How Two Teaching Guidebooks Show the Evolution of Progressive Thinking on ‘Gender’

The progressive views of “gender identity” has undergone a transformation to the point of being unrecognizable.

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About the Author

Grayson Slover is a freelance writer and the author of Middle Country: An American Student Visits China’s Uyghur Prison-State. Most recently, he was the Managing Editor at FAIR Substack.

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Many have opined on the peculiar alliance on gender issues between self-identified progressive feminists and social conservatives. Not even a decade ago, any form of collaboration between these two groups would have seemed impossible: feminists sought to escape traditional gender roles, while social conservatives fought hard to preserve them. Social conservatives today oppose gender ideology for many of the same reasons they have opposed the goals of feminists in the past. However, only a minority of modern feminists oppose gender ideology because of the conflict it raises between the “trans rights” movement and the rights of women.

There is perhaps no other issue on which the mainstream progressive movement has drifted so far so rapidly, and this shift is shown with particular clarity in two editions of an early childhood teachers guidebook published by a progressive education organization.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) has for decades been among the most influential progressive teachers organizations in America. One of their most important forms of influence is their “anti-bias” guidebooks for elementary and preschool teachers. The most recent edition of this guidebook, titled “Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves,” was published in 2020. Its predecessor, “Anti-Bias Curriculum: Tools for Empowering Young Children,” was published in 1989.

In the intervening 31 years, their treatment of “gender identity” has undergone a transformation to the point of being unrecognizable.

As the titles suggest, both editions touch on a variety of “anti-bias” issues, such as race and ethnicity, disability, activism, and economic class. While there are differences in how these other issues are addressed, my analysis will focus solely on the single chapter dedicated to “gender” in each book.

On the first page of each edition, the authors lay out a list of goals for the section. In the 2020 edition, one of these goals is the following:

Children will recognize and respect the power each person has, including themselves, to determine their own gender identity and say who they are, regardless of adult interpretations of their bodies.

The parallel goal listed in the 1989 edition reads quite differently. In that book, the authors explain that the goal is

to foster children’s healthy gender identity by enabling them to gain clarity about the relationship between biological identity and gender roles.

The language used in the 2020 edition will be familiar to anyone who reads the statements from progressive organizations on gender issues, which often center around one maxim: self-identification trumps all else. Whether it be an adult who has suffered from gender dysphoria their entire lives, or a child in elementary or even preschool, the individual must be given total power to decide their gender identity. Any deviation from this principle is often framed as “denying the existence” of the person or of transgender people generally.

In contrast, the 1989 edition’s goal highlights a dramatic shift in progressive ideology on gender issues. Back then, the progressive stance on gender was that men and women (or in our case boys and girls) should not be boxed into rigid gender stereotypes. Little girls who wanted to play football during recess or little boys who wanted to play with dolls should be free to do so. They made this argument by insisting on an unequivocal distinction between one’s “gender identity” or “sexual identity” (i.e., biological sex) and their cultural “role identity.”

This difference is further demonstrated by how each edition defines “gender identity.” The 1989 edition reads as follows:

Gender identity consists of two components: a person’s sexual identity, which is biological, and a person’s role identity, which is cultural. If one’s anatomy changes, so does one’s gender identity; if one’s roles change, gender identity remains the same. Young children do not know this yet. They need adult help to understand that their gender identity is based on their anatomy; it is not dependent on what they like to do.

In other words, teachers should make sure children understand that while their gender or sexual identity (i.e., biological sex) is based on their sexual anatomy, they should be free to play and behave however they want without the fear that doing so means they are the wrong sex. The book calls this idea gender identity “constancy,” which also requires kids to “know they are and will remain a girl or a boy.”

Conversely, the 2020 edition defines “gender identity” as

one’s internal experience of one’s gender. It is how one thinks of and comes to name oneself. A person’s gender identity may or may not conform to one’s assigned sex and may change throughout one’s lifetime. Some of the terms that describe gender identity include cisgender, agender, transgender, nonbinary, and genderfluid.

