AISD Pride Week: Queer, queering, queered

For Austin ISD’s Pride Week celebrations, in 3rd-grade classrooms, the lesson plans include reading the book Julián Is a Mermaid. It’s a book with lovely illustrations about an imaginative boy and his supportive grandmother.

What’s the big deal?

Well, if that were the sum total of the story & the sum total of the message, ok fine, whatever.

But it’s Pride Week, so the point of the book is not just imaginative boys and supportive grandmothers.

Clearly to anyone who gets the title and subtext, the book is either about a supposedly trans boy or gender-creative queer boy.

Of course you don’t have to talk about that, but for the AISD employees who are SO EXCITED about Pride Week—because they want to welcome kids’ “authentic selves”* 🙄—the whole point of the book is to talk about the subtext. And if you want to know how that conversation might go, here’s one person’s take on the book.

Note before we start that this blog writer writes of herself, “I am interested in how we think about children’s gender and sexuality, and the idea of the ‘queer child’ as a way to disrupt normative views of childhood.” And this person loves this book.

(This is from a blog by a person who in 2018 was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Depauw U in Indiana. If you want to see the blog, drop the quote into google.)

She went to a workshop entitled “Picturing Queerness: A Study of Queerness in Children’s Picture Books” in which the presenter also loved the book because it “celebrates femininity, gender-nonconformity and queer family bonds. . . .”

More specifically, the blog-post author just loved the presenter’s view about children’s books as a potential place to explore the queering of childhood and families:

I loved what she said about the queer world making potential of children’s books and the ways that these books both show the suppression of queer desire/behavior that can happen in families as well as the ways that family can be queered and children’s desire/expression supported within a family structure. She argues that the new queer kids literature is disruptive and does not accept restrictive worlds.

Ooooookay, then.

So the book is intended to show a child’s queer desire. To portray queer families. To encourage the queering of families. To be disruptive. And to reject the restrictions of the current world.

And somebody in AISD selected this book for 3rd-graders to celebrate Pride Week. Teachers will be reading & discussing this book with 8- & 9-year-old children next week. This book, part of official curriculum of Pride Week, gives teachers cover to talk to children about queerness.

Look, there is no universe in which random adults need to be talking to elementary-school children about queerness. Or transgenderism. Or anything dealing with sex and sexuality. There is no universe in which well-adjusted adults WANT to have this conversation with your child.

And no sane school principal, assistant principal, central-office administrator would want anything close to these conversations taking place in classroom. None of this should be any part of any school curriculum.

Again, any adult who is this desperate to talk to other people’s kids about sex and gender and queerness shouldn’t be anywhere near other people’s children.

The are no adults in charge in AISD.

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