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How I lost the fight against the sexualisation of my kids and was forced out of the state education system in order to keep my kids safe.

Firstly I wanted to say thanks to everyone who’s subscribed or reached out since I started this substack and wrote Part 1 of my story (see here). Our story ended with School Holidays last year. During the break, I was both thankful for the break meaning I wasn’t confronted with these issues as much, but also deeply troubled that I’d stumbled across them and that I wasn’t getting any traction with the school or the Education Department. As the school holidays progressed, I felt I needed to get prepared for what may come in Term 1 so I started reaching out to politicians, started this blog, and began doing more reading about the issues. I figured it was unlikely that Term 1 2023 would begin and the issues would have magically vanished. So I needed to be ready.

Well, day 1 of Term 1 began and nothing had changed. My local Primary School’s main entrance and office were still full of political and affirmative posters introducing my six-year-old daughter to concepts she has no business knowing about. I’ve attached some pictures I took on that day here:

There are probably a few things worth saying here as we reflect on the posters/flag.

1. In the first picture, the rainbow flag and posters next to it take up an entire noticeboard in the Main Entrance Foyer. This foyer and these noticeboards were once used for displaying kids’ artwork and learning. Now they have been sacrificed on the altar of inclusion. More space for adult politics, and less space for kids to shine. I find that sad for kids.
2. You can see in the third picture a poster about different types of families. In principle, I have no problem with kids learning there are different ways people live. However of course this is not what this poster is doing, and GayBy Baby who provide the sign and advertise with the sign do more than that. Likewise in the context of the whole, this poster says much more than it would if it were the only poster in the entire school.
3. In the fourth picture, you can see the Principal put up the sign I made in the school colours with the school logo stating that everyone was welcome. However, instead of using my sign to replace all the others, which was my intent, she left ALL the other LGBTI+ posters/flag in place and failed to add the word ‘faiths’ as one of the explicitly listed categories despite my repeated requests for this to occur if the other attributes were going to remain.
4. In the final picture, the man on that poster is the former Education Minister turned Tasmanian State Premier, Jeremy Rockliff. This poster had initially been only in the Principal’s office. But after I expressed my concerns he was moved to the very front of the school. It was as if I was being told to stand down and back off because I would lose as the Principal was backed all the way up to the Premier.

Well in fact as it turned out the Principal was right and I should’ve heeded the warning. The Liberal Party of Tasmania under the leadership of Jeremy Rockliff does indeed think that exposing my six-year-old daughter to all of this LGBTI+ political propaganda without regard to parental rights or concerns is a moral good. How do I know this? Well, I sent all these pictures to the Minister for Education Mr Roger Jaensch asking him if he thought it appropriate and he eventually replied:

… The Tasmanian Government is committed to an inclusive community and the Department of Education, Children and Young People (DECYP) provides a safe, supportive and inclusive learning environment for students, staff and families.

All schools are encouraged to foster a culture of openness and a celebration of diversity and the creation of this environment can be achieved through posters and information in public areas.

DECYP provides guidelines on Supporting Sexual and Gender Diversity in Schools and Colleges to its schools along with Inclusive Language Guidelines that are available on the DECYP website…

As my Principal had communicated by moving Jeremy Rockilffs face to the front of the school, I had not a leg to stand on because the Liberal Government backed her completely.

What should we make of the Minister’s response to my question regarding the suitability of the posters for a Primary School? Well, I think his response reveals the real agenda of what is happening not just in my school, but in the West more broadly.

“The Tasmanian Government is committed to an inclusive community…”

If this meant what it said then, of course, the school and the Government would be listening to my concerns, hearing them, and then working out how it could make everyone feel welcome be they LGBTI+, Christian, or just someone who thought maybe the posters and flag in a Primary School went a bit too far. But when we say inclusion in 2023 in Tasmania we don’t mean working out how to get along. Rather we mean the LGBTI+ INC. version of inclusive communities where you either submit to their agenda or you get happily excluded. For more of my thoughts on the double-speak of inclusive language and the LGBTI+ INC idea see my previous post here.

“… Provides a safe, supportive, and inclusive learning environment for students, staff, and families.”

If this were true, and not just political words on paper, then of course the school and the government would listen to my concerns because my daughter is a student and I am part of a family at that school. The irony of all the back and forth between the Principal and the Government is that my family did not feel safe attending the school. The dangers of our daughters being exposed to sexually inappropriate material were far too high for us, and the odds that our children would be vilified or targeted for being from a Christian home likewise were too high. How could we think any differently given the way our concerns had been responded to? In fact, my wife and I felt ill leaving our daughter in the care of people who refused to listen to our concerns and worries. There is no desire for the department to include you if you’re the wrong kind of person. No desire for its students to be safe if they’re from the wrong kind of family. And in fact, as they surrender to the trans-ideology of medicalizing and mutilating children, there is no care for the safety of any of the children in their care.

