The Queering of the American Child
a review of James Lindsay's new book
Disclaimer: James Lindsay is a friend of mine, but Logan Lancing is not. That friendship got me early access to this book, but that’s all—he hasn’t asked for this review, nor has he read it. I do not think our friendship influenced my review, because if I didn’t think the book was valuable and important, I would simply have elected not to review it. If you want me to review your book, the guidelines for my book reviews are here.
“People who have critical consciousness are religious fanatics hell-bent on breaking society and steering us toward the end of History. This is not hyperbole.” —from The Queering of the American Child, by Logan Lancing and James Lindsay
The Queering of the American Child
“Critical race theory is a legal framework that’s only taught in law school.”
This argument is the basis for nearly every defense of the current state of American public schools. It’s used about critical race theory. It’s used about gender ideology: “They’re not teaching kids inappropriate things about gender. Gender theory is a college-level topic. They’re just teaching kids not to bully classmates who are different.” It’s used about everything that teachers want to train kids to believe, whether their parents like it or not: the idea that because a particular theory, ideology, or worldview isn’t taught as a theory, ideology, or worldview, it’s not present in schools.
Montessori Schools Are The Counter-Argument
Nearly everyone has heard of Montessori schools, even if not everyone is familiar with what they are and why they’re so widespread. Montessori schools are carefully curated environments, filled with sensory-rich materials designed to stimulate children’s curiosity. They are relaxed, independence-fostering spaces wherein children are given a high level of contact with nature, with the goal of helping them develop a sense of responsibility for themselves and their own learning.
Maria Montessori developed her educational philosophy over a long career that included many distinctions. She was one of the first women to attend medical school in Italy, and she published extensively.
Montessori schools don’t teach her philosophies. Students don’t typically learn the history of her ideas or the reasoning behind why their classrooms are set up the way they are. Many students have no idea that “Montessori” is a person’s name, much less that it’s the name of a person whose philosophies and ideas are the reason behind every aspect of their school experience. That’s because Montessori schools practice her ideas. They are living, breathing entities in which her ideas are embodied and practiced. The consequences of her ideas are integrated into the minds and hearts of her students, becoming part of their personalities and shaping their deepest selves as they grow.
American public schools are exactly like Montessori schools for queer theory, critical race theory, and other subsets of Marxism: practicing it and integrating it into the minds, hearts, and personalities of the students without any need for explicit, named instruction in the formal structure of the theories involved.
Queer Is A Verb
Lancing and Lindsay provide a thorough understanding of the issues and the stakes, starting with the title: queer is a verb. To queer something is to disrupt and dismantle it, to erase all the usual definitions and boundaries so that ‘normal’ no longer has any meaning.
…..'queer' is a wholly political stance against normalcy and legitimacy and has little or nothing to do with homosexuality itself.
and
Queer Activists queer norms, institutions, and society because they believe they must do so to eliminate oppression. Queer Activists think they must practice their political activism until society no longer considers anything normal—until we all live, as Queer Activist Michael Warner describes it, on a queer planet.
and
Queer pedagogy is defined as ‘a radical form of educative praxis implemented deliberately to interfere with, to intervene in, the production of “normalcy” in schooled subjects.
are just three of dozens of clear, eloquent expressions of exactly what teachers, administrators, and other people involved in the American school systems are trying to do with their access to our children’s minds, each thoroughly explained.
When there is no longer any normalcy, these lunatics believe, then and only then can oppression cease to exist. Only then, every decison will be a pure choice, a choice made without the coercion of having to choose whether to be “normal” or not.
Queer Theory is a Religious Framework
The book’s core argument is that queer theory is a religious framework, specifically a religious cult framework, and they fully support it. Their evidence is overwhelming, their logic is valid, their premises are true, and their argument is thus entirely sound.
The United States of America is supposed to operate with a separation of church and state, but queer theory is now integrated into all aspects of educational policy and related law.
