Preschool Teachers Determine Your Sexuality?

                Your preschool teacher determined your sexuality.

                So states a research paper published recently in the journal Sociology of Education (available at bookstores and newsstands everywhere!). The paper, “Reproducing (and Disrupting) Heteronormativity: Gendered Sexual Socialization in Preschool Classrooms,” is based on a University of Michigan doctoral student’s observations of nine different preschool classrooms over the course of 10 months. The student, Heidi Gansen, believes that preschool teachers are to blame for the reason most people identify as heterosexual.

                Gansen, whose research interests include gender, sexuality and childhood, states: “[H]eteronormativity permeates” these classrooms to the extent that the little tykes learn “that boys have gendered power over girls’ bodies.” This begs the question: “WTF?!” In picking up my own kids from preschool, I’ve personally seen more than one little girl hit or push boys around. But the constant refrain in these preschools/daycare centers is “respect others,” and “sharing is good,” etc. In all my visits to these “classrooms,” I’ve never once heard a teacher/caregiver say, “For God’s sake, Johnny, put down the Barbie Doll,” or “Heather, you know girls can’t grow up to be firemen!”

                Even if one (preposterously) purports to believe that our sexuality is determined mostly by our environment, does it seem logical that this would take place by the time we are three, four, or five years old?

                It is abundantly clear to anyone not in an institution…..of higher learning…..that the paper’s conclusion is an unprecedented load of preposterous twaddle, whose artifice is only equaled by its idiocy.

                Even setting the clinical, physiological, and psychological facts aside, Ms. Gansen’s belief that preschool teachers- whether magically or methodically- imbue our toddlers with the desire to be heterosexual is staggeringly bereft of logic. This can’t possibly be the case, as, in the past, very few kids went to preschool. The vast majority of moms stayed home. Kids worked on the farm, dad was the breadwinner, and so on and so forth.

                And almost everyone appeared to be “straight.”

                Only in recent decades has preschool been the norm…the very decades in which the number of gays appears to have increased, and in which homosexuality itself has gained wide acceptance.  

                                                      *********************************

                (Some information used in the formulation of this post was gleaned from an article on thecollegefix.com, which itself found the paper publicized on the New Real Peer Review Twitter account).