“… All schools are encouraged to foster a culture of openness and a celebration of diversity…”

Once again another lie. Never once in the two and a bit years we were members of the school community was I invited to talk about our faith, which seems quite a reasonable thing to think might’ve occurred given I’m both a parent and the local Anglican minister. In Kindergarten one of the teachers was a Christian and at Christmas, they talked about Jesus being born, but that’s about as far as we got when it came to our open school including our faith. Now, in normal circumstances that would be enough for me in a secular school. But if we’re going to be doing life together openly and diversely and if the school entrances and foyer are going to be plastered in posters of the LGBTI+ INC. movement, then in the spirit of true openness and diversity at a minimum EVERY Easter and Christmas an explanation of the Christian belief, not merely the perversion of those Christian festivals with Western consumerism (Bunnies and Santa), would be done.

If that’s too much to ask then at the very least a culture of openness would demand that when a parent says that flooding the school entrance and office with rainbow political statements, makes people of faith feel excluded unless the word faith is also explicitly stated, then you would act on that very reasonable request.

“… DECYP provides guidelines…”

I found this the most disingenuous part of the whole response because I had previously raised with the Minister that his guidelines for inclusive language do not include any guidance on how to include people of faith (a story for another post). The guidelines have at least a page and a half on LGBTI+ inclusion but nothing on faith/religion.

What to Make of All This?

The Liberal Government, its Departments, and School Principals are playing the game of inclusion when in fact they have no desire to include those people like me and my family, regular Christians who don’t want to force their views on anyone but who do want the right to exist and practice their beliefs while seeking to be good kind loving neighbours in the community. And it’s not just Christians who aren’t included in the new world order present in Tasmanian schools. It’s anyone who rejects the LGBTI+ INC push to sexualise kids and confuse them about biology and ultimately push them towards a path of medicalisation and mutilation as we’ve seen in the UK and the USA and are starting to hear about in parts of Australia too.

The Rest of the Story

As far as our story goes it’s almost too comical and too complex to recount just how the rest of Term 1 unfolded after the first day back. However, in summary, the Principal continued to dismiss my concerns regarding the sexualisation of children through the posters and again refused my request to have the word faith included explicitly on any posters.

Then, in an unexpected development, we had an incident with our daughter’s teacher which was ultimately the straw that broke the camel’s back. I raised an issue about our daughter getting bored in her class with her teacher. Following this, our daughter was told by her classroom teacher that she shouldn’t talk to her parents about being bored in class. She came home and told us this. I obviously found this outrageous and in light of the posters and the push to indoctrinate kids in the school, I found it deeply troubling that this teacher would think to start encouraging children to hide things from their parents in grade one. So I complained to the school principal about what had been said, however to this day she has never informed me if she took any action regarding this serious incident. How could this be?

Well before I answer that it’s probably worth noting that as all this was happening, we ended up having an interview in a local private school to assess our options and after finding in that school a normal approach to letting kids be kids and providing them with an education minus the LGBTI+ INC. indoctrination, we decided to finish our time in the state government school at the end of Term 1. The State School Principal somehow heard that we were leaving the school, prior to any official communication from us to the school about that, and so based on rumour, instead of reaching out to us, stopped communicating with us. That was her explanation as to why we’ve never heard from her about what steps she took to deal with our daughter’s teacher instructing her and her 27 classmates to keep secrets from their parents. We put in a formal complaint, but the Department’s complaint process is so slow and so inadequate that all that led to was getting another email from the Principal stating all the same things she had said previously. There’s apparently more complaining we can do but we’re a little exhausted by it all at the moment.

But on the upside of the many downsides, we are now in week 2 of Term 2 in the new private school and our whole family is much happier. Our daughter is thriving and loving her new school and her new friends. Strangely the school has grown by almost 10% in the last 2 weeks. I would argue simply further proof of the rot that is the State Education system under our horrible Liberal Government.

When the complexities of all that happened are boiled down I would say we were forced out of the school for three reasons.

1. As people of faith, we were not welcomed and our concerns were dismissed.
2. The posters are the first step in the State Government sponsored sexualisation of kids aimed at leading them down a path of gender dysphoria. It may be just a poster in grade one, but only a fool believes that’s all it is or that this is where it stops. But neither the government nor the leadership of the school agreed with us about this reality.
3. We felt unsafe because of issues 1 and 2, but also because of bad individual actors in the teaching/leadership class of the Education Department. The lack of professionalism by both teacher and principal made the situation untenable in the end.

Once again thanks for reading about our story. Thanks for your messages of support. Please subscribe so I can keep you up to date. A whole lot more has happened and many more doors have opened. There is much more to reflect on from our experience. Though we’ve removed our daughter from the state education system our fight to protect kids has just begun. Subscribing is just one way you can join in and I can keep you up to date with all that I’m learning as we go.

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Originally published at Chris’ Substack.