They Questioned Gender-Affirming Care. Then Their Kids Were Kicked Out of School. Paul and Beka Sinclair didn’t like that their kids’ pricey private school was teaching first graders about ‘deconstructing the gender binary.’ Leighton Woodhouse
https://www.commonsense.news/p/they-questioned-gender-affirming?utm_source=email.
On May 25, Paul and Rebeka Sinclair pulled their minivan over to the side of the road, just north of Lake Tahoe, and logged onto a Zoom with Katherine Dinh, the head of the Marin Country Day School.
“Today was the last day of school for your children, Charlotte and Carter,” Dinh informed the couple. The Sinclairs—she’s 37; he’s 51—had been driving home from a vacation to celebrate their anniversary. Dinh appeared to be reading a script. Two MCDS board members joined her on the call but stayed quiet. “Please do not contact any other school employees, particularly Charlotte and Carter’s teachers, as your reaching out to them will cause them further stress,” Dinh continued. “The two of you are not to be on campus again.”
It was the closing act of a year-long drama between the Sinclairs and MCDS, which charges $40,000 per student per year and had been teaching first and second graders about “deconstructing the gender binary”—the idea that there’s no such thing as girls or boys, just a spectrum of relative girlness and boyness.
The Sinclairs weren’t the only parents who had protested the new gender-identity curriculum—most families in their daughter’s class were upset and had been talking about it among themselves. But the Sinclairs had been unwilling to stay quiet. As a result, administrators had suggested that they were homophobic and accused them of tarnishing MCDS’s reputation. (An MCDS attorney had accused the Sinclairs of “defamation” for accusing MCDS of “predatory ‘grooming’ of children.” The Sinclairs never made that accusation.) Friends had stopped replying to their texts. Teachers said they felt unsafe around them. When word got out about why Charlotte, 8, and Carter, 5, had been kicked out, the Sinclairs had to decide whether they could stay in the Bay Area.
“I had no problem being a pariah in Marin,” Beka said. “We were worried about raising our kids long term in an area that was embracing these destructive ideologies.”
Beka first glimpsed what was going on in the fall of 2020. Charlotte was in the first grade then, and the students were still in remote learning, and she saw the teacher read the kids Ibram X. Kendi’s “Antiracist Baby.” She didn’t like Kendi’s ideas, and she emailed Dinh and Stephanie Deitz, the head of the lower school, to let them know.
A few weeks later, one of Charlotte’s teachers asked the kids to introduce their stuffed animals with their pronouns. “The six-year-olds were like, ‘What’s a pronoun?’” Beka said.
A former MCDS teacher whose daughter attended the school said his little girl was similarly confused when MCDS “started introducing gender, and you can be whoever you want, and it’s fluid. She started taking that on.”
The former teacher, who declined to speak openly, said his daughter was hardly alone. A group of girls in her class started to think of themselves as gay, and then transgender. By the fourth grade, his daughter was “dating” other girls in her class. By sixth grade—last year—she had adopted male pronouns and a boy’s name, and had started wearing a breast binder.
“You could see the old going away,” the former teacher said. “It was intense. And it was just sobering to go to these meetings week after week after week, and just talk about the same thing over and over.”
Then, one day in 2021, when everyone was back on campus, Beka noticed that all the American flags had disappeared. She didn’t say anything to MCDS. It felt important, but it also felt a little weird to bring up.
The school, Paul said, seemed intent on teaching kids to feel bad about who they were—whether it was being white, or American, or a boy or a girl.
By early 2022—Charlotte was now in the second grade—MCDS parents started noticing more red flags, according to parents I spoke to and others connected to the school. One of the children wondered what they were supposed to call their stuffed animals, since they had never asked them whether they were boys or girls. Another couldn’t reconcile his interest in unicorns with his love of sports.
(Several parents I reached out to indicated that they wanted to talk but were scared. One father said he’d call me from a pay phone, if only there were pay phones.)
Parents started to hear about weird classroom exercises designed to force the seven- and eight-year-olds to decide how they identified: They were asked which gender they “felt like.” Or to pick the pronoun that seemed right to them. Or to say which toys seemed more like boy toys or girl toys.
There were three classes in the second grade, with each class comprising about 20 students. Out of that, there was a core group of more than a dozen parents who were the angriest. But no one would speak up. It didn’t matter that most of the parents were affluent. They feared school administrators. They fretted that MCDS would say bad things about their kids or deny admission to their kids’ younger siblings or not write recommendations for their kids if they tried to transfer to another school. “In these elite social circles, there’s so much social capital placed into getting into these elite schools,” Beka said.
Finally, this core group of parents turned to Rob Boutet, the vice president of the school’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee and a fellow parent. They were upset that nobody had told them what was going on, that they had to find out about it from their children.
On March 2, Boutet emailed Dinh, the head of the school. “The curriculum at MCDS,” Boutet wrote, “seems to be based on trendy political theory instead of pedagogy that has strong empirical support.”
Boutet added: “The majority of the families have and are witnessing their children experiencing high levels of stress, pain, sadness and asking questions that many parents are not ready or equipped to answer and all because of the Gender self identity activity.”
