“They actually believe that all children are intrinsically queer, and that what’s happening is that normal society is ‘socializing’ them, which is a fancy word for ‘brainwashing’ them, to be normal, which means—for them—not queer, where queer is a political stance.”
In this episode, I sit down with James Lindsay and Logan Lancing to discuss their new book, “The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids.”
“It took me less than one minute to find a whole suite of furry literature about children adopting ‘fursonas’, or furry personas, and identifying not as human, explicitly underwritten by queer theory in the doctrine,” says Mr. Lancing.
What is queer theory? Who are its biggest proponents? And what practical impact has it had on America’s youth, our institutions, and society at large?
“What they define for a pedagogy right from the beginning in 1993, was a radical form of educative activism, implemented deliberately to interfere with, to intervene in the production of normalcy in school subjects, which is just technical gobbledygook from queer theory. That means we are going to use critical pedagogy as a method and we’re going to make sure kids do not turn out normal,” says Mr. Lancing. “They’re going to turn out deviant, abnormal, perverse—whatever it is that is positioned against the norm, that is the goal. And they laid that out. Right at the very beginning. They also added that their goal was to make it explicitly activist in nature, so there is no room for interpretation.”
“There are no brakes on the train. Yesterday’s radical is today’s conservative. It has to keep moving towards the direction of completely dissolving normalcy, boundaries, and legitimacy. So, don’t be surprised if it gets a bit crazier than even children biting other children while they’re dressed as dogs and cats and wearing tails,” says Mr. Lancing.
Watch the video:
“And it was meant to bring about what Paulo Freire’s vision was: a next generation, non-Soviet, Marxist revolution in the children, based off of an education system he derived from Mao Zedong, in his own words. What Mao had done in the 1950s successfully with children, he imported into his method,” says Mr. Lindsay. “But, of course, we know that Mao used that in the mid-1960s as the basis to create his Red Guard that then went and did exactly what we see schoolchildren in America doing today. Can they read? Not really. Can they write? Not so much. How are they at math? Failing. However, they know to show up on the statehouse steps when there’s some policy they don’t like or when something happens, so that they can do a die-in or they can do some kind of show of activism.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Logan Lancing, James Lindsay, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Logan Lancing: Thanks for having us.
James Lindsay: I’m glad to be here.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about childhood innocence, which you reference in your book. It is something that is sacred in most sane societies. You make the case that this is precisely what is targeted by queer theory and queer pedagogy. Please explain that to us.
Mr. Lancing: Childhood innocence is targeted by queer theory because queer theorists do not believe that childhood innocence exists. They think it’s a social construct, so they don’t see anything wrong with targeting childhood innocence. They don’t see any barriers preventing them from doing that to children on a fundamental level.
We learned from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who was a foundational queer theorist, that queer theory sees innocence and initiation as a fundamental binary that must be overcome. All children are not innocent. All children, from the queer theory perspective, are initiated into some worldview.
In that respect, innocence is just whatever normal people in society have illegitimately and unjustly and for self-serving purposes defined it to be, so that they can protect children from experiencing the queer that the queer theorists want them to experience, and so that they can grow up and turn out a certain way, which they define as cis-heterosexual, a person who identifies with the sex observed at birth, which they would call sex assigned at birth, and with heterosexuality.
Mr. Jekielek: Queer and gay are not the same, and this is something that has been wildly conflated as well. James, could you speak to that?
Mr. Lindsay: They actually believe that all children are intrinsically queer, and that normal society is socializing them, which is a fancy word for brainwashing them, to be normal, which to them means not queer, where queer is a political stance. The word queer is a term that is used to describe a society that is not queer. Queer is very distinct from being homosexual.
A foundational work where queer is actually defined as it is used in queer theory is the book, “Saint Foucault,” written by Michel Foucault, the postmodern philosopher. In 1995, David Halperin wrote about a paragraph in this book that defines queer. That paragraph starts with the words, “unlike gay identity,” which is in giant bold caps. The first thing on the page says that queer is not like being gay.
If all children are thought to be intrinsically queer, that would include straight children and gay children and anything else that they might imagine, as John Money phrased it on the cover of his most famous book, “Gay, Straight, and In-Between.” Unlike gay identity, which is rooted in positive fact and what he calls homosexual object choice, their idea is that queer is not necessarily based on any positive truth or stable reality.
In fact, it has nothing to do with who you are. He says that it’s defined positionally, which means politically, vis-a-vis the normal. He then goes on to say that it is an identity without an essence, which means it’s not essential to who you are. Certainly it’s true that men are men, and women are women. There is an undeniable biological reality to male and female. It’s likely true that some people are homosexual as a matter of essence. It’s who they are, and we don’t necessarily know why.
Queer is different. It has no essential connection to anything about the person, which means you cannot actually be queer. You can only act queer. It is a political stance. He asks, “What is that political stance defined by?” In his own words, he says,”It’s defined by whatever is opposed to the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant.” That is the definition of queer. It is a political orientation that is against the idea of normalcy and legitimacy in the world. This is their fundamental belief.
One of their activists, Linds Amer, quite famously said on Twitter some years ago, “All children are queer. We’re not after gay kids. We’re after all kids because all kids are intrinsically queer.” She believes that childhood innocence is sacred and wholly protected by society, and that has to be disrupted. Hannah Dyer said, “It will straighten out kids if they’re allowed to grow up within a construct of gender equality and childhood innocence.” They want to queer that, or in other words, disrupt that as early as possible so that the children can be brought up free of the socializing effects of normalcy.
Mr. Jekielek: Logan, the first finding of your book is that American education is in the grip of a religious cult.
Mr. Lancing: Yes. We wanted to come out with that statement because we fundamentally believe it to be true. Queer theory has sold itself in education for the last 30 years as an academic discipline that can be deployed in schools to make them more inclusive and equitable and to build cultures where all students feel like they belong.
