SFGate: “Oakland school's lessons in gender diversity”

None—according to the mandatory curriculum at California’s Redwood Heights Elementary School. Principal Sara Stone says, “Really, the message behind this curriculum is there are different ways to be boys. There are different ways to be girls.”

After teaching about “the crazy world of gender within the animal kingdom with lessons about single-sex Hawaiian geckos, fish that switch genders and boy snakes that act ‘girly,’” Gender Spectrum trainer Joel Baum tells fourth and fifth graders, “Evolution comes up with some pretty funny ways for animals to reproduce.”

Then he extrapolates from animals to people, teaching “some boys can act like girls; some girls can have boy body parts; and some biological boys feel like a girl inside their hearts. . . . There are not just two options.” Gender Spectrum bases its curriculum on the evolutionary notion that humans are animals.

Gender is determined by what genes are being expressed. There are many interesting ways those genes get regulated in the animal kingdom. Some creatures simply express whatever sex-determining gene they have. Some lizard hybrids are able to clone themselves, remaining forevermore female. In turtles, the temperature at which eggs incubate determines gender.

Others animals are hermaphrodites, possessing biological machinery for both genders. Some, like earthworms, function as both sexes simultaneously. Others, like clownfish, change genders. Clownfish are born male but have both male and female germ cells. Within a school of clownfish, one develops into a functioning female. When she dies, the dominant male in the group transforms into a female as the female germ cells he harbors become active. God designed these creative ways for some creatures to function and to meet the challenges of their environments.

But God did not design human beings that way. Jesus said, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning made them male and female?” (Matthew 19:4)

Human physical gender identity can be ambiguous or at variance with the “gender genes” a person possesses due to conditions interfering with correct expression of the genome.

When human beings suffer physical problems with gender identity, they are suffering from a medical condition as real as other physical infirmities (consequences of the Fall of Genesis 3). Human physical gender identity can be ambiguous or at variance with the “gender genes” a person possesses due to conditions interfering with correct expression of the genome.

Human beings are designed to live a life identified as a particular gender without the prerogative to alter it at will. To teach children to be kind and loving to all people is good. But to teach children that choosing to change gender is perfectly moral and right is wrong.