Teaching The Gender Spectrum–Maybe A Transvestite Was Too Much For The Second Grade

Marcie Andrews was a teacher at Brookside Elementary, a public school in Langley, a wealthy suburb of Boston.  She had rather ordinary credentials, an acceptable degree from the University of Massachusetts, some student teaching, but no frontline experience.  She was hired because she was transgender, and the liberal schoolboard, after a long search for just the right candidate – not too obviously mannish, not swishingly gay or exaggeratedly feminine, demure within her new identity, respectful of others’ circumspection, and above all, good with children.  

She was to be the new second grade teacher now that Mrs. Crandall, an old-school, hardline, disciplinarian had been encouraged to retire.  Brookside was anxious to take its place among the Boston area’s most progressive schools and wanted no taint of the socially unevolved past.

The parents in the Brookside school district were not involved in the decision to hire Ms. Andrews, not because of her particular sexual orientation but because the recruitment process had always been an internal matter up to the administration, the union, and in certain cases like this one, the school board.

Langley, the town where Brookside was located was solidly upper middle class professional, politically and socially liberal.   They were proud of their commitment to the progressive agenda of race, gender, and ethnicity, the determination to eliminate racism, and to replace old, shopworn, tired concepts of heterosexuality with the gender spectrum.  While there were few rainbow, Black Lives Matter, All People Are Welcome Here on front lawns, all considered too déclassé for this upscale neighborhood, adherence to the movement was unquestioned.

When it came to sexual orientation, most of the parents in Langley were quite traditional.  They had been brought up in two-parent families, daughters encouraged to be like Mommy, lots of frilly dresses, princess outfits, ballet slippers, slips, and frocks; and the boys to be like Daddy, no tears, manly, and strong.

There were no compromises to thje emerging new age of gender awareness – boys were told that it was OK to cry, to show their feelings, to be comforting and nurturing, and to give a helping hand in the kitchen; and girls were were told that going off to work was a fine way to live and that a woman’s work might start and end at home, but in between there was plenty of room for toughness. 

Many of the mothers in Langley were high-powered courtroom lawyers.  Brenda Finebaum was known to defense attorneys as the Rommel of Pond Street, a tribute to her unstoppable prosecutorial blitzkrieg not unlike those of the Desert Fox whose armored assaults on Allied positions were as feared as Hannibal’s attacks on the armies of Scipio. She left her two young daughters with the nanny, drove into town, and took up her cudgel as one of the most feared Assistant District Attorneys in Boston.

Her husband, Bob, was a stay-at-home dad who thanks to the nanny could work uninterruptedly on his investment counselling business, taking advantage of the pandemic to expand his virtual high-speed connections to the world markets and more than compensate for the drop in income he took when he left his Wall Street firm. He popped his head down into the nursery time and again to peek at his daughters, stirred the soup, and went back online.

He wasn’t as domestic as his neighbor who had given up a teaching position at BU to take care of his young family; but he counted himself as one of the New Age fathers with male instincts but female sensitivities.

The rest of the Langley community were at different points on the male-female behavioral spectrum, but there were no gay men or lesbians among them – at least as far as anyone knew, for in this confessional, identity-proud age everyone with a bit of sexual twist made in known in spades.

So, when Marcie Andrews walked into her second grade class on the first day of school, decked out in frilly feminine finery, high heels, blonde wig, and costume jewelry, and said in a deep, masculine voice, “Good morning, children”, the pupils knew there was something definitely wrong. 

For one thing they were used to their former teacher’s greeting, “Good morning boys and girls; but little did they know that Ms. Andrews had determined to expunge all cis-gender references from her classroom. ‘Boys’ and ‘girls’ were misnomers, discredited, antiquated forms of gender-specific nomenclature.  There were no such things as boys and girls, Marcie knew from her course in ‘Post-Gender Educational Norms’, but only the potential for any and all gender configurations.  The first step in revolutionary education would be get rid of the cultural corralling of children into irrelevant categories.

“I’m Ms. Andrews”, she barked.  The children, used to this vocal timber only on Thursday mornings when the garbage men came around and picked up the trash in the alley, were startled.  Who was this person standing by the blackboard. What was this person standing by the blackboard? She looked like a woman, walked like a woman, and had breasts like a woman, but there was something odd about her.  A shadow of something on her cheeks, a bit of a hairy something peeping out of her sleeves; or the way she sat down, kind of fumbly when she crossed her legs, up high like their daddies and not across their ankles like their mommies. 

All through arithmetic the children looked at her thick, muscled legs instead of adding and subtracting; and all through reading they marveled at her broad chest and shoulders.  Every time she growled an ‘8+7’ or a ‘10-4’ they snickered and made up their own sums and subtractions. 