But even a cursory reading of the academic literature queer theory by the authors we cite in the book; Michael Foucault, Judith Butler, Hannah Dyer, and David Halperin, reveals that queer theory is full of mystical teachings. That’s the reason for queer confessions of faith, demands for purity, religious rituals, and a collective call for action and activism by children. Fundamentally, it is an unsettling belief of what human nature is and what our purpose in life should be.
The purpose of practicing queer theory and getting others to join this cult through various methods that anyone familiar with cults will find easily identifiable, is to convince primarily children that they are queer. The only reason they can’t accomplish this is because normal people in society have illegitimately and unjustly defined their lifestyles, their behaviors, and their love interests as being normal and legitimately defined. Therefore, there’s a conflict at the heart of society, and really at the heart of history, that must be resolved.
The way queer theory can resolve this is by convincing people that they are queer. They’ve just forgotten it and have been brainwashed out of it by growing up a certain way. They need to develop this queer consciousness, much like a class consciousness, but in a different domain. They need to start tearing away all norms, all legitimate institutions, all values, and all common sense. Anything that can be defined, categorized, and that has a barrier around it, must be dissolved.
In their view, if they can do that long enough, at the end of history, and all cults have views of the end of history, they will live in a world where they can experience their queerness. They can investigate what’s defined in the literature as their queer potentialities. It will be a perfect world where no one is leveling expectations, norms, values, or judgments on them. They will be liberated to become queer. There are other reasons why it’s justified to call it a cult, but if this doesn’t sound like a cult doctrine, I don’t know what does.
Mr. Jekielek: That is quite compelling. It’s one thing to explain it this way, but it’s another thing to say that American education writ large is in its grip. It’s hard to imagine how something like that would even happen.
Mr. Lindsay: We’ve talked in the past, Jan, about the trend of critical pedagogy. American education, at least at the level of colleges of education, by their own telling, has been in the hands of critical pedagogy since 1992, That turns out to be roughly the same year that queer theory earned its name. Critical pedagogy is a very different approach to education.
The ideas that became critical pedagogy were originally developed by a Brazilian Marxist, Paulo Freire. He believed that the purpose of education should be, and I emphasize the religious and cult undertones of this word, the purpose of education should be conscientization. In other words, to conscientize and wake somebody up to a different view of reality, which they consider to be the true view of reality that’s suppressed in the world of education. He thinks the purpose of education is to awaken people to a different consciousness.
Just to be clear, Paulo Freire explains this process of conscientization in education as literally a death and rebirth. He says that it’s dying to who you were, so you can be reborn on the side of the oppressed. He says that this new apprenticeship doesn’t count unless you experience your own personal Easter. In fact, he says that the Christian Easter is just another date on the calendar that’s dead to its true potential, with no possibility of being resurrected.
This is an extremely strong indication of cult language. He was into liberation theology, and he developed this so-called method of education. The purpose of this critical pedagogy is actually simple. It is to use educational activity as an excuse to have politically radicalizing conversations with children, to conscientize them, and to wake them up.
Isaac Gottesman wrote a book, “The Critical Turn in Education,” that’s very important reading if you want to understand what has happened in education. He was a professor at Iowa State and was a Marxist. In the first sentence of the book, he says that all the 1960s radicals went into education. Within a few paragraphs, he’s talking about how by 1992, Paulo Freire’s influence had arrived at where it is today. That’s what he wrote in 2015 when he published the book, which is to say, his influence is everywhere.
The pipeline to produce teachers, to produce administrators for schools, to produce licensure, to produce accreditation was captured by critical pedagogy by the early 1990s. What’s contained within the critical constructivist epistemology that they now use in critical pedagogy? I’m being very technical, but they have words for this.
What is contained in this critical pedagogy? All of your critical theories of identity are vehicles. What is the subtitle of Isaac Gottesman’s book, “The Critical Turn in Education?” The subtitle is, “From Marxist Critique, to Post-Structural Feminism, to Critical Theories of Race.” We’re all familiar with critical race theory. A critical theory of sex, gender, and sexuality would be called queer theory, so queer theory is contained within that same model.
Judith Butler is considered to be the fairy godmother of queer theory and was also a post-structuralist feminist. All of this was directed into education. I would even argue that most of it was specifically developed to take over American schools and target American children with this cult awakening process. It’s meant to be a personal death and rebirth or resurrection and Easter for the children so that they wake up on the side of the oppressed in solidarity with them, giving up all of their old ways of thinking, all of their old assumptions and beliefs, and adopting new ones in solidarity with the oppressed.
To be really clear, he calls this a prophetic education, so the religious language is not at all ambiguous. His acolyte, Henry Giroux, asks in the foreword to that book, “How is Paulo Freire prophetic? Giroux says that he’s prophetic because he’s calling us to build the kingdom of God here on earth in solidarity with the oppressed through endless activism.
This can be seen as, A; a religious cult, but also, B; a deliberate capturing of the American education system through this pipeline that creates all of the curriculum, teachers, administrators, credentialing, licensing, and accreditation—and it’s now a 30-year-old project.
Mr. Jekielek: Education by a religious cult is very different from what everyday parents would want for their children. Logan, could you speak to that, using a math class as an example?
Mr. Lancing: Yes, there is an eye-opening book called, “Queering Critical Literacy and Numeracy for Social Justice.” In academic jargon, that means applying Paulo Freire’s method, this conscientization process. It does not teach children how to read and write, but teaches them how to read their world in specific, political, Marxist ways and write the new world order that comes after. She’s taking that method and then applying it to math class.
The title says, “We’re not going to learn math in this class. We are going to learn how to use math for social justice.” It was absolutely eye-opening because it really gave life to the mechanics of how this actually operates in the classroom.
In this math class, under the pretense of learning math, the students are told to read various articles. They can also select their own articles to keep themselves engaged, which comes directly from Freire. But some of the articles are also provided to them, which they’re supposed to read as a group, and come back with a math problem based on the article.
