Disney's educational partner backing secretive "gender support plans" rolled out to thousands of schools across the country.
By: Sloan Rachmuth
Protesters gathered at Disneyland in California and Disney Orlando for the past two weeks to protest the company's position on Florida's new Parental Rights bill. The new law makes it illegal for public schools to teach sexuality and transgenderism in kindergarten through third grade.
Disney’s top brass publicly vowed to pressure Governor Desantis to repeal the law. A day later, journalist Christopher Rufo dropped a video of a Disney virtual town hall where executives revealed Disney’s gay agenda and promised to add LGBT content to children's entertainment. The video caught Disney's diversity manager saying the company has “removed all of the gendered greetings” at its theme parks. The days of “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” are gone. So are the special “Hello, princess!” greetings reserved for little girls.
Meanwhile, in school districts across the country, Disney’s publishing partner Pearson Education is funding transgender support plans that suggest keeping gender changes a secret from parents.
Pearson is a British multi-national conglomerate that claims to be the world’s leading learning company. The company, founded in 1844, has net earnings of over $500 million annually in the education publishing and assessment service space. Pearson owns educational products including Addison–Wesley, Peachpit, Prentice-Hall, eCollege, Longman, Scott Foresman, and others.
In August 2020, Pearson was looking for some magic to transfer from textbooks to digital learning. “Where better to find a new CEO than the Magic Kingdom?” the board thought. So they brought in Andy Bird who spent 14 years as chairman of Walt Disney International where he helped the entertainment giant build out its digital offerings.
BRINGING DISNEY’S GROOMING CULTURES & PRACTICES TO PEARSON
Months after Andy Bird (He/Him on LinkedIn) took the helm at Pearson, the company announced a groundbreaking set of Gender Equality Guidelines to “tackle gender stereotyping in education.” The new guidelines were implemented to help Pearson take a "positive and progressive approach" to gender identity issues.
The guide is not just bleakly dystopian, it is identical to directives put out by Disney in its diversity town hall.
The company's funding of Genderspectrum.org is another way it is meeting its challenge of indoctrinating children with "the meaning of what it means to be a man or a woman."
The Genderspectrum.org organization is the creator of most of the customizable “gender support plans” we are seeing in states like North Carolina, Iowa, and California. The organization describes the plan this way on its website:
The plan is a detailed form to help you create a shared understanding among school staff, parents and a student about the ways in which the student's authentic gender will be accounted for and supported at school.
Genderspectrum.org was started by famed Transgender activist Stephanie Brill who includes irreversibly harmful advice to parents in her first of its kind guidebook “The Transgender Child.” Here is just one example from the book dealing with the effects of puberty blockers, which has been disputed by the American College of Pediatrics:
One of the organization's early legislative victory came with the passage of California's School Success and Opportunity Act of 2013, which lets boys use the bathroom and participate on girls' sports teams without proof of gender.
Through Genderspectrum.org's professional trainings, it claims to “reach educators who impact the lives of more than 3 million students.”
Pearson Education is listed on Genderspectrum.org’s website as its top sponsor. One of Pearson's investments appears to be for the 2020 Gender Spectrum Conference. Our research team searched the web for conference recordings, schedules, and handouts from that meeting, but came up empty. But we did find information on the 2019 conference, and that is where the “gender support plan” was rolled out for educators.
According to the handouts for the “Supporting Transgender and Non-Binary Students” session, educators were advised to determine the level of parental involvement that would be “appropriate” in transitioning a child. The importance of using degrees of student privacy when discussing these matters with families was also emphasized.
Most troubling was the guidance on creating a private relationship between the child and the school, and even extending privacy rights to other adults who are not parents of the child in question.
Pearson Education did not just invest in disseminating blueprints for transitioning children behind parents’ backs, it invested in lessons on sexualizing and grooming 8 to 12-year-olds in the classroom. The Genderspectrum.org elementary curriculum seminar was led by:
Kieran Slattery, a white queer trans man
Katy Butler, a white 29-year-old queer woman who lives with her wife and cat
Molly, a transgender nonbinary kindergarten teacher
Carla, a queer, non-binary, Latinx writer, educator, and activist
Check out the lesson’s learning goals for this Gender Snowperson drill:
"Let students know that gender is your internal sense of being a girl, boy, both, or neither," the teacher guide reads. "Write and explain to your students that the bottom circle of the Sonwperson is a person’s sex assigned at birth," it continues.
Children should be taught that gender identity is "our understanding in our minds and heart who we are," was the overarching point of the exercise.
Predictably, the seminar offered a tool for normalizing and glorifying transgenderism in the classroom: Jacob’s new dress.
Though we did not find details for Genderspectrum.org's other past events, we did find details for its next two events on its website:
Vaginoplasty (Gender Affirming Surgery Series)
This presentation will cover the surgical journey of young patients as they navigate towards the goal of aligning their bodies with their identity in the form of vaginoplasty. This is followed by a detailed description of the surgical procedure and an extensive dive into post-operative care and long-term expectations.
And this one:
Facial Surgery (Gender Affirming Surgery Series)
Dr. Facque will discuss the development of the facial skeleton during puberty, in an attempt to help explain the reasons why some seek facial surgery to relieve gender dysphoria. He will then talk about surgical options that are available to feminize facial features and some of the special considerations that are important for each procedure. In the second hour, Dr. Facque will then be discussing the surgical options that are available to help masculinize the face as well as relevant anatomy and details of those procedures.
We can only hope that neither lunch nor dinner will be served at the event.
PEARSON POWER
To understand how Pearson Education harnesses its partners to create a juggernaut like the K-12 Transgender movement, it is helpful to view them as a broker. Pearson acts as an intermediary between their partners like Disney and Genderspectrum.org – all kindred spirits – who work on behalf of the company to change and then set, American K-12 education policy.
Pearson benefited most from the hundreds of millions of dollars in Common Core-related testing contracts, even after the scheme had proven detrimental to student achievement across the country. The reason? The Pearson brand was (and still is) the market leader in education - oh, and it spent $8 million on lobbying for five years.
Pearson influences education policy at the state level too. It writes the textbooks and tests that drive instruction in public schools.
Pearson software is used to grade essays, monitor student behavior, and diagnose and treat attention deficit disorder. The company administers teacher licensing exams and trains new teachers. We have already learned that Pearson provides continuing education for teachers through its partners like Genderspectrum.org. It also operates dozens of online public schools.
Does Pearson’s CEO Andy Bird care about the psychological impact that grooming children into changing genders has on tens of millions of American families?
As Pearson’s campaign gains traction, how will state and local superintendents respond to the association of their schools with efforts to groom children?
And how will Pearson’s grooming efforts, carried out by the company and its partners, impact parents’ decision to opt-out of public schools altogether?
Will Pearson's decision to go full "groomer" prove to be a strategic blunder?
Stay tuned.
Note: Education First Alliance contacted Pearson Education and Genderspectrum.org for comment but has not yet received a response.
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