Disney funds gender identity, LGBTQ curriculum in schools—and has been for 20 years
GLSEN has ways that teachers can incorporate lessons on gender identity and LGBTQ advocacy and issues from 1st through 12th grade. And Disney has been funding them for over 20 years.
Disney announced with pride their plans to fund 10 organizations that are based in advocacy and education around LGBTQ issues, specifically for children and teens. Among these groups receiving funding is GLSEN, which pushes gender identity and LGBTQ curriculum to schools in the US.
GLSEN provides resources for educators toward “developing LGBTQ-inclusive classroom resources,” that “promote safer school environments” by “developing lessons that avoid bias and that include positive representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, history, and events.”
The idea is that the lessons should start in elementary school.
“Students of all ages must be given an opportunity to learn that the words ‘gay,’ ‘lesbian,’ and ‘transgender’ are adjectives that should be used with respect to describe people in their community, not words used in a negative way to hurt, insult, and degrade,” GLSEN says.
Further, an LGBTQ-based curriculum should be implemented “into most content areas,” and should facilitate students’ own discovery of their gender identity.
“Care should be taken to fill gaps while looking for opportunities to deepen student understanding of their world and identities,” GLSEN writes. “LGBTQ people, history, and events can be easily inserted into most content areas. Teaching about identity at any age is valuable for students, and can be considered part of social emotional learning (SEL). Curriculum should provide students with opportunities to reflect on their own identities, including gender identity and expression, family diversity including LGBTQ-headed families, and the types of relationships they may want to build.”
GLSEN provides lessons that teachers can use to indoctrinate students into these views. Many of these lessons center on teachers drawing out students to talk about their own identities and explorations of those perceived identities.
In early elementary, students will be taught about non-traditional family structures and gender stereotypes.
Upper elementary brings a lesson called “Identity Flowers,” which “encourages students to explore their own identities and personal experiences with race, culture, ability, family structure, religion or spirituality, and gender identity and expression encourages students to explore their own identities and personal experiences with race, culture, ability, family structure, religion or spirituality, and gender identity and expression.
Middle school lessons are about giving “students an opportunity to experience what’s it’s like to be labeled in a negative way,” and encourages empathy for those who are labeled negatively, therefore.
High school lessons teach how students can be “empowered” through “self-identification.” The lessons teach students how to undertake the process of self-identification, and to then be proud of those identities they have identified with.
In the discipline of science, children are meant to learn that sex isn’t all about the gender-binary, and should be taught, per GLSEN, about animals’ “diversity in gender and family structure.”
By middle school, children learning science and sex education should be given the “gender triangle,” so they can learn “to distinguish between gender identity, gender expression, and bodies. Educators teach about biology and the human bodies in ways that do not reinforce gender binaries, and includes intersex people.” In this lesson, students will learn that chromosomes have nothing to do with a person’s gender.
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