Fourth and fifth grade children were given an article that compared marriage equality laws by state with suicide rates by state, ostensibly so the children could read this and then create a math problem that drew a link between the two, which is wholly inappropriate. What the author learned, and she admits this explicitly in the paper, is that the children usually did not finish their math problems because they were emotional wrecks. All they wanted to do was discuss the politics of marriage equality, transgender health care, and the various other intersectional oppressive forces in society, which she writes about a lot throughout her book.
Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy is applied in this context to use math as a mediator for a political lesson. In this case, it’s a queer political lesson, so that children can be initiated into queer theory. This is not new. By 1993, the first paper to take critical pedagogy and smash it together with queer theory to bring queer theory into schools was called, “Queering Pedagogy: Praxis Makes Im/Perfect.” Praxis is a Marxist word for activism. The word imperfect has a slash through it, so it’s a pun, meaning, “I’m perfect.”
Right from the beginning in 1993, they defined queer pedagogy as a radical form of educational activism implemented to interfere with the production of normalcy in school subjects, which is just technical gobbledygook from queer theory. That means, “We are going to use critical pedagogy as a method, and we’re going to make sure kids do not turn out normal.”
The goal is to turn out whatever is deviant, abnormal, and perverse, then position that against the norm. They laid that out right from the very beginning. They also added that their goal was to make it explicitly activist in nature, so that there is no room for interpretation. From the very beginning, this was designed to initiate these children into this way of viewing the world.
Mr. Lindsay: This is very clear in Paulo Freire’s writing on education. He says explicitly in “The Politics of Education,” his book from the 1980s, that for the revolution to be authentic, it must be perpetual. The new normal soon becomes the new Right-wing, so that new status quo has to be overturned. Otherwise, it will become sclerotic and bureaucratic, and you’re going to need another revolution anyway.
He had the Soviet Union in mind and how that became a bureaucratic nightmare. He nods very explicitly to the revolution in Mao’s China as his inspiration for his education method in the first chapter of his most famous book from 1970 called, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” That’s a very important part of the book. They know what they’re doing, and they’re building this out.
I want to add some depth to this. Logan gave the example of fourth and fifth graders not being taught a math topic, but instead being given correlations between LGBT policy or suicidality. What the critical pedagogy method boils down to at its core, is what Paolo called the generative themes method of education. They’re supposed to pick things that are engaging to them or they are provided with things that are engaging to them. The idea is to get something that’s engaging not just to their minds, but to their levels of excitement and to their emotions. It’s supposed to stimulate their hopes and fears.
They are actually explicit about this. It’s supposed to be emotionally engaging and meaningful to them. Paolo Freire said that it’s supposed to be from their real, lived experience and from their concrete existence. The goal is to bring up this topic, tie it into so-called LGBT topics, and then to implant the idea of suicide into fourth graders. That’s a generative theme.
Now, they’re thinking about suicide where they may not have been thinking about suicide before. Fourth graders do not think about killing themselves, but now this is a topic that’s in their world. Their innocence has been stolen from them in this process. But this is how subtle this can be.
This is a real example from a real teacher training that happened in Indiana. Jennifer McWilliams brought it to my attention after having gone through the training herself. It was a math example for second graders, and it was a word problem. I'll just very quickly relate it to you.
Johnny is riding in the car on his way to an amusement park with his mom and dad. The amusement park is 50 miles away. They’ve already driven 30 miles. How much further is there to go? I used to teach math, so I know that the point of the word problem is to extract the numbers, set up the subtraction, solve the subtraction problem, then report back in words. The answer is, “They have 20 miles left to go.”
But that’s not what the teachers are meant to do. They have to make it engaging, and to engage with the generative themes in the word problem. They say, “Hey kids, who has ever been to an amusement park?” Now, the kids are excited. Some raise their hands, and some don’t. Now, you have a difference. You have what they would call a stratified population or what Marx would see as a basis for conflict.
This is now a conflict playing out in the classroom. They ask, “Why have some of you been, and some of you haven’t been to an amusement park?” You are taught as teachers to prime the students until somebody says, “Not everybody can afford it,” or, “My parents won’t let me because I’m not old enough.”
Then you can have these discussions and ask, “What could we do to make it so everyone can afford to go?” Is parental authority the best way to decide who gets to go? But it’s not just about an amusement park, which is a very innocuous term that’s generative here. Mom and dad could be generative terms here as well.
Then you could end up with a queer theory conversation and ask, “Does everybody have a mom and a dad? What are some different family models?” Then you’re off and running. You could actually prime the conversation off a car and have all the environmentalist conversations that they lay out in education for sustainable development, which is a big push now.
These generative themes are tucked in throughout the pedagogy, suicidality being one in the example that Logan just gave. But this is how that method works. It was meant to bring about what Paulo Freire’s vision was, a next generation non-Soviet Marxist revolution in the children. He based it off of an education system derived from what Mao Zedong had done successfully with children in the 1950s. He imported Mao’s system into his method.
We know that Mao used that in the mid-1960s to create his Red Guard that did exactly what we see school children in America doing today. Can they read? Not really. Can they write? Not so much. How are they at math? Failing.
However, they know how to show up on the state house steps when there’s some policy they don’t like or when something happens so that they can do a die-in or have a show of activism. All the experiments that have happened throughout the world with this form of education successfully radicalize kids. They make them into emotional wrecks.
Then in the words of the activists themselves, the goal when they enter into that crisis is to structure the environment around them so they resolve the crisis productively. That’s a direct quote from Kevin Kumashiro. In this case, to resolve the crisis productively means adopting the worldview of the woke cult.
Mr. Jekielek: You wonder how drag queen story hour became a thing that people are fighting for. Of course, these days a lot of people are fighting against it, as well. But somehow, they say it’s a good thing that children should be exposed to.
Mr. Lancing: Yes, absolutely. Drag queen story hour is a program that sells itself with a specific paper, “Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood.” It caught on a couple of years ago and it’s the justification for putting drag queens into schools. They say in that paper, “We use tropes of empathy to sell what we’re doing, but we just use that to justify its educational value.” That is a direct quote. They come right out and say, “We’re lying about how we’re getting this into schools.” But the purpose of getting the program into schools and having a highly sexualized male, a drag queen, reading books in front of children is to initiate them into the cult.
