Got little kids in public school? Live in Arlington, Virginia?
Odds are, you don't. But even if you don’t happen to have children in Jaim Foster’s kindergarten class, odds are that in today’s ultra-PC, uber-progressive culture, what he teaches his students about gender may soon be headed to a classroom near you.
Foster, an openly gay kindergarten teacher at the very public Ashlawn Elementary School, told the Washington Post he makes sure to stock his classroom library with books about kids who have gay or lesbian parents, as well as kids who identify as transgender. Having once been a teacher in Nebraska, Foster said he was tired of being told he couldn't share his gay-ness with his students by telling them all about his boyfriends.
You know, as kindergarten teachers are so normally apt to do.
On top of that, Foster, with the school’s blessing, also brought in a transgender activist last week to read his kindergarten class from a picture book about how awesome and totally normal transgenderism is.
From the glowing WaPo report:
Arlington does not have a curriculum that specifies how students should be taught about sexual orientation or gender identity, Foster said. But he shares experiences about his spouse with the children and stocks his classroom library with picture books such as “Heather Has Two Mommies” and “My Princess Boy.”
“We talk about it all the time, in one way or another, of accepting families and differences,” he said.
To help these very young and impressionable children understand how (apparently) perfectly fine it is to be a boy who identifies as a girl, Foster, in conjunction with the Human Rights Coalition, brought in transgender activist Sarah McBride as part of the National Education Association’s annual Read Across America Day. Surrounded by posters about transgender kids and how to be "welcoming" to those who identify as something other than what they actually are, McBride read from a children’s book by transgender TV personality Jazz Jennings, explaining to the group of 5-year-old prepubescent students how being trans is totally, perfectly O.K.
“I’m like Jazz,” McBride told the kids. “When I was born, the doctors and my parents, they all thought that I was a boy.”
“Why?” one little girl asked.
“Because society, people around them told them that was the case,” McBride responded. “It took me getting a little bit older to be able to say that in my heart and in my mind, I knew I was really a girl.”
Because hey, when it comes to figuring out who you are or and all the ins and outs of personal plumbing and sexuality to kids who only just recently learned to pee on their own, why leave that up to the actual parents?