Delhi-NCR-based Shiv Nadar School has come up with a parent feedback form that has caused a stir among the parents. The feedback form asks the parents about their views on various aspects of the school, its programs, and the child’s journey there.
The parent feedback form is meant to be filled out by all parents of children across all grades on all campuses. The Shiv Nadar school has campuses in Noida Faridabad and Gurgaon.
Notably, in the first section, which asks for the essential details about the child, there is a section on gender that asks the parent to choose between “Male”, “Female”, and “Non-Binary”. While “other” and “third gender” are common in feedback forms across platforms, specifying non-binary brings a different approach. Notably, there is no guideline from NCERT on adding such a gender option for the school forms.
In the form, there is an option to select the child’s grade. It is evident that this form is to be filled even for kids as young as 3 or 4 years of age since selecting ‘Foundation year’ and ‘Nursery’ is also an option.
Non-binary is used to describe people who feel their gender cannot be defined within the margins of a gender binary. Instead, they understand their gender in a way that goes beyond simply identifying as either a man or woman. It would, therefore, mean that Shiv Nadar is going down a slippery slope of elected pronouns and gender politics of the West.
Until even a decade ago, the terms ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ was used interchangeably and it was widely understood that there are only two genders that could be considered normal, while transgenders are considered a deviation from the norm and were understood as an anomaly and rightly so. But as it turns out, a certain bunch of ‘intellectuals’ in their echo chambers had conjured the hypothesis that gender identity is completely independent of biological.
When it is claimed that gender identity is independent of biological sex, one goes down a slippery slope of elective gender politics. Essentially, this would mean that a boy could claim that he is ‘non-binary’ and ‘gender fluid’ since he feels like a boy one day, a girl the next, and like an individual with no gender at all on the third. This ‘non-binary’ individual could also then claim that they are not comfortable with conventional pronouns since they are attributable to gender identities, and therefore, he would want to be referred to as “They/Them” or Xe/Xhrer or some other made up pronoun.
We also noticed that the school has a “Gender Sexuality Alliance” to provide “a safe and free space to express and allow the germination of new ideas”. The school’s website page about School Councils reads, “The Shiv Nadar School is a safe and free space to express and allow the germination of new ideas. The Gender Sexuality Alliance is a club that hopes to start conversations about gender neutrality and open acceptance of sexuality. Earlier the IBDP students had initiated the Gay-Straight Alliance club, taking it forward this year, not only was it renamed but also opened to all the students. The aim of this club is to facilitate activism in the form of open discussions without any prejudices to provide a welcoming environment for all the students.”
The Harmful Effects of Gender Politics on Children
The normalization of such toxic politics has led to a situation where countries in the West are suddenly seeing a spike in the number of teenage girls who want to transition to male. Lisa Littman, an American Academic, said that ‘socially-awkward’ girls self-identified as transgender after being drawn together in chat rooms where they reinforced each other’s beliefs about their identity. She was ostracised by the academia for observing this particular trend.
Furthermore, gender identity overlords advocate the use of puberty blockers for underage children. Puberty blockers are drugs that postpone or inhibit puberty in children who feel they are of a different gender. This is not to say that gender dysphoria is not a real issue but it’s particularly concerning because research indicates that over 90 percent of the children (94% to be precise) grow out of it by the time they reach puberty.
Thus, gender identity overlords are irrevocably altering the natural growth of children and scarring them for life due to their petty politics when most of the children would go on to have a completely normal life without it. Their justification for such life-altering events at such a tender age is that children ‘feel’ that they are a ‘boy trapped in a girl’s body’ or vice versa.
Children are children at that age. They might say a lot of things and do a lot of things but it is the responsibility of adults to ensure that they do not let them harm themselves. But hundreds of children under the age of fourteen, many as young as 10 years old, have been injected with these life-altering drugs merely because of their feelings, something that the children could come to regret later.
Shiv Nadar’s inclusion of ‘non-binary’ as a gender identification for children is being viewed as an extension of the normalization of such toxic politics at an early age.
OpIndia tried to speak to the parents of a few wards studying at Shiv Nadar. While some parents we reached out to refused to speak to us saying that it would unnecessarily affect the progress of their ward, a few parents, on the condition of anonymity, expressed outrage about the school’s decision to force all parents to subscribe to gender politics. “I think the decision about what the children should learn about such sensitive and politically charged subjects should be left to the parents. The school can’t enforce their own woke ideology on the students and their parents”, one parent said. The other said, “Most parents don’t speak up because they fear the repercussions the child might face, but this was simply not expected. We don’t want such fantasy being fed to our children”.
Not the first time
This is not the first time that a school has attempted to normalize dangerous gender politics. In 2020, there was great outrage on social media after Harish Iyer, a prominent LGBT activist, said on the micro-blogging site Twitter that he had conducted a workshop on sex, orientation, gender identity, and gender expression at a school in Mumbai. Several sessions of the same were conducted on the same day and in the tweet, he mentioned that it was the 4th session that was then underway. After the tweet caused outrage among users on social media, Harish Iyer proceeded to delete the tweet.
What caught people’s attention in Harish Iyer’s tweet was the reference to a ‘gender identity class video’ composed by Abish Mathew of All India Bakchod fame and one Anuya Jakatdar. One social media user soon discovered the video that the LGBT activist was referring to in his tweet where he announced his workshop in a Mumbai school.
The video in question is titled on YouTube as the ‘Gender Identity Song’ and is quite disturbing, to put it mildly. It is tailor-made to target its intended constituency, that is, children, and is entirely a tool for brainwashing. There is not even an attempt made to make it seem anything other than a propaganda tool.
In the video, there is an entity that calls itself ‘Angel’ and claims it is gender fluid. He is, apparently, sometimes a boy and sometimes a girl, both and sometimes neither: That is my gender identity. It could be different from my gender expression and my biological sex,” Angel says.
Then, Angel proceeds to sing. “If it hangs between your legs, it’s your sex. It physically manifests, it’s your sex. But society thinks in two’s, doesn’t mean that it is true, Gender Identity is what’s inside of you.” The song continues, “If you want to be a boy or a girl, or you want your special fashion to unfurl, you get to choose how you and the way you want to dress. You get to choose how you would like to be addressed.”
Then, the person proceeds to brainwash the children with the concept of gender pronouns. There is also a point in the video where it speaks of ‘gender-neutral toilets’. The core message of the sermon is, “You don’t have to get it. You just have to respect it.”
NCERT does not prescribe the inclusion of ‘non-binary’ as a gender identification
In 2021, the Department of Gender Studies at NCERT had earlier published a document titled ‘Inclusion of Transgender Children in School Education: Concerns and Roadmap’ where it said that toilets were used to brainwash children into believing that there were only two sexes, men and women. Besides that, the training manual appeared to give its support for puberty blockers, a medication that has gained widespread notoriety in recent times. The medicines were used to block the development of puberty in children which permanently alters their natural course of development. Following public outrage over the manual, NCERT had removed the document from public access.
Another draft was issued in 2023, which was later pulled down after receiving feedback from the stakeholders. That document did not talk about adding “non-binary” to school forms in the name of inclusivity. NCERT has no guidelines for schools to use “non-binary” in any form.
OpIndia reached out to Shiv Nadar for their comments on the inclusion of ‘non-binary’ as a gender identification for students. The school wasn’t forthright in answering the specific questions and chose to prevaricate. As and when the school chooses to respond, their statement will be added to this story as an addendum.