Mr. Jekielek: The justification is that these drag queens are persecuted and we need society to accept them for who they are. That’s the purpose.
Mr. Lancing: Ostensibly. In their own words, it’s because a drag queen reading to you in their own words is less boring. It’s dialed up because of the colors. This is how a lot of the surface of queer theory gets to children. It’s done through colorful cartoons, like the gender man, the bread man, and the gender unicorn. There are lots of colors, and they describe it as being dialed up.
They use the technical term, alternative modes of kinship, which is a generative theme. They don’t explain that much further than to say that through alternative modes of kinship, children can be taught to live queerly. What it really amounts to is grooming.
I don’t necessarily mean sexual grooming, but certainly at a bare minimum it is cult or worldview grooming. A child will ask themselves, “Why is this man in lipstick and this colorful costume reading books in front of me? Why is a man dressed like a woman?” Of course, the point is for them to then ask themselves, “If he can do that, why can’t I? He’s talking about his gender identity. Do I have a gender identity?”
What is absolutely wicked about this is that in their own literature, they say, “We use tropes of empathy and inclusion to get into schools, but that is just to justify the educational value.” This is a huge problem. In New York City’s Department of Education, in the first six months of 2022, they had over 49 drag queen story hour performances in their public schools.
Mr. Lindsay: We have mentioned Judith Butler, the fairy godmother of queer theory. Judith Butler’s entire body of work can really be boiled down to just a few things. One of them is a six-word sentence, “Drag is life, life is drag.” Her technical term for it is gender performativity. In other words, everybody is always acting and performing their gender.
Her account would be that you’re born with a certain sexual anatomy. The doctor observes this and it becomes a sex assigned at birth that might be a right or wrong answer for who you really are. In the social reproduction hypothesis, society will reproduce itself from one generation to the next. Society will socialize a boy to wear boy clothes and do boy things. It will socialize a girl to wear girl clothes and do girl things. It’s like in a very old Simone de Beauvoir kind of way, one is not born, but becomes a woman. What makes you become a male or female, is that you’re doing a drag act all the time.
Now, what does that mean for a drag performer? It means the drag performer is awakened. They know that life is a drag act, and they’re leaning into that. Now, they’re this awakened guru who is coming into the classroom to initiate children into the possibility of performing their gender, in any or all circumstances, or performing another gender, or trying them on like a dialed up outfit.
Here’s an example of dialed up that is horrifying for people when they find this out. We’re all familiar with the pride flags. How many flags can there possibly be? We know the rainbow flag, we know the one with the wedge cutting in, and then some of them have a circle cut in it. There’s also flags for specific sexualities in all these rainbow colors. There’s the trans flag which is pink and blue and white. There’s the bisexual flag, which is red and blue and purple. There are all these flags.
Did you know there is also a straight flag? Imagine that you’re a child in kindergarten or first grade, five or six-years-old. The teacher says, “We’re going to look at the different flags for the different sexualities. Here are all these colorful flags. Which one are you?” This is called comprehensive sexuality education, which came from the United Nations, by the way. They show the children flags with all these bright colors; a pink flag, a red, blue, and purple flag, and a bright rainbow flag.
The straight flag is just stripes of gray and it’s the most boring flag possible. These kids are presented with this generative opportunity to pick a flag. What does this really mean? What is a demisexual, actually? You’re dealing with a six-year-old, so you start telling them all these fantastical things about it.
It turns out that the drag queen and drag queen story hour plays the same role. The purpose of the drag queen is generative education. It’s a generative opportunity. The presence of the drag queen and his performance are specifically meant to generate the idea of a liberatory potential in the child’s mind and stoke those conversations. Even in states where these shows have been banned, which is a number of states now, in the schools, there’s usually a loophole in the law that’s called the doctrine of spontaneous utterance.
If the student provides a spontaneous utterance and says something, then the teacher has license to talk about it, even if it’s a prohibited topic. That becomes a backdoor for them to continue having these political conversations, even where they’ve been banned. If they see a drag queen on TV, and they happen to say, “I saw a drag show last night,” now the teacher has a spontaneous utterance. The student brought it up and now the teacher can talk about it.
If they put a drag queen into a county library and the kids attend, and then if they come to school and talk about it, now the teacher has the opportunity to go into the lesson and start doing some of the conscientization potential. All of this is very deliberate and very by design, but it all ties back to exactly the same thing. It is the overcoming of childhood innocence through the introduction of inappropriate themes that are then going to be contoured and structured in a productive direction, which means to radicalize our children, not specifically into a Red Guard like in China, but maybe into a rainbow guard.
Mr. Jekielek: Are all teachers actually doing this?
Mr. Lancing: All teachers do not do this. Many of them do it without knowing they’re doing it. They’ve only been taught to use Paulo Freire’s generative methods, which generally are no longer called critical pedagogy. It’s usually called culturally relevant pedagogy, which comes out of the same literature. The person who popularized it in 1995 was Gloria Ladson-Billings.
She published a paper, “Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy,” explicitly drawing references to Freire and the critical consciousness raising process. Most teachers have been taught culturally relevant teaching or pedagogy, because these things are pushed down from the Department of Education itself and its Office of Civil Rights. This queer theory is deeply ingrained into all of these credentialing bodies and into the Department of Education. It’s just not called queer theory.
You may be a parent looking at your child’s assignments and asking, “Is there queer theory in my child’s school?” You’re not going to find it written on an assignment. But it’s certainly happening, usually through a back-and-forth conversational style. The technical term from Paulo Freire is called a dialogical process, but a lot of teachers don’t know this.
They think they’re being empathetic and inclusive, because they’ve been sold a lie. If people aren’t familiar, Marxists are very good at redefining words without telling you. They share words, but they’ve got a different dictionary. They employ the motte and bailey form of argument rather well.
