Public Health Survey Threatened by Censorship-Crazed GOP
The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which was designed to help the CDC understand health risks to the nation’s adolescents is being reinterpreted as a tool of gender ideology by the far right.
by Evan Urquhart
By now we’ve all heard it stated outright: The goal of the GOP is to eliminate trans people from public life. This is the motivating factor behind attempts to criminalize drag performances, ban books from American schools, and it’s driven an attempt to ban Florida students, including those with supportive parents, from transitioning at school. Even public health is in the crosshairs, as an effort to portray a CDC survey which dates back to 1990 as a Trojan horse for gender ideology continues to gain steam. Most recently, multiple right wing outlets have portrayed a survey question simply asking middle schoolers if they are transgender as age-inappropriate and a cause for parental outrage.
Anti-trans activists want the very word “transgender” censored completely in US schools. And, as part of the effort, the right is working overtime to conflate trans identity with explicit sex acts. Stories in the Washington Free Beacon, the New York Post, and Fox News all highlighting questions on specific sexual activities such as oral sex alongside a question that simply asks if the student is transgender, making no distinction between the two.
Despite having different bylines, the stories are all very similar. Each quotes a Massachusetts woman named Dierdre Hall and one additional anonymous parent, relying on reporting in the Free Beacon. Every story also includes a question asking if students are transgender as an example of the “explicit” content parents are objecting to.
screenshot from the Washington Free Beacon
While the stories about Massachusetts don’t acknowledge any activist source for the complaints, the parents’ rights movement is known to be opposed to public health surveys on gender and sexuality in schools. The website for one such group, Parents Defending Education, instructs parents to request copies of surveys including the YBRS, explains how to opt out of participation in such surveys, and solicits “incident reports” from parents to support the goal of politicizing these surveys further. Last August, Fox News quoted one spokesperson from that organization claiming that the results of public health surveys including the YBRS would be manipulated by schools to fund diversity and “social emotional learning.”
screenshot from Fox News
This attack on gathering any information about transgender student is part of the parent’s rights movement’s broader attack on public schools, which Assigned covered in depth last October.