The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) seems to have taken down the manual titled ‘Inclusion of Transgender Children in School Education: Concerns and Roadmap’ that was published by the Department of Gender Studies at NCERT.
The manual had claimed to be aiming at “sensitization of teachers and teacher educators regarding aspects of gender diversity keeping gender-nonconforming and transgender children at centre stage.”
The 115-page manual was prepared by Dr Poonam Agrawal, Professor and former Head of, Department of Gender Studies, NCERT, and several other educators. There were several problems in the document that were pointed out by many. One of the aspects that raised eyebrows was related to the infrastructure. The document had stated that toilets are used to ‘brainwash children into believing that there are only two sexes, men and women’.
The document read, “The use of toilet, an infrastructural facility, is used to condition children into binary gender; female children are conditioned to use the toilets labelled ‘girls’ and male children are to use the toilet marked for ‘boys’.” It also blamed ‘Caste patriarchy’ for the stigma against the transgender community. The manual had even claimed that there were multiple genders in the Vedic age.
The document also appeared to lend support for puberty blockers, medication that has gained widespread notoriety in recent times. The medicines are used to block the development of puberty in children, which permanently alters their natural course of development. It was seen as another major red flag in the manual.
After the outrage on social media, NCERT has removed the document from public access. The link to the manual now shows error 403, which means the server has denied access to the document. It is possible that the document still resides on NCERT servers, but the public cannot access it.
The inclusion of Vikramaditya Sahai raised questions
Vikramaditya Sahai was one of the external team members of the team that prepared the manual. Sahai has an Instagram profile vqueer, which is full of obscene content. Even Twitter flags the screenshots of the now-locked Instagram account Sahai. Notably, Twitter is often considered as a liberal social media platform that hardly censors anything posted on it.
Warning: Adult content
This is one of the “External Team Members” of the project that produced the woke NCERT training manual for teachers pic.twitter.com/lwbwDKqCUK
— Sensei Kraken Zero (@YearOfTheKraken) November 1, 2021
Sahai’s profile on Centre For Law & Policy reads, “They are interested in sex, feeling, and the structure and narrative in their relation with forms of sociality, law and politics.”
