The Catholic school in crisis over gender fluidity
AN elite Catholic girls’ school is uproar after the principal linked changes to the school uniform to controversial gender theory, writes Miranda Devine.
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AN elite Catholic girls’ school is in crisis after the headmistress linked the concept of gender fluidity with the introduction of pants and shorts into the school uniform.
At a protest yesterday afternoon, parents demanded the resignation of Santa Sabina principal Maree Herrett and threatened to pull as many as 200 girls out of the school.
Santa Sabina in Strathfield is dominated by the devout Maronite Catholic community in the part of Sydney that voted No in last year’s same-sex marriage survey, so you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that “Safe Schools”-style gender theory won’t fly.
But that didn’t stop Herrett boasting in the media that the uniform change was about enabling “a variety of gender expression”. She said: “What I think we’re recognising is that there has always been a variety of ways of expressing your femininity or your masculinity.”
And if students were questioning their gender, she said, the uniform would “make the journey a little bit more comfortable for them”.
But it was Herrett’s Twitter feed that crystallised misgivings parents had about the politicisation of the new uniform. On February 25, two days before the uniform was launched, Herrett tweeted her recommendation of a book promoting radical gender theory.
“Gender is a social process, a dynamic of change quite different from biological evolution,” she wrote, with a link to the book Gender Reckonings and the exhortation: “Buy the book!”
Herrett’s Twitter feed, containing a variety of left-wing musings, was revealed by Ross Cameron and Rowan Dean on their Sky News show Outsiders last weekend.
Already on guard for social incursions into their faith after the bruising same-sex marriage debate, Santa Sabina’s parents grew increasingly concerned about what they call “the enemy within”.
Herrett deleted her Twitter account on Friday but screenshots of her tweets have done the rounds of the school, and a cursory perusal of the book she recommended further confirms parents’ fears.
Gender Reckonings, edited by James Messerschmidt, who coined the phrase “toxic masculinities”, and transgender academic Raewyn Connell, is chock-full of the insidious Marxist-based theory that underpinned Safe Schools.
The book rails against “the international fundamentalist campaign against the idea of gender fluidity”. It claims the concept of binary sexes — as in male or female — is “impoverished thinking”.
It describes women as “people assigned female at birth”. It praises “polyamory” and criticises monogamy.
It promotes a “movement to assert a multiplicity of sexual and gender identities” and “unbounded fluidity of gender and sexuality (to) escape the constraints of institutionalised heterosexuality”.
Connell, referenced by name in Herrett’s tweet, has been a research associate of Gary Dowsett, a controversial professor in the Sex, Health and Society Department at La Trobe University, where Safe Schools was designed. This program, defunded by the federal government and axed in NSW, fell into disrepute when parents realised it was radical gender theory posing as an anti-bullying program.
The full extent of its penis-tucking, breast-binding nature is barely understood, but it’s not a coincidence that the advent of Safe Schools in Australia coincided with an epidemic of children seeking help at gender clinics because they feared they were trapped in the body of the wrong sex.
So it is no wonder Santa Sabina parents are alarmed that their principal has promoted such a book and appears to have applied its precepts to the creation of a new genderless school uniform. They reject the school’s claim that the dispute is about changing the uniform.
“Not one single parent has taken issue with the uniform,” says one father.
In a letter to the school board, another parent wrote: “Must we remind you that teaching children about gender fluidity is against our religion, against evolution and against the teachings of Christ. Dr Herrett has no place in this school. She is entitled to her own personal opinion and beliefs, but not while holding up a Catholic flag.”
The parents see this as an existential battle and they will not back down.