U.S. Dept. of Ed hosts webinar on ' Supporting Transgender & Nonbinary Students in K-12 Schools'

Parental rights not mentioned a single time

The U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) held a webinar on April 13 titled “Lessons from the Field - Supporting Transgender & Nonbinary Students in K-12 Schools.”

“The U.S. Department of Education is hosting a webinar series to address hot topics that are on the top of the educators’ minds,” reads the event notice posted to the USDOE’s National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments (NCSSLE) website. “After sharing federal updates, the series features lessons learned and best practices from faculty, staff, schools, districts, institutions of higher education, and other places of educational instruction. It also shares a variety of useful resources.”

Transgender and non-binary student “supportive” work by administrators, principals, and teachers was a main focus while parents rated a scant 13 mentions during the over 1-hour long webinar.

Following the event, the USDOE pushed out the video of the webinar and materials to state education agencies across the country.

The webinar was hosted by NCSSLE Training Specialist Tim Duffey. In his opening remarks, Duffey listed speakers for the webinar that included a long list of names from various organizations, including the CDC, as well as listing their “preferred pronouns.”

USDOE’s Rhoades acted as moderator and in his opening comments took aim at “an increase hundreds of bills that are really targeting unfairly students” and that he thinks “these bills have been proposed across the country and they're really targeting our young people.”

Ames echoed Rhoades on a “wave of legislation” targeting transgender students.

“It's actually shocking how engaged these young people are in what is being done to them. They're watching this wave of legislation targeting them in just about every area of their life,” said Ames, who went on to say that “Some of them restrict trans girls from playing on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity.”

The CDC’s Raspberry followed up with comments about the controversial CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which parents have pushed back on due to it containing privacy-invasive questions.

Raspberry also shared examples of “CDC-funded districts” doing support work for “transgender non-binary and gender non-conforming students” such as Chicago Public Schools’ guidelines “outlining gender-affirming protocols and policies” and Seattle Public School incorporating the books, photos, and LGBTQ affirming exhibits “into students' learning by developing grade-level lesson plans.”

Another example was the Albuquerque Public Schools “Pronouns Project” as detailed in the slide below:

One of the slides used during the webinar claimed that “almost 2% of high schoolers identify as transgender.” That number seems inflated given that the most recent statistics put the adult transgender population at just .6% of the entire U.S. adult population.

The full webinar video is below, NCSSLE’s website has slides, speaker bios, “resource” lists, and a full transcript of the remarks can be viewed here.

Much of the data and statistics presented during the webinar appeared to come from GLSEN, formerly known as the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network. GLSEN was founded by Kevin Jennings, a former Obama appointee who was Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education and who some say also had some questionable inspirations and associations.

This is not the first LGBT-tied push by the Biden administration’s USDOE.

In June of 2021, amid widespread pandemic learning loss for K-12 students, continued masking, and school closures, the USDOE had published a two-page document for “supporting transgender youth in schools.”