Imagine if the correctness and truth of Islam were codified into law here, and all female students had to wear hijab, or if Buddhism’s noble truths were the underpinning for civil cases. Imagine being injured by another’s negligence but having to argue for compensation in a court where the Buddhist belief that desire is the cause of all suffering was the core legal axiom, so you and your attorney would have to argue far more than the merits of your case to have any chance at winning a just settlement.
Imagine how oppressive it would be to have to fight a system set up to propagate a religious faith not your own, one where not just the laws but the reasoning behind the laws were based on someone else’s religion.
That’s exactly where all Americans who don’t accept Queer Theory are now. Parents who don’t homeschool are like non-Muslim parents enrolling their kids in a madrasa while trying to have their kids end up not thinking, reacting, reasoning, and responding like devout Muslims.
Queer Theory Activists Want Your Child’s Innocence
The book is particularly strong when using the words of queer theorists themselves to show exactly what they want to do, and why. We need simply believe their own self-reports about their motivations.
Queer Activism is dedicated to disrupting normalcy wherever it manifests, by definition. That means it is also dedicated to preventing any sense of normalcy from ever taking root in children in the first place. Queer Activists say that the idea of a healthy and innocent child, both in mind and body, is a political construction created to maintain a “developmental sequence which culminates in normalcy.” Said another way, Queer Activists think there is no such thing as a “healthy and innocent” child. They think those in power created and defined the categories of “healthy” and “innocent” to coerce society to raise children a certain way. In this sense, all children are compared to “normal” and “healthy” childhood development to sort out those children that will help reproduce society as it is, cementing the normal status quo.
The normalization of childhood transition is designed, I believe, specifically to erase the boundary between adult and child and thus normalize pedophilia. There is no logic to rely on to keep pedophilia stigmatized if a child can consent to “gender affirming care” but not sex. There is no solid rationale to saying that a child can consent to having his genitals chemically stunted or her breasts surgically removed, but the same child cannot consent to having his genitals or her breasts fondled. The book quotes queer activists like Gayle Rubin admitting openly to support for “boylovers” and regarding pedophiles as victims of persecution.
Most people who oppose queer theory find their way to learning about it through realization of how insane the trans mania has gotten. The idea that ‘gender identity’ exists, and that it can differ from a person’s sex, is a core tenet of queer theory. It covers the case of all people who suffer from gender dysphoria, but that’s not the only thing it refers to. Indeed, it is not what many of the activists mean when they talk about transition. They often regard transition as a way to queer an individual identity—transition as transcending, here transcending the oppressive norms and boundaries of the gender binary. From the book:
Queer Activists have transformed education's purpose, methods, and content to push kids to become Queer Activists themselves. They have determined that the best way to do this is to teach kids to queer themselves—to teach kids to destabilize their minds and bodies by deconstructing their identity until they become queer, which is a political cult identity that has nothing to do with sex, ‘gender,’ or sexuality.
This absurdity is fully codified into law and proselytizing this religion is the sole aim of many teachers and schools. This is what parents who do not subscribe to this religion are up against—and as the schools are the most important battleground of all, ultimately it’s what all of us are up against.
Almost every school is a Queer Theory school now, including red state public schools and even including many parochial and private schools that parents think are safe.
History of Queer Theory
The book has a long section wherein Michel Foucault, a pedophile, and the other sick perverts who brought us queer theory in the first place are discussed. It’s readable, engaging, and important, but this review is going to be long already so I’ll simply note that it’s an excellent primer in the history of queer theory and move on.
Queer Theory is Queer Marxism
The most helpful section of the book, to me, is the chapter in which Marx’s philosophies were taken from the simplistic—that he believed capitalism is unfair to workers—and given much more depth. There is enormous value in helping people understand what they recognize and intuitively understand to be true, but often struggle to put into precise language. As a recent university graduate, I am often able to do this for people with regard to aspects of Wokeness and how individual minds are affected by Woke programming, especially in relationships between the sexes, anti-racism, sexual education, and fiction.
