Dear Senator Chandler,
I’m bringing to your urgent attention, and asking as a parent and educator, that you would please review and amend the written material contained in the newly launched Tasmanian Department of Children and Young People, the Respectful Relationships packages, particularly, the Early Years Package(RR), Respectful Relationships and Consent in the Early Years. (education.tas.gov.au) (RREY) disseminated to teachers, students and parents in February and June 2024.
My concerns relate to its embrace throughout of contested gender ideology and I am putting forward my concern, as an educator, that this material is without evidence and is contributing to mental health concerns in the young people I see.
My primary concern with the RREY document is that it disconnects and teaches to children and educators, that the words ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘boy’, ‘girl’ are not related to biological sex and connects them instead to a sense of inner ‘gender identity’ – that is, how you feel yourself to be, which it puts forward as independent of the biological sex of the body.
All Respectful Relationships documents newly released have this concept of ‘gender identity’ imbedded throughout and it is presented as factual, whilst never linking it to any research or evidence.
In the Respectful Relationships and Consent in the Early Years. (education.tas.gov.au) (RREY ) ‘clarification of terms’ page, a link is provided for more information, taking the reader to the American Planned Parenting site, where again a proliferation of definitions are provided without research or evidence (RREY, Pg.55) – Understanding Gender Identity (plannedparenthood.org)
For the past 50 years or more, teachers like myself have studied in their university training, that children become aware biological sex is a stable part of their identity, that it is fixed and cannot be changed ( Kholberg and Piaget – Gender Constancy – Sex Roles, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Concept Formation – JRank Articles) and also that role playing helps to concretise this sense of self, as a boy or girl, and that it is necessary for a healthy stable self. There are no studies currently, to discount Piaget and Kholberg’s findings.
Though I would agree harmful sex role stereotyping can inhibit ways of thinking about what you can become as a biological boy or girl, this DECYP document (RREY) links – without evidence – the idea of biological sex as proliferating harmful stereotypes and seeks therefore, to supplant the biological sex identity of a boy/girl, with a non-evidence based concept of ‘gender identity’, as a means to free children to be their true selves, which could be a girl, though the child is biologically a boy.
“Gender is a way to describe someone’s identity. It is not the same thing as their biological sex. People can feel like they are male, female, both, or neither. “ P. 22 RREY
The document goes on to undermine and see as a negative, children’s natural development and desire to distinguish sex, and for girls this is about safe-guarding themselves and their space. It upends this natural safeguarding by stating on page 19
“Children can become very keen to police gender, demanding that a person is a boy or a girl, and that ‘boy’ should look and act in a particular way and so on.”
In this way ironically, the RREY document contributes to the destabilisation of the stable development of identity in children, by putting forward stridently, the idea that biological sex is not connected to the gender of a being a boy or girl. It conflates the problem of sex role stereotypes with children seeing sex and gender related to biological reality.
I am red flagging to you that disrupting stereotypes should not mean denying biological reality. But these documents connect the two, without evidence.
Acknowledging our biological sex as part of our identity, should simply be taught, as it always been for the last 30 years, that being a boy or girl doesn’t limit your educational outcomes and you can be anything you want to be.
Instead, what we have presented in these documents is a suggestion stereotypes come about from set ideas of boys’ and girls’ behaviours and that the antidote is to make the idea of being a boy or girl fluid, and not tied to the body. This document puts forward children’s identity as a boy or girl (rather than behaviours) is not fixed, is changeable, as a means to encourage children away from stereotypes, which is really the wrong solution to the problem of stereotyping and is dangerous in itself.
This RREY document dismantles biological reality by putting forward the idea any child can actually feel like a ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ inside, regardless of their observed sex at birth. This is not supported by evidence. Yet this ‘feeling’ is never defined in the document, but one presumes it relies on stereotypes to differentiate itself from the other. This in itself is psychologically harmful.
Furthermore, the RREY document goes onto conflate this argument by bringing in intersex as a means to justify gender identity fluidity, yet intersex is not a gender identity – it is a difference in sex characteristic development and remains at around 1.7% of the population Page. 55 RREY.
This concept of a gender identity is woven throughout the new Respectful Relationships texts (up to the year 11 and 12 course documents) yet it is a contested ideology that is now being withdrawn from school curriculums around the world. Schools told not to teach about gender identity (bbc.com).It is not inclusive of students of particular faiths and cultural understandings either. It is teaching gender identity as fact, without evidence. These documents need to label ‘gender identity’ as ideology or remove it altogether.
