Minnesota schools advised to let students as young as kindergarten choose pronouns, bathrooms

Public schools in Minnesota have been advised to stop calling students “boys and girls” and to start implementing a guide to encourage “transgender and gender nonconforming students” at school.

The Washington Free Beacon’s Elizabeth Harrington joined Tuesday’s “The Morning Blaze with Doc Thompson” to talk about the new gender “toolkit” for schools in Minnesota. The new guide has advised schools not to assume kids’ pronouns, names or gender identities and not to restrict students to one bathroom based on gender.

The toolkit was approved last week by a Minnesota Department of Education advisory council to be distributed to K-12 schools statewide. Under the guidelines, teachers must stop saying “boys and girls,” calling the students “scholars” instead. Teachers are also expected to ask kindergarten students their preferred names and pronouns.

“They don’t even know what a pronoun is, but they’re going to be asked what their preferred pronoun is,” Harrington pointed out.

The gender toolkit also has guidelines for bathrooms, locker rooms and hotel rooms for any travel away; students are allowed to choose the restroom, locker room or accommodation of their gender choice. If any students feel uncomfortable, they are designated to a single-use restroom.

These guidelines are given to all schools and all students despite the fact that transgender people are estimated to make up just 0.6 percent of the U.S. population.

“It’s literally insane how trendy this has become [to have] all of these rules in place for something that really was very, very uncommon,” Harrington said.

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