What Lancing and Lindsay do in this section is take the intuitively obvious notion that all of this nonsense has its roots in commie bullshit and provide clear, specific explanation for why that intuition is true. From that section:
Millions of dead bodies bear witness to the fact that Marxism doesn’t work. Marxism doesn’t work because it’s not an economic or social theory. Marxism is a cult theology, so acting as if it has anything to do with economics produces devastating consequences. But that has never stopped Marxists from believing in the promises of Marxism. When “classical” or “vulgar” Marxism was revealed to be a catastrophic failure, Marxists simply tweaked Marxism to account for an ever-increasing series of variables and excuses. Losing Marxism meant losing the promise of salvation. The cult of Marxism just couldn’t let it go.
and
In Queer Marxist Theology, trans or “non-binary” people are breaking society’s chains—they are refusing the doctor’s “assignment” and society’s demands. They are refusing the pronouns, the dress, the sexuality, and the behaviors of those who would claim “normal.” A trans person makes the reality in their head “the truth” of their world as they materialize their thoughts on their body by way of their own will. Queer Theory argues that trans people are divine beings transcending their fallen physical form. Trans people reveal the “truth of Queer Theory” to the rest of society; they serve to “queer” society. A trans person reflects a transcended humanity back on society to demand changes in how people think about sex, gender, sexuality, and the “normal.” A new society—new traditions, norms, and values—then reflects a new human image back on Man. Queer Activists believe that if they can repeat this cycle—Man makes society, society makes Man—enough, they will reach the end of History, realizing their full queer humanity and become God.
I won’t try to summarize their excellent explanation here, as a summary would not do it justice, but it’s one of the more empowering things I’ve read in the last few years. I am much more confident that I understand exactly why these nutjobs always, always, always turn out to be communist lunatics, even (perhaps, especially) when they don’t even recognize that fact about themselves.
Schools as Strategical Battleground
Have you noticed that everything is political now? That even the offhand wish to not have to make things political is deemed evidence of ‘privilege’ and thus immediately made political? There’s a reason for this.
To the activists, everything in life—everything—is based on the tenets of queer theory, and those tenets are interwoven into every aspect of how schools are designed, built, and operated—how they teach each and every subject, how they guide children to think about themselves, the world, and each other.
This is not an accident. From this section of the book:
The working class was too big to chew all at once, so Marcuse set out to divide the working class from within. Rather than attempting to radicalize all working-class people by telling them that U.S. economic conditions are fundamentally unfair, Marcuse argued for radicalizing specific subgroups of people that would be more welcoming to the Marxist sales pitch. The strategy was straightforward: first, radicalize college kids who, in their disastrous idealism and absolute ignorance, would then move on to work in the institutions that Marxists wished to infiltrate and capture. From these institutions—like education—the young professional radicals could inspire Marxist cultural changes from the top-down.
How the Cult Beliefs Are Inculcated
The primary method for inculcating the cult beliefs goes by the deceptively anodyne name, “culturally relevant teaching.” From the book:
At its core, Culturally Relevant Teaching forwards the idea that many children fail in school because there is a cultural mismatch between their school and their home/community. Culturally Relevant Teachers assume that “academic knowledge and skills” must be situated “within students' lived experiences and frames of reference”82 to be learned. Therefore, students who can learn, read, write, talk, and behave at school like they do at home or in their community—a cultural match between school and student—are more likely to succeed. Students who are removed from their cultural reference points and “lived experiences” at school face a cultural mismatch, making them less likely to succeed. Put simply, Culturally Relevant Teachers believe that schools privilege some cultures while “silencing” and excluding others.
and
Likewise, the goal of the Culturally Relevant Teacher is to help students deconstruct their own culture(s) and determine how they specifically are oppressed by the dominant culture(s), or how their culture(s) oppress the marginalized culture(s). After modeling this deconstruction, the Culturally Relevant Teacher’s mission is to empower and inspire her students to change the dominant culture through social justice activism. Her job is to push her students to develop critical consciousness.
The second important tool is social-emotional learning.
This one in particular enrages me because it takes what normal, healthy adult caregivers do—teach children to have empathy and to work towards a theory of mind that allows them to be considerate of others—and weaponzies it into political activism.