Actually, one of the most ridiculous papers I read while researching this book was called, “Navigating Parental Resistance.” These two educators explicitly deal with the ways they overcome parental objections to what they’re doing in the classroom with children, which is queer pedagogy. One method they detail is couching queer pedagogy in larger learning objectives. They explicitly state that queer pedagogy has learning objectives, like becoming a problem solver.
When the parents object, they say, “We’re just teaching your children to be problem solvers.” They’re not going to talk too much about solving society’s problems as informed by queer theory, like transgender discrimination. They will not talk about the fact that your child may have a gender identity that you don’t know about. They say, “We’re just teaching them to become problem solvers.”
Who can possibly have a problem with that? Of course, that works on many parents. In the paper, they call parents significant gatekeeping mechanisms to the queer work that they need to do with children. They say parents represent the status quo power relations of the normal society trying to prevent this from happening.
Mr. Jekielek: That sounds right, actually. That’s the job of the parent.
Mr. Lancing: Right. What they’re admitting though, is that they know this is wrong and they shouldn’t be doing it. Their other method is to use the authority of their mandated curriculum from their Department of Education as cover for their queer work. Specifically, the example they cite is one dad who had an issue with his daughter being introduced to Alex Gino’s, “George,” which is a book about a transgender 10-year-old. The teacher said, “It’s mandated. This is my mandated curriculum. We have to do that.”
Now, of course, she doesn’t need to use that book to accomplish her mandates for English language arts education, but that’s what she hides behind. There was a line in there that really cut at my heart as a parent. When the student returned to school the next day after completing the assignment, the teacher asked, “How did it go last night with your dad helping you with the assignment? Did he help you?” The little girl responded, “Yes, he helped me with the commas.”
The authors celebrate this as an achievement, because parental resistance has been overcome. They say that this is an excellent way to help parents come to terms with the queer education their child is receiving. They use the word palatable. It’s a great way to make it palatable for parents who don’t want this to happen.
They explicitly know what they’re doing. Many teachers just don’t know that they’re doing it because it’s hidden under a banner of inclusive teaching. Queer theory in schools is almost synonymous with inclusive policies, practices, and procedures.
Mr. Lindsay: Just to be a little technical, and this is very familiar to a lot of people, so naming it may help clarify what they experience. They’re strategically switching levels of abstraction to confuse people. They say, “We’re just dealing with mandatory curriculum,” which might be to deal with reading lessons. But the problem is taking place on a lower level of abstraction with a more concrete example, “I don’t want you teaching this specific book to my daughter.” But then they abstract up one level in order to get around parental resistance, so what they’re doing is manipulating.
The other example was a conceptual jump as well. They’re modifying which level of abstraction that they’re using at any given time, so that they can get away with doing some specific thing you don’t want them to do. They hide behind some generality. They say, “We’re just problem solving.” They don’t tell you that there are a lot of meanings in what they are saying.
Problem solving could take on a lot of context in a more specific sense, but they’re doing a lot of abstraction. It could be solving society’s problems. It could be solving society’s problems using queer theory. Now, we are two levels down and they say, “We’re just working on problem solving.” When they do that, to steal the word from Marx, they are mystifying.
If they have written a document about using strategies to overcome parental resistance to what they’re doing, they are intentionally mystifying. There are many teachers who are utterly opposed to this. There are a lot who are trapped by this value system of inclusion, and not able to discern that inclusion means including things that are inappropriate. But if you don’t do everything, you’ve got something wrong with you. You’re a bigot or some moral failing or intellectual failing.
But at the same time, there is a small body of people in most school districts, if not all of them, who are activists and know exactly what they’re doing. It turns out that it doesn’t take that many activists to do this. In the book, we describe the structure of cults, where you have people who really know what the cult is about, and we call them the inner circle.
Then you have people who understand and are caught by the cult doctrine and are really intellectualized by it. They have rationalized it. We call them the inner school. That’s actually borrowing from the Chinese term, which means the inside school, the disciples.
Most of the people that are captured by this are actually socially and emotionally caught up in it. That would be an outer school or an outside school. Most of your teachers in schools are either going to be repellent to this or they’re caught up in it through policy or through values. They are not really meaning to do harm. Like Gloria Ladson Billings did in her 1995 paper, they think, “This is just good teaching.”
Then you have some who have rationalized and intellectualized it. It’s a smaller percentage, and here the 80-20 rule probably applies. Then in any given setting, there’s a very small number who are hardened activists who are driving the agenda. It doesn’t take very many of them to be able to push this agenda in enough classrooms to create an inside/outside dynamic. You have this pressure from outside activists who say, “You need to make the school more inclusive. We need to do this. This is coming down from the government.”
Then you have an inside dynamic where some proportion of the teachers, and some proportion of the students have been brought into it and start demanding it. They demand accommodation for their queer personalities or their queer identities. Now, you have this thing and they lean on it and say, “We’re just responding to student demand.” It’s a different domain.
There was just a publication from the NEA [National Education Association] the other day saying that there’s a great inside demand for more environmental education by the students themselves. They find a few students who demand that they need this and then they assess this in some way through relentless surveying. Then they can say, “You might have gender confusion, so you need this kind of inclusive classroom.”
This very small number of people becomes a demand base that creates an inside agitation and combines with an outside pressure. It squeezes the organization into changing and often adopting radical policies and training at extraordinary expense. They do this very rapidly before anybody can even know what’s going on. You can couple that with the fact that they’re trying to hide from parents that it’s even happening at all.
They quite explicitly say that they have to hide it from the parents. They are caught on tape talking about how they have to hide it from the parents. When you combine those things together, you see that this is a very deliberate maneuver. Now, just to be very clear and fair one more time, not all teachers are deliberately involved. There are very few that are probably deliberately involved. There are some teachers who are putting up a good fight.
I wish they were a little more vocal and had an organization like Moms for Liberty, except for teachers, where they could really support each other and articulate what’s going on in the schools from the inside. It’s great we have accounts like Libs of TikTok and others exposing this. But it would be even better if we had actual insiders showing us what’s happening in the schools and how it got there and what they’re expected to do.
Mr. Jekielek: There are a few that I communicate with quite regularly. The HR departments, and not just in education, have this DEI approach to hiring. They select a disproportionate number of people who are the true believers. These are the ones who understand how it all works and structure their resumes correctly and have the right talking points. This pushes the whole DEI system along and grows it as well.
Mr. Lindsay: Yes. This is a little bit of an either/or situation. This was simultaneously organic and deliberate. We have to acknowledge that the long march through the institutions is not a conspiracy theory. It was a deliberate strategy that was named in 1966 by Rudy Dutschke, who was a Marxist. What was he referring to?
He was referring to the first successful long march through the institutions. He wasn’t riffing off of Antonio Gramsci, who had not yet been translated from Italian, and was still being held in prison. Gramsci was the father of cultural Marxism who said, “Infiltrate the institutions.”
He was referring to Mao Zedong’s successful infiltration of institutions to control Chinese society when he took over, starting in 1949. The long march through the institutions is actually real. It was echoed in 1972 by the most famous and influential of the radical Leftists of the day, Herbert Marcuse, in his less read book, “Counter-Revolution and Revolt,” which was written after the attempt in 1968 to overthrow everything failed.
He got all mad and had to say, “The counter revolution has come and now we have to revolt against that.” He writes this relatively short book, naming Rudy Dutschke, and naming the long march through the institutions. He says, “This is exactly what we should do. We should go into the professions. We should become computer programmers.” In particular, he says, “We should go into education at all levels.” Therefore, there is a deliberate pressure from the activists themselves to take these positions in these institutions, including HR. They want to do this.
Mr. Jekielek: Marcuse was not a casual side intellectual. He was a rock star.
Mr. Lindsay: He was the rock star. Yes, he is considered the father of the new Left. Basically, he’s considered the intellectual progenitor of all Leftism since the Vietnam War. I’ve done a podcast entitled, “We Live in Herbert Marcuse’s World.” He was extraordinarily influential. He called for this infiltration, so you have the activists trying to get in the institutions.
We see that echoed in the first sentence of Isaac Gottesman’s book, “The Critical Turn in Education,” that says, “Where have all the 1960s radicals gone? Not to yuppiedom, and not to the religious cults, but to the classroom.” Being a cult, they disproportionately pick their own, whether they’re deliberately doing it, or whether they are finding people who share similar values to theirs and preferentially choosing them.
Simultaneously, a lot of conservatives like to say that the HR environment changed radically with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s, but that’s not correct. What is correct is that civil rights law was very radically and very rapidly reinterpreted. When you read civil rights law, it’s pretty clear on its face that you have these protected categories. You can’t discriminate by sex and you can’t discriminate by race. It doesn’t say which races. It doesn’t say sex discrimination is only against females. There’s none of that in there. It’s very clear that these are categories that cannot be discriminated upon.
In 1971, there was a very important Supreme Court decision called Griggs v. Duke Power Co. It was about race, and it set up the doctrine of interpretation that’s called disparate impact. It says that if there is some disproportionality, or what in the modern parlance is called an inequity in outcomes, like more white people than black people being able to get into management, even if you can find no evidence of discrimination in the test or the interviewing process or anywhere else, you can assume it must be there by default, due to the fact of disparate outcomes.
Just a short time later, we went from the 14th Amendment equal protection clause understanding of the Civil Rights Act, to what doesn’t exist in the 14th Amendment, an equitable protection clause that sets up the entire diversity, equity, and inclusion industry that developed overwhelmingly within the HR and managerial field. It created a legal doctrine that overwhelmingly strengthened the pressure on institutions to bend toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s all based on affirmative action, of course. That was the space in which critical race theory was developed.
Critical race theory got its name in 1989, and queer theory in 1991. Read their own writings from the 70s and 80s, and these doctrines were developing in that space, leading up to the birth of critical race theory, which over time led to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s very clear that they’re very concerned with that particular legal doctrine, and they use the disparate impact of Griggs v. Duke Power Co. specifically to advance their agenda. That became law in 1991, I believe.
Mr. Jekielek: Thomas Sowell says that it’s a preposterous idea to believe that disparate outcomes are caused by discrimination.
Mr. Lindsay: Ibram Kendi’s bread and butter is that particular trick, which is to set you up to where you don’t have any good options. In the parlance, it’s called an affordance trap. They afford you too few interpretations for the data. Ibram Kendi says this about testing in his talks, articles, and books all the time. He says, “If there are disparate outcomes in the test, there’s something wrong with the test,” aka it’s racist, or, “You’re saying there’s something wrong with black people,” aka you’re racist. Those are the only two options he affords you. Now, you’re in this affordance trap.
Mr. Lancing: This is precisely the argument that is specifically used in queer theory in schools in regards to gender identity and mental health outcomes. The affordance is that children are discriminated against, and that’s why they have poor mental health outcomes.
Mr.Lindsay: It would have to be that either children are discriminated against, so they have poor mental health outcomes, or that you’re not inclusive enough, and that’s why they have poor mental health outcomes.
Mr. Lancing: Yes. The mental health problems, psychopathologies, and trauma do not precede the gender identity, they are caused by the gender identity not being acknowledged. It is because they don’t feel like they belong in the school community. That’s been a huge trap that a lot of people have fallen into because many teachers are empathetic, and they want all of their children to feel like they’re included and belong.
When they get a bunch of data thrown at them with these affordance traps, they say, “Clearly there’s a disparity here. The children who have adopted a different gender identity than the sex they were assigned at birth have these terrible mental health outcomes. There must be some discrimination in here. We’re not accounting more. We need to include more queer theory into the school. We need more inclusive policies.” We see it play out like that.
Mr. Jekielek: As opposed to helping them with their mental health issues and resolving the situation.
