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Gender diversity lessons aren’t appropriate and should be stopped, a primary teacher has told a parliamentary select committee.
It is the “stuff of nightmares” Waitakiri Primary School teacher Helen Houghton told the committee.
“I believe our professional integrity comes under threat when we are required to teach ideology that many in our parent communities, as well as personally and professionally, disagree with,” she said.
The petition urges the Ministry of Education to remove the learning objective for teaching gender diversity in the sexuality education guide and to remove gender diversity from the TKI website, a teaching resource.
Houghton told the select committee of a parent who contacted her recently.
She said the parent’s daughter had reached out to support her cousin who came out as transgender and that they attended a support group together at school.
The parent told her: “My daughter decided to help him and went along herself a couple of times to the support group where I can only guess they somehow convinced her that she, too, was transsexual.”
“I’m literally not exaggerating when I say she left the house that day female and returned with her hair shaved off, a chest-binder on, and wearing male clothes.”
“Now, my daughter is this boy who believes he is meant to be a girl thanks to the guidance counsellor at school… This literally is the stuff of nightmares.”
Houghton also spoke of a US woman who transitioned (from female to male) but later regretted the decision.
She has written about how she regretted becoming an “overweight, pre-diabetic nightmare of a transgender man”.
Labour MP Kieran McAnulty says he’s not convinced there’s an issue with the current school syllabus.
He said Houghton “failed to convince” him there is an issue.
“I’m intrigued you came to the select committee to convince us there is an issue and you’ve used an overseas example presumably from the internet,” he told her.
Despite her views on the curriculum, Houghton admitted she believes there “are people who suffer with gender dysphoria where they feel they are in the wrong body, a psychological condition not biological, which we must support”.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Minister of Justice (Domestic and Sexual Violence Issues) Jan Logie said she hopes Houghton will “learn more about the needs of trans students”.
During the select committee hearing, a comparison was made between teaching religion and gender with Houghton arguing they are both ideologies.
If “transgender ideology is to be imposed on all students, then Christian theology should have equal time,” she said.
Logie responded saying being transgender is “not a belief system. It’s about who they are and it’s about inclusion.”
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