One of the hardest jobs in America today is teaching in a public school or secular private school. Besides the usual challenges, many teachers are now faced with a new mandate – eliminating references to gender in their classrooms.

Some California teachers received an instructional packet a few weeks ago which reminded them that the beginning of the school year is an “ideal time to establish the foundation of gender inclusion in your schools and classrooms.”

Jeff Iorg

Teachers are encouraged to say things like:

“There are lots of ways to be a boy or girl or even something else; isn’t that great?”

“Some bodies are thought of as ‘boy’ and some thought of as ‘girl’ but that’s not true for everyone.”

“Being a boy or girl or something else is not about what you like or what you wear or your body. It’s something that each of us figures out for ourselves based on how we feel inside.”

That’s just a sample. The training packet goes into significant detail about avoiding “binary” descriptions of sexuality or gender. References to gender must eliminate any hint of a connection to anatomical features. Gender is something a person chooses, and every child (even those who aren’t “confused”) must be taught to reconsider their gender in light of who they might feel they truly are.

It’s easy to imagine a scenario where teachers will soon be reprimanded or disciplined for holding to the “shocking” position that boys and girls are different, that those differences are directly related to their birth sex and that both should be celebrated for their uniqueness. And, if someone were to take the truly “outrageous” position that God created “man” and “woman” as His perfect design – scandalous!

Believing God makes boys and girls – and we are responsible to shape them according to their creation-gender – is too important to kowtow to today’s gender-choice nonsense.

Courageous teachers in classrooms across our country will ignore training like this and continue to shape a new generation of boys into men and girls into women. Let’s support them as they do.

(EDITOR’S NOTE – Jeff Iorg is president of Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, with campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, Denver and Phoenix. This column first appeared at the seminary’s president’s blog.)