Brace yourself: Someone at Fox News is speaking out against a move aimed at creating positive changes in regards to gender in the classroom.
What's causing the latest outrage? A proposal to change the language used by teachers in public schools that reinforces the male/female binary.
Gretchen Carlson led the charge on this one, fixating on the suggested use of inclusive ways to refer to groups of children rather than "ladies and gentlemen" or "boys and girls" -- such as employing the phrase "purple penguins."
Carlson said on air:
Don't kids have enough to worry about right now? Now we're going to confuse them even more -- right before puberty, by the way -- to not call each other what the majority of the population really is, and that would be boys and girls. Once again, this is pandering to outrageous over correction of a society addicted to making sure we take care of the .001 of the population instead of the masses. I want to be very clear: I am not against transgender people or transgender kids in any way, but to make an entire population start calling each other "purple penguins" because maybe one child in the entire school system will turn out to be transgender is crazy.
This is certainly not the first time Carlson or other Fox News pundits have freaked out over pro-transgender moves within the public school system. Last year members of "Fox and Friends," including Carlson, lashed out at a California bill that aimed to allow children to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity rather than the one they were assigned at birth.
Upping the ante, in January, Fox News' Keith Albow called into question whether or not transgender people even exist. He wrote on the Fox News website, "I don’t believe we have definitive data (although many psychiatrists with very impressive credentials, who seem to mean well, assert that we do) that any male or female soul has ever in the history of the world been born into the wrong anatomic gender."
(h/t Media Matters)
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