Further to this, despite the lack of evidence, the DECYP Early Years RREY document controversially provides a link directing teachers to affirm ‘gender identities’ expressed by children as young as 3-
“Use the names and pronouns that the child expresses (rather than those they were assigned at birth).” P 29 RREY – *Trans-and-gender-diverse-children.pdf
I am concerned this will lead to litigation because in stark contrast to this, the idea put forward in the DECYP RREY document that a ‘gender identity’ is a healthy variant of normal and should be affirmed, it is not accepted by Dr Andrew Amos of James Cook University FRAN ZCP, nor is it accepted by the Australian National Association of Practising Psychiatrists. They state unequivocally that there is limited evidence around efficacy and safety of affirmation. #154 – Dr Andrew Amos on the Concerns with Gender Affirming Care – A Psychiatrist’s Perspective | Strategic Psychology Canberra
Dr Grossman here outlines the harms of gender affirmation,
Given this controversy around affirmation of ‘gender identity’, I am raising a red flag about these education packages. It’s irresponsible for the RREY document to state:
“It’s common for children to have questions about genitals and how bodies look different for boys and girls. While the simplest answer is that girls have vulvas and vaginas, and boys have a penis and testicles, that answer isn’t true for every child. Boy, girl, man, and woman are words that describe gender identity, and some people with the gender identities “boy” or “man” have vulvas, and some with the gender identity “girl” or “woman” have penises/testicles. Your genitals don’t make you a boy or a girl.” P 55
As a parent and teacher, it’s not acceptable to redefine the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ ‘boy’, ‘girl’ in such a DECYP document as meaning ‘gender identity’ and not biology. There is not even a dictionary that has this new definition of ‘gender identity’ linked to the words ‘boy, girl, man, woman’. There has been no debate with teachers, parents or the general public about this redefining either.
In order to truly safeguard children in relation to health screening and abuse, it is necessary for them to understand who a man , woman, boy or girl is, and to use the terms accurately, as they relate to biology.
I am also concerned about the fact the RREY document discourages the use of words ‘mother’ and ‘father’, encouraging them to be replaced with ‘caregiver or families’, when a more inclusive approach would be to use these terms alongside each other,
“Gender is a way to describe someone’s identity. It is not the same thing as their biological sex. People can feel like they are male, female, both, or neither…Avoid creating strangeness or otherness between boys and girls: when we persistently group children based on two genders, we are reinforcing that you can only belong to one group or the other. Small changes, like saying ‘children’ instead of ‘girls and boys’ or ‘parents and carers’ or ‘families’ rather than ‘Mums and Dads’ can help to affirm the things we have in common rather than only our differences.” P22 Respectful Relations and Consent in the Early Years – Department of Children and Young People.
Over the last 5 – 10 years concurrent with these concepts being put into the curriculum of Australian schools, there has been a rise in young people and children with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and children presenting with new identities, who are distressed about their biological sex, and which parents and educators are then directed to alleviate via psychosocial interventions of affirmation, and doctors in Tasmania using medical and surgical affirmation.
Gender dysphoria in young people is rising—and so is professional disagreement | The BMJ
I am putting my thoughts forward as a concerned educator and parent. I have before me in my classroom a continuing rise in youth mental health concerns around this issue. As such I’d ask these RR teaching and learning packages be reviewed and changed in light of the mounting controversies and evidence.
Respectful Relationships Education Teaching and Learning Package: Years 11 – 12 (PDF, 4.1MB) – New release (March 2024)
Respectful Relationships Education Teaching and Learning Package: Years 7 – 10 (PDF, 10MB)
Respectful Relationships Education Teaching and Learning Package: Foundation – Year 6 (PDF, 15MB)
Respectful Relationships Teaching and Learning Package: Early Years (PDF, 7MB) – New release (June 2024)
As an adjunct to this letter, but still on the subject of seeking evidence for my personal pedagogical understanding, I am still awaiting from DECYP, an acceptable answer to my question, which I put to the facilitators of the PL I recently attended, “Words@work” (run by the Diversity Council of Australia June 26th 2024 – through the DECYP Professional Learning Institute), about their preamble to this course, which stated to participants, “ We accept neither sex or gender exist in binary categories”. I have expressly asked for the research that underpins this statement, as I have this questioned in my classroom, and I wish to give an informed answer to my students.
Though I have been provided with documents outlining a variety of terminology to use as an answer to this question, none of the links are to any evidence to support the idea that sex or gender does not exist in binary categories, instead the provided documents just state it’s offensive and not inclusive to see sex and gender as binary and here are alternative understandings for you to use.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Your sincerely,