The Unicorn Is Under Attack!

The peaceful gender unicorn is under attack by the right wing fanatics.

Beware The Gender Unicorn: Franklin Graham Takes Aim At The Transgender Community
Americans United
By Rob Boston
August 10, 2016

Part of my job involves monitoring the activities of Religious Right groups, which means every day my email box receives messages from groups like the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom and American Family Association (AFA).

The AFA has lately been going around the bend about something called the “gender unicorn.” This unicorn, which has apparently surfaced (metaphorically speaking) in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, has Franklin Graham, son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, in quite a tizzy.

Terms like “brainwashing” and “gender-bender morality” were being tossed around. I knew I had to check it out.

“Parents, watch out,” Graham blared in a story distributed by OneNewsNow, an AFA “news” service. “They are using this unicorn to grab the imagination of children and make this seem acceptable.”

He added, “Parents should be enraged and so should we. The Communists used brainwashing in Eastern Europe and Russia, and they took the parents out of the decision-making process and the state began to make decisions about morality. This is a dangerous path.”

OK, so what’s really going on in the Charlotte schools? I did a little digging. It turns out that the school system sponsored training for its teachers and staff on the challenges facing transgender students. Education officials wanted to make sure that all students are welcome in the schools, including those who are transgender.

The gender unicorn does exist. As the Charlotte Observer noted, the unicorn is a cartoon figure that was created by Trans Student Educational Resources, a national transgender youth group, to help people understand terms that are often used by the transgender community, such as “gender identity,” “gender expression,” “genderqueer,” “cisgender” and “sex assigned at birth.”

This training was for teachers, not students, and it’s designed to keep kids safe, ensure that their rights are protected and that they’re treated with the respect they deserve.

Circle the wagons, the trans people are coming to a bathroom near you! Heaven forbid! Their children might meet people who are different from them and find out that they are just people like them and we can’t have that.