The most important line in this definition is arguably the second, “[gender identity] is how one thinks of and comes to name oneself.” Again we see that the central metric for judging one’s gender is the individual’s self-identification. There is no mention of anatomy or biology whatsoever, for these terms suggest an objective standard for determining an individual’s gender identity.

Throughout the 1989 edition’s gender identity chapter, the authors emphasize the importance of biology and anatomy:

Remember that the purpose of these activities is to enable preschoolers to develop a clear, healthy sex identity through understanding that their being a girl or boy depends on their anatomy, not on what they like to do.

And again further down the same page:

It is important to find other ways to help your children understand that their body, not their behavior, makes them a girl or boy.

The 2020 edition only mentions biology to de-emphasize it’s importance. The authors even attempt to problematize the concept of biological sex by using the term “assigning sex at birth” and by pointing out that there are “many genetic variations beyond XX and XY chromosomes.” At one point, the authors even suggest it is harmful for young kids to be taught the significance of biological sex.

Young children eventually realize that genitals have something to do with why people are called male or female. This connection between gender and genitals adds to children’s confusion and tension about both topics.

Although the 2020 edition is undoubtedly the more radical of the two books, the 1989 edition is not without its controversial elements. At several points it appears to cross the line from opposing restrictions for children based on sex stereotypes to encouraging teachers to actively promote behaviors in children that defy these stereotypes.

Free choice is a vital part of good early childhood education and should be a large percentage of the curriculum. However, thinking about free choice from an anti-bias perspective raises the question of how free “free play” is when preschoolers’ behaviors are already influenced by gender socialization. Complete reliance on children’s self-directed activities may limit rather than expand development. So, occasional teacher-initiated activities to correct “cognitive deficiencies” caused by non-participation in key activities are necessary.

It’s easy to see how this practice of correcting “cognitive deficiencies,” especially if it is carried out heavy-handedly, could be deleterious to the healthy development of some children. Despite many progressives’ hesitance to acknowledge it, gender stereotypes often accurately reflect average behavioral differences between boys and girls. This of course in no way suggests that teachers or parents should enforce these stereotypes on children, but it does mean that these average differences should be considered when evaluating whether a child’s behavior is a result of social constraints or a natural aspect of their developing identity.

Yet, as the 2020 edition clearly shows, we have now moved far beyond this debate. Issues that social conservatives might have challenged in 1989 are now widely accepted norms, and many have decided that their efforts are better spent protecting their children from the widespread influence and social contagion of gender ideology.

Despite paying far more attention to the trans rights side of the gender issue, proponents of gender ideology often insist that they still agree with 1989 feminist views regarding the problem of sex stereotypes and the belief that children should not be limited by them. However, this stance holds little practical significance when they simultaneously argue that young children can reliably determine if they were “born in the wrong body.”

To clearly highlight this contradiction, consider the process a young child would go through to make such a determination. In order to decide if they were “born in the wrong body,” the young child would have to compare themselves to an objective standard of what it means to be male or female. Yet, the only standard a five-year-old can comprehend is rooted in sex stereotypes—which, because of their correlation with biological sex, will remain constant despite efforts to eliminate them. The current “gender-affirming” approach used in progressive circles inadvertently revives the old and rigid sex stereotypes that feminists 30 years ago were singularly focused on dismantling.

If progressives returned to their former stance on gender identity, where they emphasized the perils of forcing kids to conform to sex stereotypes (without crossing the line into discouraging behaviors that align with these stereotypes), it’s likely that they would face very little pushback. Sure, there have always been those on the right who lionize traditional gender norms to an extreme degree, but these people represent a tiny minority in our society today.

Reflecting on the broader picture, the fact that we’ve come so far as a society in enshrining equal opportunities for both men and women, and the widespread support for it, is a testament to the success of progressive ideas on gender in our country. At the same time, this notable progress should prompt a reevaluation among gender ideology advocates who criticize those opposed to teaching children they can choose their own sex.

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