent of