Safe space. Sounds like a nice idea, “a place or environment in which a person or category of people can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment or any other emotional or physical harm.” Of course schools don’t want children to be “harmed” or discriminated against on their watch. But in practice, in an attempt to live up to their promise of being a safe space, K12 schools have morphed into bastions of ideological conformity. The “safe space” is used to squash dissent, to compel speech and to sort and segregate individuals into groups based on their immutable traits. It attempts to put a shiny gloss of virtue on a concerted effort to replace the innocence of childhood with hyper-sexualization and gender ideology, all in the name of inclusion. As more and more state boards of education and school districts pass resolutions and draft policies that promise “safety,” “inclusion” and freedom from “harm,” it becomes increasingly clear that the entire concept of a safe space is a lie.
The reason we know it’s a lie is that countless students and staff feel very unsafe when forced to participate in lessons and activities designed to promote “safe spaces.” Elementary aged children, as well as older children, are coming home from school upset and uncomfortable after being compelled to engage in conversations about their gender identity and their “sex assigned at birth.” They do not understand why they are constantly being asked about their pronouns — a grammatical concept they have never been taught—and they are exasperated when teachers repeatedly badger them about the topic of gender. When a 3rd grade boy hears “just because you have a penis doesn’t mean you’re a boy” from his teacher, he doesn’t feel safe. Is it really a safe space when a 5th grade teacher announces to her entire class school that that she is “pansexual?”
Boys don’t feel safe when they are told that being male makes them an oppressor and girls don't feel safe when they are taught that being born female automatically makes them members of an oppressed class. Jewish students who are keenly aware of BLM’s support for Hamas and its characterization of Israel as an “apartheid state” don’t feel safe being forced to sit in classrooms and walk through hallways blanketed in BLM posters, banners and flags. Biracial students don’t feel safe when they are forced to sit through lessons about how half of their family can never be fully trusted because of their whiteness. Black students don’t feel safe when they are told over and over that they can’t get ahead, that America is no better for them today than it was during the time of slavery, and that a racial power differential exists even during the kickball games they play with their best friends at recess. Asian students don't feel safe when they are erased completely from conversations about disparities in student achievement, labelled white-adjacent or told to “check their privilege” when they express frustration over their hard-earned academic achievement being ignored by admissions officers. White students, including kindergartners, don’t feel safe when they are told that “whiteness is a bad deal and always was.”
Race and gender essentialism is damaging students. The question is how did we get to a place where students are made to feel uncomfortable and shamed on purpose, where school officials brag in writing about their commitment to making students and staff experience discomfort? Certainly there will be times when students feel discomfort or sadness because they are learning about evil injustices like chattel slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese internment and the Holocaust — that is healthy and necessary and some children will internalize the injustice more than others, as they always have.
But it is not the role of a public school to deliberately inflict emotional distress in the name of social justice and setting out to deliberately make children feel discomfort, because of their immutable traits, is abuse.
Everyone deserves to be treated with kindness and respect and to attend school free from discrimination and harassment. But no one can be allowed to force children or employees to pass an ideological litmus test in order to be deemed sufficiently respectful or kind, especially not a government agency in an intellectually diverse country like ours. The real safe space is one where people are free to say what they think, ask questions, wrestle with ideas and change their minds. Or not. When will school boards and district officials stop sitting down in their safe spaces and instead stand up for that?
Former Portland State professor Peter Boghossian explains it well here in 40 seconds.
I was told by our Catholic high school that the teachers would not call my daughter by her given female name because they want her to feel safe at school. I asked "so by extension, my daughter must be unsafe in my home, that of her grandparents, uncles, aunts and all of the other adults in her lift?" The school replied well no. Well then I asked define the terms "safe" and "unsafe" - they declined. I asked whether the other students in my daughter's classroom who would be susceptible to the gender dysphoria social contagion were safe with the teachers confirming a delusion. Luckily my daughter came to her senses and returned to her female identity, BUT one teacher still refuses to use her female name - guess which one? Her religion teacher. She know rudely calls my daughter by her last name. There is no safe place for a child anymore.
I’m really curious. Who on earth does this whole business benefit? It makes white people feel like terrorists and people of color feel like they are too dumb to enter society. Seems to me that absolutely nobody would want this. Who does this belief system benefit and why?