From this section:
Simply put, Queer Activists convince kids that they can’t identify as normal boys or girls—they must choose political positions and enter into an identity crisis. Queer Activists must first persuade kids to see themselves as different by “forc[ing] a separation of their sense of self from a sense of normalcy.” They are then led to feel as though they are oppressed because they’re abnormal. Only then can kids be taught the key reversal that activates them: that they are abnormal because they are oppressed. That is, they would be “normal” too if it weren’t for society’s expectations to be normal on other terms. Society, by failing to accommodate their quirks, is making them abnormal.
and
In effect, Queer Activists say, “I know you’re uncomfortable now that we’ve inverted your world, but it’s OK. We can help you become more self-aware so you can finally understand who you truly are.”
and
In effect, social-awareness is the process of taking a child standing in the deconstructed rubble of their old normal world—a place they have been taught is full of evil spirits and wickedness—and placing them in the loving embrace of revealed queer wisdom.
Queer Classrooms
In this section, Lancing and Lindsay give specific examples of changes that we’ve all noticed in classrooms and schools in recent years and lay out exactly how and why they play into the overall goals of queer marxism. They cover everything from the de-gendered of language to curriculum choices, decorations, bulletin boards, Drag Queen Story Hours, using children’s curiosity as a weapon by implementing standpoint epistemology as normal, and everything in between—especially problematizing.
From this section:
The only thing children learn how to read in DQSH is oppression. The program is designed to make children think gender and sex are social constructs that must be mocked and broken. DQSH is a grooming program for Queer Theory. I don’t mean “grooming” as sexual grooming, although there have been many cases of drag queens leading DQSH events who were later found to be prostitutes and pedophiles.
and
In reality, pride flags in classrooms serve as a warning sign, telling all children that the school outside the classroom especially, and even the classroom itself, isn’t safe without Queer Activism. The message is only places hanging the pride flag have a chance of being safe. Everywhere else, including the rest of the school, community, and home, is dragged into question. If these spaces were safe, there wouldn’t be a need to hang a pride flag in the classroom as a symbol of potential safety.
and
The point of problematizing something is to identify a person or group needing saving. Once those people have been identified, the goal is to categorize them as victims. If there are victims, there are wrongdoers and perpetrators.
Queer Theory in Other Areas
The book also contains a solid introduction to queer theory’s influence in other areas, like Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, the field of psychology, and the very concept of parental rights (especially with regard to consent for medical procedures of the life-altering and “gender affirming” variety). In the interest of brevity I’ll just note that they do a good job of clearly explaining why these things matter and why we should care.
Having minored in psychology and thus been very recently exposed to what the queering of psychology looks like in a college classroom, I can tell you that they absolutely nailed it.
Why Aren’t You Homeschooling?
If “I can’t teach my kid math” is the reason, don’t let that stop you. There are myriad curriculum choices available, and I will help you figure it out. Email me at hollymathnerd at gmail dot com and I’ll help you make sure that you do right by your kids in the math department. I do this for free, though if you’d like to become a paid subscriber to this Substack I wouldn’t say no.
How to Get the Book
The Queering of the American Child will be released on February 29. Amazon is still only listing Kindle versions, but is supposed to list hard copies soon, and the other retailers (linked on their website for the book) have hard copies for sale.
Comments are normally open for paid subscribers, but they’re closed this time because I’m sick. Do email me if you need to take me up on my offer to consult with you on your mathematics curriculum for homeschooling, though—it won’t be quickly, but I will get back to you!
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About My Substack: I’m a data scientist who would rather be a math teacher but, being unwilling to brainwash kids into Woke nonsense, am presently unqualified to teach in the US. So I bring my “math is fun and anyone can learn it” approach to mathematics here to Substack in my series, “How to Not Suck at Math,” (first five entries not paywalled, links at the top of part 5, here). Paid subscribers also have access to a creative writing series in which I post a variety of things, including fiction, descriptions, and other “writing experiments,” along with personal stories that don’t relate to Larger Points I Want To Make About The World.
My other posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews, including of the Wokest novel I’ve ever read and a memoir by Rob Henderson. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.