The Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland coerced 11 & and 12-year-olds to acknowledge and differentiate between their “gender identity” and “sex assigned at birth” last week.
As shown in images Defending Education shared with the Washington Examiner, the school district provided students with a worksheet that asked them to match vocabulary words such as “sex assigned at Birth,” “gender Identity”, “transgender,” “gender expression,” and “cisgender” with the corresponding definition during the seventh grade’s “family life” lesson during the week of October 13, 2025.
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“This vocabulary lesson requires that students buy into an ideology that many reject,” Erika Sanzi, Sr. Director of Communications for Defending Education, told the Washington Examiner. “Does MCPS require that students subscribe to gender ideology in order to fulfill the district’s family life requirements for middle schoolers? Because if so, that seems like viewpoint discrimination in a public school.”
Defending Education posted about the incident after receiving a tip from one of the parents of a middle school student about the assignment the child brought home.
The school’s effort to push its dangerous ideological agenda on young students is both scientifically and morally wrong; it jeopardizes the students’ well-being, alters their development, and separates them from the values cultivated by their parents.
Apart from the biological fact that gender is not a concept that can be fluid, 11 and 12-year-old children are far too young to understand what gender identity, transgender, gender expression, and cisgender even are.
As stated by the Discovery Institute, when young children are exposed to gender identity discussions or teachings, the child suffers anxiety, confusion, among other things, since the concepts are too complex for their developmental stage and interfere with a child’s understanding of reality or their relationship with their parents.
The exposure these children undergo can potentially influence a child through these discussions, creating the false illusion of a child’s sense of self, which can spiral into mental health issues or the premature desire for medical interventions.
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The actions of the school districts are blatantly irresponsible, unprofessional, and certainly counterproductive to the original mission of education, which is to positively assist the development of a child.
Legal action against the school district is encouraged.
