The theory of gender at high school: an ideological education

Publié le 31 Jul, 2011

After Sciences-Po Paris, which dedicated them a chair and an obligatory education in 2010, the gender studies will be needed for high school students (premières L, S and ES – sixth year of secondary school) from the new school year 2011 within the framework of SVT classes (Life and earth sciences). Nathan, Bordas and Belin publishers have already published their manuals, according to new programs. In the three editors, the theses of the theory of gender, an ideology which denies the difference of genders and the natural complementarity between man and woman, are incorporated in the “Feminine-Masculine” module, in the new chapters called “Devenir homme ou femme” (Becoming man or woman) and “Vivre sa sexualité” (Living one’s sexuality). The partisan approach of identity and sexual orientation themes arise an important controversy in educational areas which identify the pernicious effects for the construction of identity and personality of adolescents.

 

An activist theory…

 

The ideology of gender entered on the international stage during the Global Conference on women in Beijing in 1995: today it inspires UNO agencies and the European parliament. Born in the 70’s in USA under the influence of French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the theory of gender has first be the ideological and subversive tool of an activist feminism: in the name of the non-discrimination between man and woman, it rejects the biological basis of genders like naturally identifying data for the person and affirms that the difference between man and woman falls exclusively within a social construction. Masculine and feminine genders consist in arbitrary socio-cultural “roles” that it thus possible to destroy. Consequently, no natural dynamism pushes man and woman one towards the other: this inclination also falls only within social conditions. Within this perspective, it is the sexual orientation (homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and transsexual) which must take precedence over the biological sex, genetically determined by the sexual chromosomes XX or XY.

 

…supposedly scientific

 

The new manuals of biology continue in large part with theories less than biological. This way the Hachette manual pretends that the sexual identity is part of a subjective choice of the individual: “the sexual identity is the subjective perception we have from our own sex and our sexual orientation. (…) The sexual orientation must be clearly distinguished from the biological sex of the person. “In the Bordas manual, the only socio-cultural context is sufficient to explain the predominance of the heterosexual model.

The educational area and student’s parents have firmly denounced the abusive intrusion of this ideology in the program of biology. Gathered within the collective “L’école déboussolée“, public teachers have sent to the minister of National Education Luc Chatel a petition with 33,000 signatures: he refused any dialogue. The Associations of Catholic Families (AFC) and the catholic education have also protested.

MPs intervened to Luc Chatel so that these manuals in question are withdrawn and revised. The deputy Christian Vanneste, supported by his colleagues Xavier Breton, Marc Le Fur and Jean-Marc Nesme, reminded that the National Education does not have to “instil, under the guise of a scientific education purely ideological conceptions“, or replace families, such drifts are “the characteristic of a totalitarian State“. For others like Dominique Dord, Jacques Myard, Yannick Favennec or Véronique Besse, teaching this theory is not “reasonable, or responsible” and “affects adversely the duty of neutrality of the National Education, by interfering in the individual consciences and in the familial sphere. “The Senator Marie-Thérèse Hermange has underlined the numerous questions on the human condition, the reproduction and the organisation of the society the theory of the gender arises.

 

Decoding

 

For the philosopher Thibaud Collin, author of essays on these questions, “the premium to sexual non-differentiation promotes in fact homosexuality. These theories are a beachhead for a radical changing of society“. The dissociation of sexuality and procreation is then consumed: the cultural revolution desired by the gender promotes the “rights” to contraception, abortion and artificial procreation.

Some psychoanalysts, like Tony Anatrella and Jean-Pierre Winter, warn in any case on the risk that the theory of gender creates for the preservation of the social link and the mental structuring of the person. The sexual otherness, in a realistic vision, places the man and the woman “in an equity in dignity and in a relationship based on complementarity” which allows their cooperation, necessary for constituting the social link”. The society cannot be built on this “pseudo-identities of gender” or on sexual orientations otherwise it may lead to “psychological and anthropologic dissociations which are sources of violence and injustice“. The ideas circulated by the theory of the gender trap in the “model of ‘we are all the same’, according to the idea of the same and similarity” where each individual “is told to stay in a narcissistic self-sufficient economy“. By denying the difference, this speech avoids opening the individual to otherness and “separates, divides and invites each gender to stay at its place“, they note.

 

Conclusion

 

In Spain, Zapatero’s government has already made obligatory the classes on the gender, leading to the removal of about ten thousand families from the schools applying state programs.

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