A New York public school teacher has been suspended after one of her seventh-grade students brought home a packet of information about transgender surgeries that included graphic sexual definitions, outraging the students' Christian father.
The teacher from Cambridge Central School in Albany, New York, was placed on paid administrative leave after school parent Sirell Fiel posted a live video on Facebook expressing outrage at the material shared with his 11-year-old child during a health class, WRGB-TV reports.
In the video, Fiel said he sat down with his son one day to do homework and was apalled to discover the boy had been given 40-page "gender identity" packet containing graphic details about genital reassignment surgery, including a diagram of a "genderbread person." Additionally, the packet contained a list of more than 50 sexual definitions and slang terms the children were to be tested on the following day.
"You're going to tell me this is something our kids need to know in 7th grade to pass 7th grade health class," Fiel said. "This is stuff our kids in 7th grade don't need to be learning in school."
Part of his anger, Fiel said, stemmed from the fact that he never received any kind of warning or permission slip from the school stating that this information would be distributed in class.
"I understand we live in a...world [where] everyone's got their thing and not everyone's going to be the same,"' Fiel said in the video. "But, as we come with our own Christian values, we live by our own expectations and when it comes to teaching our kids certain things, that should be left up to us, not the school districts. Not health class in seventh grade, no."
Field said the health lesson and packet were little more than "state funded porn."
"They're really desensitizing all our kids, it's ruining America," Fiel said. "It's not bad enough that their innocence is being robbed from us through the frickin' news on the TV everyday, they're literally taking the innocence out of our kids everyday with this BS."
He urged parents to stand with him on the issue: "This is well beyond that line that the school needs to be teaching our kids. They are way outside their boundaries."
Field later told the Glen Falls Post Star that he has no problem with talking about diversity, but the information shared with the 11 and 12-year-old students was "too much."
In a letter posted on the school district's website, superintendent Vincent Canini wrote that the gender identity information packet was handed out by a guest speaker from the Pride Center of the Capital Region, an LGBTQ education and advocacy group, who was invited by the school's health teacher.
After a review of the packet, the guest speaker was then "uninvited" from presenting in the school district and the teacher was placed on paid administrative leave, the letter said.
Canini admitted to WRGB that the teacher had requested permission to host a guest speaker in the class, but had not presented the handouts for review in advance.
'There's a district policy that certain materials should not be distributed," he said. "This is not what we would normally do, and you can be rest assured it will not happen again."
Statistics from the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) reveal that the number of children referred to "gender identity clinics" has quadrupled in the past five years. In 2016, 84 children aged between three and seven were referred to gender identity clinics, compared to just 20 in the year of 2012 to 2013.
Dr. Joanna Williams, author of Women vs Feminism, told the Telegraph that the results suggest that transgender issues are being "over-promoted" in schools.
"Children - encouraged by their experiences at school - are beginning to question their gender identity at ever younger ages," she said.
"In doing more than just supporting transgender children, and instead sowing confusion about gender identity, schools do neither boys nor girls any favors," Williams said, adding that recent changes to school policies could be forcing children to "unlearn" the difference between boys and girls.
