Exclusives

EXCLUSIVE: School District Offers ‘Women Studies Course’ That Encourages Students To Use ‘Gender-Neutral’ Language

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A Texas school district offered a “Women and Gender Studies” course that taught students to use “gender-neutral” language when describing jobs in order to be more inclusive, according to course materials obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In the 2022-2023 school year, Judson Independent School District offered a “Women and Gender Studies” course which quizzes students on the definition of “safe space” and “patriarchy,” according to documents obtained by the DCNF through a public records request. As a part of the course, students were given a list of job titles and phrases such as “mailman,” “policeman,” “woman’s institution” and “sportsmanship,” and asked to take “man” out to make the terms “bias free.”

“Although these gender-biased labels reflect our past more accurately than the present, they are still used,” the curriculum showed. “Some will try and tell us that some titles are ‘inclusive’ and can be used for both men and women. This is not true. What would happen if a group of males were referred to as ‘you gals?’ Yet females are  called ‘you guys’ all the time.”

Students were asked to brainstorm ways the phrases, “fisherman,” “bachelor’s degree,” “mankind” and “tomboy” could become more “gender neutral” in a worksheet included in the curriculum.

“As the times have changed, many women and men have entered jobs that were once gender specific,” the activity stated. “Now we hear job titles such as flight attendant, fisherperson and homemaker. Language has had to change to reflect the change of the workforce. We still have words to describe careers and jobs that we have found hard to change.”

As a part of the activity, students were also asked to make job titles and phrases “race-neutral,” the documents showed. Students were told to create new words in place of “white lie,” “black lie” and “alien minority” to make them less “race-biased.”

Students were quizzed on the definition of “patriarchy,” which the curriculum defined as “control with men having a disproportionately large share of power” and “safe space,” which the course defined as a “place (as on a college campus) intended to be free of bias, conflict, criticism, or potentially threatening actions, ideas or conversations,” according to an assessment.

Students were asked to define “LGBTQIA,” “CIS,” “non-binary” and “gender identity,” a quiz showed.

An essay assignment asked students to explore their “attitudes and anxieties” towards the opposite gender in an effort to foster “healthy and equitable” opinions.

“Discrimination against women,” a lesson included in the class, taught students about “occupational sex segregation,” according to the worksheet. In a research activity, students had to find what percentage of minimum wage workers are women and how much the average woman earns compared to men.

In Judson Independent School District, 50% of high school students are proficient in reading levels while 56% met math grade-level expectations, according to U.S. News and World Report, the nation’s largest ranking system.

“Half of the high schoolers students in this district aren’t proficient in reading,” Alex Nester, investigative fellow for Parents Defending Education, a parental rights organization, told the DCNF. “Yet, they’re teaching students definitions of words like ‘non-binary,’ ‘patriarchy,’ and ‘cis-,’ and asking students to make common words and phrases ‘gender neutral.’ Seems like the priorities are a bit off here.”

Judson Independent School District did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.