Fish Hoek High School has been in the news following uproar after a “diversity workshop” that was imposed upon it by the DA-run Western Cape Education Department (WCED). As far as I can see, the purpose of these diversity workshops, which are thrust upon rich schools but not poor ones, is to stir up racial hatred, to distress and confuse the children, and to stamp out all diversity of thought and ideas. Everyone must comply with one rigid ideology decided by the thought police, taking their instructions from America. You are not allowed to be different. You are not allowed to ask questions.
I spent all twelve years of my schooling at Fish Hoek Primary and High Schools. (This was a while ago. I matriculated in 1965.) Fish Hoek school was then, as it still seems to be now, a good middle-class school but by no means an elite school like St Johns, Roedean, Bishops, or SACS. In Fish Hoek, the richer friends of my parents sent their children to posher schools up the line, schools that carried more upper-class status, schools to which ANC politicians now send their children. At these posh schools, this diversity workshop would have caused no uproar. The richer you are, the more woke you are, and the more scared you are of opposing the new fascism of Critical Race Theory and the new transgender drivel. The WCED made a mistake in thinking middle-class Fish Hoek High School would tolerate this malign nonsense. They would make an even bigger mistake if they tried it at a working-class school.
The Fish Hoek “diversity training workshop” was led by a Ms Asanda Ngoasheng and “a team of WCED psychologists”. It was two and a half hours long. Parents and teachers were not allowed to attend. The young white children were taught that white people are racist. Of Christianity, they were told that “the disciples could have been queer, and the Holy Trinity some weird twisted love triangle and the Holy Ghost transgender”. (I’d be interested to hear from Ms Ngoasheng what Muslim parents say when she makes similar remarks to their children about Muhammad and his followers.) The fact that this workshop bypassed parents and teachers to indoctrinate children directly is reminiscent of the Hitler Youth in National Socialist Germany and by the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse-tung in Communist China. In both cases, children were taught to spy on their parents and report back to party headquarters. “Have you seen your Daddy being friendly to Jews?” “Is your Mummy an intellectual who reads classic literature?” In Germany the fascist ideas came from Hitler, in China from Mao, but in South Africa they come from America. South Africa doesn’t seem able to produce her own fascist ideas.
Racial indoctrination
Racial indoctrination at our elite schools has been going on for some years now whereas sexual indoctrination seems recent. A parent at an elite school showed me a creepy sexual tract for schools entitled “Genderbread Person”. It comes from America, of course, where woke perverts have been campaigning to spread confusion about the sexes. A good example of their success is the case of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was recently nominated for the US Supreme Court. A senator asked her to explain the differences between male and female. She could not do so. The senator then asked, “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” She was unable to answer, and said she was not a biologist. In case any readers feel similar confusion (which I doubt), let me, not a biologist either, explain the biology of sex and the difference between “sex” and “gender”.
Sex evolved about two billion years ago when there were only single-celled life-forms. Sex is the mixing of the genes of two different individuals, causing their offspring to derive from two parents not one. The reasons why sex evolved at all is complex and I don’t think completely understood. Over a billion years later, multi-celled animals evolved. Among modern animals, the fundamental difference between the sexes is this. The male continually produces (all his life) a very large number of small, fast-moving sex cells (sperm). The female is born with a very small number of large, slow-moving sex cells (ovules or eggs). Once born, she can never produce one single ovule more, whereas old men can continue to produce millions more sperm. This explains the totally different sexual drives of males and females. The more females a male can impregnate, the more offspring he can have. But since he can never be sure if the female is carrying his child, the male has developed a ferocious sexual jealousy. So, he mates with as many females as he can, and tries to drive off male rivals. The female has a small number of eggs and once impregnated has the massive burden of carrying the unborn child to birth and then caring for the baby afterwards. It behoves her to have a limited amount of sex as discerningly as possible and to try to tie down one male to help her look after the offspring. Among humans and some other animals, but by no means all, the male has XY chromosomes and the female XX. Different sex cells, different chromosomes: that’s all Judge Jackson needed to have answered.
Gender is a grammatical term. The recent replacement of sex with gender is unfortunate and deliberately confusing. It should be reversed. It spoils the famous census question: “List the members of your household broken down by age and sex.”