Mr. Lindsay: Right. It’s inverting the symptom and the cause. A gender identity disorder, as they used to be called, may be a symptom of other underlying mental health conditions, or a response to previous trauma. You'll find many people provide tremendous evidence that is very frequently what’s going on. But rather than saying that gender identity disorder is a symptom of an underlying mental health or trauma-based disorder, they will say that the gender identity disorder is the cause of the other comorbid mental health disorders.
Mr. Jekielek: But then they’re also saying, “How dare you say that?”
Mr. Lindsay: Exactly. There’s something stupid and evil about you if you disagree.
Mr. Lancing: This is precisely the logic behind the DSM-5 [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders] in 2013 reclassifying sex confusion, which is what it really amounts to in children, from being a gender identity disorder, as in a disorder of your identity and internal processes, to one of gender dysphoria, where we are longer trying to help you address and overcome the root causes of your mental health issues or whatever is causing the sex confusion.
Mr. Lindsay: Now, what has happened in the DSM-5 is truly exquisite.
Mr. Jekielek: For our audience, what is the DSM-5?
Mr. Lindsay: That’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is the gold standard book for understanding and diagnosing and recommending treatment for psychiatric disorders. In the DSM-5, they literally rewrite the definition of gender dysphoria, which replaces the previous gender identity disorder. It is the distress associated with having a perceived mismatch between sex and gender expression. The disorder itself is the distress.
The resolution is not to treat the underlying cause, but is rather to ameliorate the distress, and the only way to ameliorate the distress is affirmation. We always hear about gender affirming care that says, “We have to affirm. We have to celebrate belonging and inclusion.” These are all words that are related, but specifically the pathway to treatment is given as affirmation. If this was addiction literature, we would call that enablement.
You have to affirm the gender confusion or sex confusion of the child in order to reduce the distress. That’s the entire corrupt understanding of this problem that is now an epidemic among young people, especially young girls. You affirm them when they repeat queer theory, and you correct them when they don’t repeat queer theory.
In some sense, you’re exploiting their distress, and you’re exploiting that trauma specifically to bring them further along into the doctrine in the name of medical care. In all of psychological medicine, it is the only condition that’s treated that way. The reason is very simple. It is because queer theory has captured our schools.
It has also captured our professional institutions like the American Psychological Association, which promotes this line relentlessly, and the American Psychiatric Association, which is even more strongly devoted to it. The American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society—name the professional organization and they are all captured across the board.
Mr. Lancing: The American Psychological Association characterizes anything outside of affirmation as conversion therapy, if you are not affirming the cult identity of a child who has significant problems that need to be addressed to help them. That’s the most wicked thing about this. These kids have been traumatized and they’re hurt or something is wrong, and we need to help them. But all of these organizations are saying, “Trying to help them resolve those issues is conversion therapy.” To your point, they say that you must affirm.
Mr. Lindsay: Multiple states are not just threatening to, but literally taking away the children of parents who don’t go along with this. It’s not just that states like California and many others have set up as sanctuary states. There is the famous case of Adam Vena in Los Angeles County. He lost his son because his ex-wife started taking the son down the path of transition. He disagreed and said that he is not affirming.
Now, his son technically has a restraining order against him, and he hasn’t seen his son in years. This isn’t something hypothetical. The law has now gotten involved and says that you are committing child abuse if you aren’t affirming. Why? Because it’s written in the gold standard psychological care textbook that the goal is to ameliorate the distress associated with gender dysphoria. That means dragging in this cult doctrine through this practice of affirmation.
Mr. Jekielek: I’ve spoken with a number of detransitioners on the show and they become apostates, which speaks to the cult characteristics of this ideology. I want to get you to comment on that. Also, the recent WPATH files work done by Mia Hughes has shown how ideological this is, and that there is no medical basis for it. The Cass Review final report came out more recently. It shows circular frames of reference where they cite each other’s papers to prove what has no basis in medical science. Can you comment on these two items?
Mr. Lancing: We really need to pay a lot of attention to detransitioners. For someone who may be a scientologist, you can see how difficult it is for them to leave the cult that I believe they’re in. When detransitioners decide to turn away from the doctrine of queer theory, they are viciously attacked. Immediately, their stories are no longer credible. Immediately, they never really felt it on the inside. Immediately, they’re a liar. They must be relentlessly attacked and shunned.
We need to support them. With detransitioners we can see that it is wholly unethical to not get informed consent from children, before giving them a cascade of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and potentially removing their breasts and doing genital surgeries on them.
We have evidence from detransitioners that they certainly regret it. They all say the same thing, “Where were the adults? I couldn’t possibly have given my informed consent. I didn’t know anything about sex or sexuality. My mind was still forming. How did you let this happen to me?”
To your point, we need to listen to detransitioners. We need to elevate them because they expose the cult dynamics of queer theory. If you listen to them, they talk about the manipulations. They talk about all of the dynamics that kept them in the cult. If parents can learn this, hopefully they can prevent their children from falling prey to the same thing.
Let me address the broader question of these circular citations. All of these organizations reference each other for their policies and procedures. The policies and procedures aren’t actually rooted in objective scientific analysis, because queer theory does not care about science and objective truth. Queer theory doesn’t think that objective truth exists, so they just reference each other.
There is no science behind this. It’s just cult doctrine putting it out there. I often ask people, “Where do you think the American Psychological Association or the Endocrine Society got the idea of gender identity or gender expression? Where did they get these terms from? They say, “What do you mean?” I would say, “You’ve got to ask that question because those terms all come from queer theory.” It is pure ideology with no relation to objective fact or science. Clearly, some kids have sex confusion. I am not saying that’s not the case.
Mr. Lindsay: You can give a concrete example of that. It’s not well known that the preponderance of the leadership of the Endocrine Society are currently WPATH members. WPATH will cite the Endocrine Society, and the Endocrine Society will cite WPATH. That’s a chain of two. This is just hypothetical, but imagine if you had four or five researchers or entities.
