Gender Theory Remarks Cause Outcry in France

Controversy has broken out in France following Pope Francis’s comments on “gender theory” from October 2, 2016, in response to journalists on the airplane that was bringing him back to Rome following his 16th apostolic journey, to Georgia and Azerbaijan.

The Pope condemned the “ideological colonization” of “gender theory” when it becomes “a doctrine.” Faced with journalists, the sovereign pontiff told the story of a “French papa” who “asked his 10-year old son, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ ‘A girl,’ the boy answered. The father realized at this point that gender theory was taught in the school texts.” Pope Francis declared that “this is against nature!” For a person, it is one thing to have this tendency, this option, and even to change sexes; it is another to design the teaching in schools along these lines, to change mentalities. This is what I call ideological colonization.” As Jean-Marie Guénois points out in Le Figaro of October 2, 2016, Pope Francis had previously stated, “There is a world war on marriage and we must be careful not to allow these ideas to take root in ourselves.”

This was all it took for the French minister of National Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, to express regret the next day that the Pope had been “misinformed,” since there was no “gender theory” in school textbooks. She suggested on a France Inter broadcast that Francis was “a victim of the massive disinformation campaign run by integrists.”

The National Union of Primary School Teachers (SNUipp-FSU), through the medium of Francette Popineau, its spokeswoman and co-secretary general, also denied any teaching of “gender theory” in France. According to her, the curriculum content simply includes “an education in equality between boys and girls,” as part of “the fight against stereotypes and discriminations.”

According to Bérénice Levet in Le Figaro of October 4, “Gender advances wearing a mask: it is in the name of equality, of respect for differences, that the deconstruction of the masculine and the feminine takes place.” According to this academic, “the specialists of denial object to us that Gender is not taught in primary schools or in middle schools, since nowhere is the word present. Perhaps, but that is not the question; what is in fact transmitted is the fundamentals of Gender.” She calls it “a new Gospel,” announcing “the good news that sexual genders are only constructs that can be deconstructed.”

On October 4, on Reinformation.tv, Clementine Jallais also regretted that “the presence of gender theory in school textbooks has indeed become more marked over the years.” The new civic education programs “show this in particular. One has only to open a year 6 or year 7 book to see that the “traditional” models of masculinity and femininity are systematically reversed, for an organized ‘reeducation’: more than ever, gender is presented as an oppressive social construct which ought to be overthrown.”

Sources: kipa-apic.ch – Le Figaro – Reinformation.tv – DICI 342, October 14, 2016