Secret teacher union training admits gender identity is foreign to 'traditional progressive base'

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's dismissive description of half the country as a "basket of deplorables" may have cost her the 2016 election. 

Now the National Education Association's use of "villains," in handouts for an upcoming "Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice and Transgender Advocacy" training, may fuel bicameral efforts to remove its 119-year-old congressional charter.

Parents advocacy group Defending Education obtained the participant handouts and "pre-attendance package" for the Dec. 2-4 gathering in the "Focus Academies" series, which go into great detail about NEA's planned messaging campaigns against "villains" and "our opposition," the latter used twice as often.

An overarching goal of the training is to meld the distinct issues of race, class and "gender" – "a spectrum on which both cis and trans people exist" – into a single "narrative," addressing a central weakness of progressivism: gender orthodoxy tends to be more important to those who are well-off and white, if not actively opposed by lower classes and nonwhites.

One of the more notable sections addresses this tension in the context of whether gender identity or sex should determine eligibility in sports, admitting that "our opposition wins the debate … against any and all arguments we have tried for our side" and that a third of "our audiences" favor eligibility by both sex and gender identity, which is "contradictory."

This is due to "the individualistic lens of competition" through which people understand sports, at odds with the "collective good" of the race-class-gender narrative. Unlike opponents' use of "coded language" against gender identity in restrooms, "they use the physicality of the issue to directly spout dehumanizing stereotypes about transgender women and girls."

The materials also provide a full guide on how to register and complete a gender transition at work, taken from Cornell University, and suggest language tweaks to "subtly … orient people towards our worldview" on gender identity, including by "pluralizing and personalizing genders" as opposed to the "singular and abstract concept" of gender.

The documents raise "major questions about the priorities of the nation’s largest teachers' union at a moment when two-thirds of students aren’t reading at grade level, chronic absenteeism is soaring, and classroom behavior challenges are at historic highs," Defending Education told Just the News in sharing the documents.

The largest teachers' union in the country has "decided to vilify half the country in an upcoming training," a far cry from its charter purpose to "elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching" and "promote the cause of education," senior director of communications Erika Sanzi said.

"Seeing as their leadership – and by extension, the organization itself – has morphed into a far-left insane asylum that is actively destroying the cause of education, that charter is no longer defensible," she said.

Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., introduced the National Education Association Charter Repeal Act this summer, crediting the NEA's then-recent votes to fight President “Trump’s embrace of fascism," promote LGBTQ events in public schools and sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League. 

The votes make it "crystal clear it’s a partisan organization, and it shouldn’t be rewarded with a federal charter that platforms woke gender ideology, antisemitism, and left-wing propaganda," Blackburn said. The bill is one line, repealing the U.S. Code section with the charter.

HR 4450 and S-2310 have not moved since their July introduction. Blackburn's has a single cosponsor, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming, while Harris's has 19 GOP cosponsors, including New York's Elise Stefanik, Arizona's Andy Biggs and Texas's Chip Roy. The repeal bill has been introduced in at least two previous Congresses.

NEA didn't answer a query about potentially giving congressional Republicans ammunition against its federal charter and the training's emphasis on issues tangential to teaching.

'Name the villains'

The NEA materials use "villains" in just one section, "ARCHITECTURE OF A RACE CLASS GENDER NARRATIVE," and don't actually describe a large group as such, though participants may gloss over the definition if they aren't looking closely.

"Open with a shared value, explicitly naming or evoking race, gender and class," such as “Whether we are Black, white or brown, Native or newcomer, transgender or not, we want the freedom to be ourselves," the narrative opens.

"Name the villains who violate our values, expose their motivation of getting back into or holding onto power, and position them as a barrier to what our families need," then "Call out how the villains … exploit divisions across races … and exploit the lack of familiarity with transgender people." The example villains are "some people," "schools" and "certain politicians."

Further down, three columns labeled "say this," "instead of" and "because" instruct participants how and why to change their language. "Certain politicians," "Some people in power" and "A powerful few" – rather than "Politicians" and "The wealthy/powerful" – should be identified as villains "as opposed to vilifying whole categories of people."

Defending Ed didn't answer queries for why it characterized the scope of the "villains" in the training as "half the country" when NEA urges against "vilifying whole categories."

The pre-attendance package is less than half the length of the handouts, giving attendees "short, relevant" assignments before they arrive for training, including "a list of key terms that we will be using" and the Gender Unicorn, whose use at Texas A&M University played a role in the president's resignation in September.

The listing for "two-spirit," defined as a "traditional third-gender or gender-variant ceremonial and social role" in U.S. and Canadian indigenous tribes, warns non-native transgender and nonbinary people against using it.

"LGBTQ+ Scenarios" ask how participants would handle each from "service model" and "organizing" perspectives, what documents they would need and how they would "work with the press." 

One involves a policy that students will use the locker rooms matching their sex during "state-required lockdown drills," angering a mother of a male who identifies as a girl when the student is directed to the gym bleachers during a lockdown drill. Another involves allegations that the librarian and library paraeducator are "groomers."

Focus groups associate 'being transgender with being white'

The introduction to the handouts is far more inflammatory, arguing for replacing the "colorblind messaging" in LGBT advocacy that is "tacitly reinforcing a conservative worldview around race and class and further siloing trans issues from related progressive causes."

"The right has exploited … our lack of an affirmative, race-forward message to advance anti-trans attacks, further splinter and impugn the left, and sabotage progressives on a broad range of issues," with "Republicans in state legislatures" using anti-trans rhetoric and bills "as a powerful complement to their arsenal of racist dog whistles."

Conservatives have paired a "moral panic over transgender youth" with "fear-mongering about Critical Race Theory, mobilizing their base with a potent mix of racist and transphobic tropes," the introduction says. "Progressives cannot ignore these attacks hoping that simply sticking to economic issues alone will save us."

Focus groups confirmed "past research in finding concerningly low connection to, understanding of, and familiarity with transgender people in the U.S., including among our traditional progressive base," which even supporters "clearly perceived as wholly separate from and unrelated to their own lives" and through a "racial dimension."

Many participants "largely associated being transgender with being white, or associated acceptance of transgender people with whiteness," the "architecture" section says.

A "Freedom from boxes" narrative claims it is particularly effective with respondents who are "Black and Latinx," an ungrammatical term for Latinos in a sex-based language, which reportedly fewer than half of Latinos have even heard and only 4% use.

Again using vague identifiers, the introduction says "some people try to get and hold onto power by putting us in boxes" such as "how schools tell Black kids how to keep their hair or send girls home for the clothes they wear, and "certain politicians exploit lack of familiarity with transgender people, excluding trans kids from healthcare, school, or sports."