Genders
There are four genders (male, female, common, and neuter) and two sexes (male and female). That’s it. But within each sex there is an enormous range of sexual desire, sexual preference, and even biological difference. It is important that these should be explained to children as soon as they are old enough to comprehend them. As soon as possible, children should have clarity, confidence and understanding about sex and about their different sexual proclivities. The trouble is that the sexual indoctrinators want to do the opposite. They want to make children anxious and confused about their sexuality. They want to undermine the traditional family. The nasty Genderbread Person v4.0 describes itself as “A teaching tool for breaking the big concept of gender down into bite-sized, digestible pieces” and then proceeds to cause maximum confusion and doubt among children with obscure diagrams and tables with arrows.
I certainly believe in sex education for children. I believe that there are certain things they must be taught as soon as is possible without disturbing them. (Sex is innately disturbing for children. It is shocking to learn what your mother and father did to make you.) They must be taught that male and female sexual desire is completely different, and there is nothing to be ashamed of in either. In boys and men, the objects of sexual desire might vary enormously, but the desire itself is usually strong, urgent and easily satisfied (for a while). In girls and women, sexual desire is usually weaker and far more complicated. Boys shouldn’t be ashamed of the sexual urges that torment them from about the age of eleven, and girls shouldn’t be ashamed if they feel little sexual desire, or none at all – despite the women’s’ magazines telling them they must have at least three orgasms a week.
I’m not sure how I should teach children about homosexuality, but it would in some way explain that some men are sexually attracted to other men and that’s just a fact of nature, which should be accepted and accommodated, in the same way that left-handed people should be accommodated among the right-handed majority. The same with lesbians. We should stop making a fuss about it. In the ancient world, in the teachings of Jesus in the gospels, and in most of history, homosexuality was hardly ever mentioned. People didn’t care much about it and just accepted it. We should do the same.
Even more important, girls must be taught that there is nothing dirty about their bodies. They must be told beforehand about menstruation and warned about the blood they will see and the pain they will feel. They must be taught that menstruation is clean, natural and healthy. They must be taught that all parts of their body, including those associated with sexual intercourse and childbirth, are clean and good. The horrible teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on these things must be countered strongly. All three have a disgusting ceremony about a month after childbirth to cleanse the child of its befouling contact with the dirty parts and fluids of the mother during birth. In the Catholic faith, this is called “Churching”.
Undermine
Instead, the modern Genderbread brigade seems determined to undermine what little confidence young children have in their sexuality and to persuade them that sex is very complicated and that they should try and move away from the simple idea of love and sex between a man and a woman. The mania about “transgenderism” is mad and contradictory. We must celebrate women but we must not know what a woman is. If a man feels strongly that he is in the wrong body and thinks he is really a woman, then by his lived experience he actually is a woman and must be allowed to compete in women’s sporting events. A transgender woman with beard, penis, testicles, and big muscles must be allowed into any women’s bathroom.
Recently at a school in Vermont, a 14-year-old girl saw a boy (a “biological boy”) in the girls’ locker room. She told her father, the school’s soccer coach. They reported the incident on a social media post. He lost his job and she was punished for “misgendering” the boy. In an age where there is a clamour for a “safe space” for everyone, do we believe that the girls’ bathroom will be a safe space for anxious girls when transgender boys with penises can come in and watch them undress? Children have anxieties about a lot of things, and it is the easiest thing in the world for any unscrupulous adult to exploit them. Most of us as children had all sorts of doubts and fears about our sexuality. The transgender mob wants to exploit these doubts to evil ends. Some boys and girls are persuaded that they are in the wrong bodies, and must undergo therapy, and chemical treatment, and even operations to remove breasts, penises and testicles. How different this wicked nonsense is from the experiences of real transgender persons.
A famous example is James Morris, who became Jan Morris. He was born in 1926, married happily and had five children, and became a wonderful writer. His trilogy on the British Empire is marvelously exciting and informative. But all the while he felt, and then knew, he was in the wrong body. In 1972, at age 46, he had the operation and lost his male parts to become a woman. Jan Morris reconciled sympathetically with the mother of his children. She died happily at 94 with no regrets at all. Her book, Conundrum, is a moving account of the transition. Compare her calm, rational, patient thought and care in this book with the demented nonsense of so much of the transgender movement now.
Parents and children must rise up against this horrible brain-washing at school. The DA must be roundly condemned for promoting it. I should like to see an audit of all schools in South Africa, asking them these questions: “Do you have diversity workshops at your school?”, “Do you teach Critical Race Theory at your school?”, “Do you teach transgenderism and the Genderbread Person at your school?”. The answers would be published to help all parents to choose schools for their children.
And here’s another question for the WCED: “How much did you pay Ms Ngoasheng for her diversity workshop?”
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend