Genders & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) clubs are popping up in schools all across the nation, a new investigation by Parents Defending Education (PDE) reveals.
The investigation shows the extent to which these clubs have found root in various schools, often under names such as “Queer Straight Alliance,” “Rainbow Club,” and “Affinity Group.” The GSA Network helps “Trans and queer youth of color use their collective voice and power to change the narrative,” according to the organization’s website. Often billed as a student-run group, some GSA clubs have had educators involved in the group’s political activism, PDE reveals.
Schools in states from California to Florida to Kentucky are named in the investigation.
“These clubs definitely range from an after school social club all the way to these indoctrination camps seeding this anti-racist woke ideology and using the kids as activists,” Ryhen Staley, a researcher at PDE, told the Daily Caller.
“That’s what people think when they think of these GSA clubs,” he continued. “That it’s just a place where a kid that might be trans goes and they hang out and they chat. And by the way that could be true. But these other clubs, they go beyond that.”
Some GSA clubs provide information on pronoun use, while others coordinated with school officials to protest Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” law.
A club in Saint Paul, Minnesota, advocated for its school to mandate that teachers put stickers on assigned “Safe Spaces” and that they hold a Day of Silence to “protest the silence created by heterosexism and anti-LGBTQ bias in our society.”
The GSA Network receives donations from the Transgender Law Center, Novo Foundation, and Ford Foundation, PDE noted in its investigation.
“It is deeply concerning when adults leverage their position of authority over elementary and middle school students to advance social justice activism,” Staley said. “After-school clubs and programs should be focused on academic and social enrichment, not having the students evaluate how racist or transphobic their school is.”
Parents and students are encouraged to submit tips on other GSA alliances at schools across the country.
GSA Network has taught that “capitalism erases” LGBTQ people, and encourages students to ask “what ways might we be systematically oppressed?” according to a previous report by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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