Willow Woycke, president of the Transgender Education Association
by James C. Sherlock
Family Life Education – Board of Education Guidelines and
Standards of Learning for Virginia Public Schools, updated in 2020 by a famously progressive Virginia Board of Education, requires:
A plan for teaching sensitive content in gender-separated classes shall be announced publicly.
Current Fairfax County School Board Regulation 3204.9 Effective 09/15/2020 requires both elementary and middle school Family Life Education classes to be gender-separate.
Those rules apparently are now judged to be insufficiently progressive in Fairfax County. Headline:
Fairfax County school board debates mixing genders in 4th-8th grade sex education classes.
How did this get to be an agenda item for the Fairfax County School Board? The answer:
An advisory committee recently approved a plan to mix boys and girls in grades 4-8 during Family Life Education instruction; a practice that is done in some area school systems but not in others.
That raises several questions.
- Who convened the advisory committee? Why?
- What will be the advantage of changing the current policy? For children I mean, not adults.
- What are the motives of those who want 10-year-olds of both genders to sit together for sex education?
The only motive revealed in the story is a component of the agenda of the transgender education lobby.
“FLE (Family Life Education) is a health class. It teaches students about their own health and the health of others,” said Willow Woycke, president of the Transgender Education Association.
Woycke’s full statement can be seen at here starting at the 46:17 mark.
The story did not mention that Ms. Woycke is an appointed member of the FCPS Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee that has proposed the change. It would be interesting to know the public policy objectives of the rest of the members.
She* starts by saying that mixed gender classes are good for not only transgender kids but also other kids. She* then proceeds to tick off all of the things that could be taught in those mixed classes. I watched it twice.
The FLE SOLs indicate that all of the things she* wants taught to mixed gender classes are presented single gender classes. So her claim that “cisgender” and homosexual students will get education that they do not currently receive is untrue – a false flag.
Ms.* Woycke’s** true motivation appears to be that she* wants transgender kids not to have to pick a gender for instruction.
The school board changed the agenda to postpone indefinitely public discussion by the board of the proposed changes to the FLE program. Ms.* Woycke spoke of it anyway from the audience.
When they do take it up we will see who speaks for the rest of the children in Fairfax County.
I suspect the answer is parents, who will pull their children out of FLE in droves as is their right under Virginia law if mixed gender FLE classes are mandated. Ms.* Woycke in her remarks openly advocated that outcome. She* found opting out an attractive option – but not for transgender kids.
The change will discriminate against children of followers of the major religions because the readily foreseeable outcome of the change in policy is that those parents will opt them out. I would do so if mine were that age.
If you believe, which the state of Virginia formally asserts, in the value of FLE education, then those children will be denied the quality education guaranteed to all children by the Virginia constitution.
There are less destructive ways to make sure transgender kids are not discriminated against in single gender FLE instruction. Policies adopted in Fairfax in 2015 already forbid discrimination against transexual students.
Making them comfortable in FLE instruction is the kind of thing school counselors have been doing ever since.
I have written here before that the transgender lobby is small but relentless — and has other progressives terrified to speak out against it.
I rest my case.
Ms.* Woycke advocates the nuclear option. And, given that this is the Fairfax County School Board, may get it.
Updated May 17 at 10:04 AM and at 11:17 AM (11:17 update after finally finding the video of Ms. Woycke’s full presentation to the school board).
Footnotes:
* Apologies if “Ms”. and “she” are not the right forms of address. No offense meant.
** Worth noting that my spell checker tried to change that surname to “Woke.”
