At no time during this eight-hour conference did any of the two hundred participating teachers and administrators challenge the assumption that gender identity is a learned (“socially constructed”) characteristic. Nor did anyone mention the immense body of scientific literature from biologists and developmental psychologists showing that many male/female differences are natural, healthy, and, by implication, best left alone.3 On the contrary, everyone simply assumed that preschool children were malleable enough to adopt either gender identity to suit the