‘Five!’ shouted a pretty girl with a green bow in the back of the class.  “No, it isn’t”, said Marcie, smiling, knowing that she had been outed before she had even begun.  She expected that teaching 8 yr old second graders about sexual diversity and gender choice would  be a walk in the park; and instead she was fretting about her makeup, her hemline, and her voice. Perhaps it would have been better to wait until the progesterone and estrogen bit and made him feel more feminine, but the school year was starting, and he did not want to wait another year.  He hated to admit it, but he was still a transvestite, a reset chorus girl at the Riverboat Queen New Orleans drag club, a trannie poseur, trying out a new outfit without giving it his all.

He kept thinking of himself as Bruce, no matter how much he was conditioning himself to respond only to Marcie, and no matter how he tried he could not imagine himself in full female Monty, without his junk and just a receptor.   The Brookside recruitment committee and the schoolboard never bothered to ask – or were too timid to ask – what he was, either a man dressed as a woman or a man transitioning to a woman – and for them it really didn’t matter because the issue was politics not genitalia.  They could check off the diversity box which listed M, F, or OG (Other Gendered) without checking below the belt and still get credit from their progressive supporters for advancing the cause of alternative sexuality.

“Now, children”, Bruce  said, looking out over the sorry lot of sexually pinned offspring of a bourgeois herd.  “Today we are going to talk about boys and girls.  All the boys in the class, raise your hands”.  The hands of all the boys shot up and waved.  “And the girls?”  The hands of each and every one of the girls went up.  “Now, which of you boys would like to be girls?”, Bruce asked.  No response.  “And how many of you girls would like to become boys?”.

“Boys are yukky”, came a voice from the back of the room.  “They have pee-pees which are gross worms”.

“Yeccchhhh, disgusting’, came the chorus of girls front row to back.

“Now, now, children”, said Bruce, a smile fixed on his face. “That’s not nice.  Not nice at all”.  He would have to take another tack; but each time he came about, jibed, or ran with the wind, he foundered.  Even at this young age, sexual identity had been so deeply conditioned (there was no such thing as hardwired XX or YY genetic destiny) that it would be hard to divert or distract or change.

“Let’s play a game”,  Bruce said.  “Instead of your boys and girls names, let’s give you neutral names, without gender signifiers”; but the names Varda, Omic, Lezid, and Bronis only caused trouble.  The boys thought they were Star Wars names and fought for the coolest ones, and the girls said that the names were just silly. 

Bruce gave that up and drew pictures of the gender spectrum, a big circular affair with high points spotted and illustrated.  Here was an illustration of ‘gay’, too men hugging each other.  “Gross” said the boys and the girls.  “Men who hug each other are funny”, said Belinda Marx. “Girls who hug each other like to smell each other's perfume”, said Bobby Mitchell, “and then they hug each other some more”.

“Ahhh”, thought Bruce, we’re making progress.  “I can build on ‘some more’, and build he did, telling a fanciful story of Jane and Janet who loved each other deeply and liked to touch each other.  “Gross”, shouted, Billy Baxter whose father wore white ducks and flannels at the crew races and was considered to be The Casanova of the Charles.

It didn’t take long for the parents to realize something was up at Brookside Elementary and in Ms. Andrews’s second grade.  Word got around that ‘there was something funny’ about the teacher and ‘she talked like a man’.  The Chairman of the PTA immediately called a meeting of parents to canvass their reactions and positions before addressing the issue with the school.  All decorum, temperance, tolerance, and progressive compassion and inclusivity went out the window.  The most ardently woke parents were apoplectic.  Theoretically, the gender spectrum might be a good idea, a rejection of social conservatism, Bible Belt Christian manhandling, and political archaism; but promoting sex changes to eight year old children was another thing altogether.

The finely-woven quilt of progressive harmony had been ripped and torn by Marcie Andrews and the educational, union claque which had hired her.  There was no way that the parents of Langley would permit such progressive idolatry and insensate promotion of a twisted sexual logic.  There, it was out in the open.  Langley was as conservative as any Trump red district in Mississippi, and proud of it.

Once Ms. Andrews was sent packing and the school board members replaced, the newly energized parents went after every other woke initiative and became as influential as Virginia or Florida parents in their fight against Critical Race Theory and the progressive denigration of the American commonwealth.

Langley Massachusetts became a bellwether of conservative emergence within deep blue states, and was at the avant-garde of militant opposition to the progressive juggernaut.  It took a man in woman’s clothing to turn the tide, but the tide had only been waiting to be turned.  How imbecilic and puerile was the progressive agenda once you saw it in practice and up close, Langley-ites now said.  

Brookside Elementary under parental pressure returned to The Three R’s, and the topic of gender transformation was never discussed again.