A group that accredits North Carolina day-care centers encouraged early childhood educators to teach kids as young as four about transgenderism and the Black Lives Matter movement.
In October, the North Carolina Association for the Education of Young Children hosted a conference for child care professionals to complete the mandatory training hours needed to remain licensed in the state. Attendees were required to watch Reflecting on Anti-bias Education in Action: The Early Years, a documentary that follows teachers at two West Coast preschools as they drill their young pupils in a number of "woke" subjects.
In one scene, a teacher holds up a doll and tells a class of four- and five-year-old children that the doll is nonbinary "just like me" and corrects the class when the children refer to the doll as "he" instead of "they."
Later in the film, the young children make "Black Lives Matter" signs and march them around the preschool. The class also writes a statement supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, which one of the children reads to the camera.
"The Black Lives Matter movement is a group of people who want to make sure that people of all skin colors are treated fairly," the statement read. "Black lives matter because black people are not being treated fairly, and that's not nice."
This is the latest instance of an accrediting body pushing radical racial and gender ideologies on children. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which sets standards for pediatricians, has come under fire for endorsing sex-change operations for children as young as 10. Zero to Three, the top early childhood development group in the nation, has said signs of "transgender identity" can begin to emerge in children as young as two, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The documentary was filmed at Epiphany Early Learning Preschool and Southwest Early Learning Bilingual Preschool in Seattle, Wash., and Pacific Primary School in San Francisco, Calif. One of the film's producers, Debbie LeeKeenan, said during a virtual screening of the documentary that "there are no scripts or actors in the film" and that "these are real teachers in real classrooms."
One teacher, who identifies as a gay man, says that he wears a skirt to school and discusses it with the young children in his class.
"I tell the children that I want to wear the skirt, but I want to make sure that I feel safe wearing a skirt in the classroom," he says. "So I'm just a little bit afraid that someone might laugh or they might feel uncomfortable."
The children featured in the documentary are shown parroting their teachers. After one child responds to a question about a doll's gender by saying that "kids can be boys or girls," other students chime in to say that the doll could be "they" or "maybe nonbinary."
According to registration materials obtained by the Free Beacon, the conference was broken into four sessions. Attendees could choose among three different options for three of the four sessions. But the documentary screening was mandatory for all participants.
One veteran child care worker who attended the October conference told the Free Beacon that the film made her "angry to the point of tears."
"The conference was about being inclusive. Well, back in the day that would include, you know, being inclusive of children in wheelchairs, or speech issues," she said, adding that she felt "the innocence of childhood" was "being stolen" by the group's "adult agenda."
The teacher was so disturbed by the film that she wrote a letter to North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson (R.), a copy of which was provided to the Free Beacon.
"Indoctrination and exposure is not developmentally appropriate to a young child's brain development," she wrote in the letter, adding that she wasn't sure if parents were made aware of the content that was being taught to their children.
"As teachers, it is our responsibility to protect innocent young children, and this feels like child abuse to give such adult and societal ideas pushed as an agenda to very young children," the teacher wrote.
The North Carolina Association for the Education of Young Children and the National Association for the Education of Young Children did not respond to requests for comment.