Imagine that WPATH cites the American Medical Association, which has a group of activists that puts something out, then cites the Endocrine Society, then cites the American Academy of Pediatrics, and then cites WPATH. You can get the circle a little bit bigger that way. This is the mechanism of that circular logic exposed by the Cass Review report in particular. It is idea laundering, as Brett Weinstein originally named it some years ago.
Ultimately, the postmodern philosophers called this legitimation by pyrology, which is a very fancy way of saying manufactured consensus. They invent the belief that everybody believes something by making it look official on paper with lots of citations. But with the citations, you can ask, “What do they go back to?” If you trace them back, you end up going in a circle. You come back to the same people in the same organizations. That’s what the Cass Review report was showing.
These two things, the WPATH files and the Cass Review report are extremely important. We should be paying attention to this. We need the United States and Canada to back off from this. They’re probably the two most aggressive countries still pushing queer theory and gender ideology, into education and medicine.
But the point about detransitioners is beautiful and very important. Detransitioners actually reveal something very important about the entire transgender phenomenon, and the minors in particular. Let’s say we have a girl, and maybe it’s our friend, Chloe Cole. At some point, Chloe Cole was 100 percent convinced that she was a boy. That was once her internal feeling, and that was once her truth. But presently, in alignment with her physical reality, she is 100 percent convinced that she is a girl.
One of two things is true. One is that her internal sense of having been a boy during that phase, of which she was 100 percent convinced, was never veridical. The other is that it’s simply not possible to do an accurate diagnosis. There’s nothing upon which a diagnosis could be based, because it could later change.
You are trying to treat a psychiatric condition as a physical condition, something that is rooted in her essence. But we already heard from David Halperin in, “The Definition of Queer,” that it’s an identity. Queer is an identity without gender. It’s not located in the body anywhere. It’s not even located in the brain.
Then they’re fundamentally wrong about the nature of gender identity, because Chloe was born female, and then 100 percent convinced she was male. At which point everybody was expected to say, “She’s 100 percent accurate in her own assessment of herself.” Then later she said, “I was wrong.” That means gender identity cannot possibly be this kind of concrete thing.
It’s ephemeral. It’s mystical or even spiritual. But maybe that’s not what they’re saying in the first place. They’re saying that maybe it is a little bit subjective and objective mixed together, so maybe it could change again later. Maybe she was just mistaken or lying, in particular lying. Then that means it’s not possible to diagnose it.
The DSM-5 now says that she’s experiencing some kind of distress related to her sense of gender. They invert the symptom and the cause in order to justify a treatment. At the very least, the existence of detransitioners says it’s not possible for these doctors to accurately diagnose a condition and prescribe permanent treatments like cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers or surgeries. Because it cannot be known whether or not it is veridical or non-veridical.
There was recently a paper that came out that said gender affirming care is not compatible with ethics, because it cannot distinguish between pathological and non-pathological. That’s the most important thing to remember, that there are many pathological ideologies of gender dysphoria. In other words, the question is, “When is it the cause and when is it the symptom?” Having just a single detransitioner says that this diagnostic method is unreliable. The fact that there are many detransitioners easily demonstrates that it’s simply not possible.
This is witchcraft and witch doctors making decisions based on the sacred science of queer theory about who is veridically trans and who is not. Jan, if you said, “For the next five minutes, I’m trans,” they would say, “You’re lying.” Through the magic of queer theory, they can tell that you don’t accept the doctrine. But if you committed your life to it and made sacrifices to the cult, then you’re probably really transgender.
Mr. Jekielek: Recently, there was a group of students walking out of their school because furry-identified children were harassing them, pouncing on them, and biting them. This actually happened. This reminds me of queer theory. Do you have a final thought?
Mr. Lancing: When I saw that same report, I researched it online. It took me less than one minute to find a whole suite of furry literature about children adopting “fursonas.” They are furry persona, and not identifying as human. This is explicitly underwritten by queer theory and its doctrine. There are no brakes on this train.
Yesterday’s radical became today’s conservative. It has to keep moving towards the direction of completely dissolving normalcy, boundaries, and legitimacy. Don’t be surprised if it even gets crazier than children biting other children while they’re dressed as dogs and cats and wearing tails. It may be absurd, but it is also really sad, because those children should be learning in school.
Mr. Lindsay: There are no brakes on the queer theory train. Queer theory is opposed to any limiting principles, and people need to understand that. To be very blunt about it, will queer theory eventually go into defending pedophiles? Yes, absolutely. Will it eventually go into defending bestiality? Yes. Will it defend any perversion that anybody can possibly think of? Yes, 100 percent. Why? Because it must.
Because the second somebody thinks of it and claims that it’s essential to their identity, nobody is allowed to tell them no and is a bigot for saying that you draw that line there. You can now look at the way that the radical feminists are being destroyed by the trans activists, and it’s the exact same progression. Gender criticality went into sex criticality, and there’s nothing they can do to stop the train from going to the human species criticality.
There’s a pair of books written by Martine Rothblatt, who is the creator of Sirius XM Radio, is a billionaire, and sits on the board of the Mayo Clinic. The first book, “The Apartheid of Sex,” explains that the idea of men and women is identical to the apartheid in South Africa, and is a moral injustice.
The second book,”From Transgender to Transhuman,” says, “If it turns out the body is not relevant to who we are in terms of gender, in other words, transgender ideology, then why does it matter what the body is at all?” Maybe we could be silicone bodies. Maybe we could be digital uploads. Maybe we don’t need a body at all, so we can move from transgender to transhuman. The book is very poor, very superficial, properly awful, and insane.
I bring it up because this person has tremendous wealth and tremendous power, and is pushing these ideologies very vigorously, and now sits on the board of the Mayo Clinic, which is a very important medical institution, maybe the most important in North America. Will it condone any perversion or even outright transhumanism? Yes, 100 percent. There’s nothing in this ideology that will prevent it.
Mr. Jekielek: Logan Lancing, James Lindsay, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Logan Lancing: Thank you so much.
James Lindsay: Thanks, Jan.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Logan Lancing, James Lindsay, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
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