Officials with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have started this week started to promote a new tool meant to push various schools all over the U.S. to accept gender ideology as a means to increase “inclusivity.”
This past Tuesday, the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health released a link to a new resource aimed at assisting administrators from various schools to “quickly gauge inclusivity” at all of their schools.
Created as a self-assessment tool, the new resource covers subjects at schools ranging from pronoun usage and sports teams to bathroom policies. This new tool was developed utilizing a large plethora of materials from various non-government organizations like the National LGBT Health Education Center and the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health.
“Schools play a critical role in supporting the health and academic development of all youth, including the success of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth. Creating and sustaining inclusive school environments, policies, programs, and practices that include LGBTQ youth is one strategy for improving the health and academic success of all youths,” explained the resource.
At first, the resource was created through a collaboration between the CDC and the NORC research group at the University of Chicago. The resource has not been expressly “required” and is described as “a collection of curated resources and tools to help schools enhance LGBTQ inclusive policies, programs, and practices.”
The new “inclusivity” assessments are split up into various sections for use by educators, administrators, school health staff, and the rest of the student body. There are a total of three stages of inclusivity marked in the tool going from “Commit to Change” all the way to “Awesome Ally.”
In one part of the new tool, it asks if the user can recognize that gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation can be “experienced on a continuum” and in another section it asks if the user normally just “assumes” gender identity.
This new tool also questions of school employees about if they make use of gender-neutral language such as “partner” in place of terms like “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” all to go along with the use of the preferred pronouns of their students.
School administrators are issued a higher “inclusivity” grade if they implement policies that allow students to make use of the locker room/bathroom that corresponds to their chosen gender identity. These same administrators are also questioned on if the technological policies “allow student access to age-appropriate LGBTQ content and information.”
The new tool recommends that these administrators make use of information from the Human Rights Watch and Gender Spectrum, a group that promotes resources for “gender diverse” youth.
