Michigan's Dept. of Education encourages child sexual transitions without parents' consent

The Michigan Department of Education has embraced a radical gender theory program that encourages teachers and staff to adopt the principle of 'intersectionality.'

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Sign up for his newsletter here. 

I have obtained videos and internal documentation from the state’s training program, which first took place in 2020 and was repackaged for public school employees for the 2021–2022 school year. The training program mimics the basic narrative of academic queer theory: the presenters claim that the West has created a false notion that "gender is binary" in order to oppress racial and sexual minorities. In response, the department encourages teachers to adopt the principle of "intersectionality," a key tenet of critical race theory, in order to "dismantle systems of oppression," which are replicated through the culture and institutions of education. 

The first step to dismantling these systems, according to the presenters, is to disrupt the gender binary. In one presentation, trainer Amorie Robinson, who describes herself as a "Black, masculine-identified, cisgendered lesbian baby boomer" and uses the "African name" Kofi Adoma, says that "we’ve been condition and we’ve been acculturated in this particular culture that gender is binary." But teachers should know that, in fact, gender is a spectrum, including identities such as "gender non-binary," "gender fluid," "gender queer," "gender non-conforming," and "bi-gender." Likewise, sexual orientation can include an expanding range of categories. Students might identify as "asexual, lesbian, straight, gay, bisexual, queer, questioning, demisexual, demiromantic, aromantic, and skoliosexual," says Robinson. "I’ll leave that to you to go Google on those. Because we ain’t got time today!"