In an email to parents, Dinh explained that, as early as kindergarten, “some children do not identify within a gender binary.” MCDS, she said, sought to “affirm gender identity.”
In a subsequent email to Boutet, Dinh said that parents anonymously protesting the curriculum had left many MCDS faculty “with feelings of unsafety,” especially those, she said, who were LGBTQ+.
A month later, Boutet was kicked off the DEI Committee. (He declined to comment.)
Frustrated, the Sinclairs applied for Charlotte and Carter to attend Mark Day School, another private school in Marin County. They were accepted for the upcoming fall semester.
But Paul wasn’t content to leave it at that.
He didn’t think of himself as a political person, but he wanted other parents to know what was happening at MCDS. “I’m from Canada,” he told me. “I view myself as a centrist. I am by no means—well, let’s just say I’m not a Republican.” But he was upset. He didn’t want his kids hearing about all this stuff at such an early age, and no one had bothered to ask him or any other parents how they felt. The head of the school didn’t seem to care at all about parents’ concerns.
Without Beka’s knowledge, Paul sent several internal MCDS emails to Undercover Mother, an online group that exposes what it views as left-wing indoctrination in private schools. He hoped to cast a spotlight on the new thinking that had gripped the administration.
That was when everything ratcheted up super fast:
Undercover Mother began blasting out unsolicited mass emails to MCDS parents—attacking Dinh and the school’s board of trustees. The school surreptitiously launched an investigation. The investigation revealed that Paul had leaked the MCDS emails to Undercover Mother. (Administrators had made subtle changes to emails sent to different parents, and it was clear that the emails Undercover Mother was reprinting could only have come from him.)
Then, Dinh reached out to the Sinclairs to schedule the Zoom call so she could let them know their children would be barred from attending the last few weeks of school—and then the Sinclairs hired Republican powerbroker and super-lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, in San Francisco, to represent them. Two days later, Dhillon blasted off a letter accusing MCDS of the “baseless expulsion of innocent children in retaliation for parents expressing an opposing viewpoint.”
On June 3, Drew Davis, an attorney representing MCDS, sent Dhillon a letter that seemed to blame the Sinclairs not for simply leaking emails to Undercover Mother but actually concocting the whole anti-MCDS campaign.
“I had two friends meet me for a walk,” Beka said. “They were like, ‘I can’t believe everyone thinks you wrote those emails.’ At the time, end of school parties were happening, and everyone was talking about it.”
Beka felt compelled to set the record straight. On June 7, she and Paul emailed the whole MCDS community. They wanted everyone to know that they were just concerned parents, that they didn’t like what was happening, that they were angry that their kids were being spoon fed this stuff without parents knowing, but that they hadn’t written the Undercover Mother emails.
Then, on June 12, Joe Harvey, the head of the Mark Day School, emailed the Sinclairs. Harvey said he had read Beka’s email to the MCDS community. Quoting from Beka’s email, he said, “We are now understandably concerned about your questioning of the ‘science around human identity development’ and your assertion that there is a ‘political motive to deconstruct the gender binary.’” Harvey said that “reasonable people” could be “offended by your presence on campus.” He concluded that the school felt compelled to rescind Charlotte’s and Carter’s admission. They would not be getting their $11,700 deposit back.
Kelly Watson, an MCDS spokeswoman, declined to answer my questions. Nor would members of the MCDS board of trustees comment.
Another parent at MCDS lamented what had happened. “It takes a lot of courage to be a champion of our children’s well being when the main priority of those that we have entrusted with our children’s education is not our children,” the parent said. “The Sinclairs have been very brave to have exposed and called this out. We stand by them, admire their courage and are grateful that they put children first.”
A parent of students at another Marin school said: “We all experience this very progressive, liberal lifestyle that I love. But that open-mindedness is turning into homogeneity. We want our kids to be critical thinkers. We want diversity of thought. But if we’re teaching them there’s only one way, and that you’re at risk if you disagree—I think that’s the last thing we want to teach our kids.”
Neither Beka nor Paul was sure what came next. The private schools were obviously not an option. Public school might work, but their reputation had been “totally trashed,” Beka said.
In their June 7 email to the MCDS community, the Sinclairs voiced regret. “We are apologetic for how unsettling the undercovermothers emails were to our community,” they said.
But most of all, they were worried about their kids. “Holding my daughter crying her eyes out, telling her she couldn’t go to school to say goodbye to friends and teachers—I hated that,” Beka said. “She was begging me one day to go to the bus stop to say goodbye to the other kids. She didn’t understand—she couldn’t understand—that that just wasn’t possible. The last thing I wanted was someone saying something awful to her because they’d been told her mommy had the wrong opinion.”
The Sinclairs recently went into escrow on a home in Newport Beach. This fall, their kids will enroll in public school in Southern California. They hope public schools are still accountable to parents. If it turns out they’re not, they hope they won’t be shamed for voicing their opinion. They don’t want to move again.
Beka got angry when she thought about what had happened: “You can’t say obvious, uncontroversial things anymore. We’re asked to lie over and over, and because we all do it so much we seem to have forgotten that that’s what we’re doing, that we’re taking part in a charade.”
She was done with taking part in the charade. “Really, what I want is not to feel like I’m on an ideological island, like I’m crazy for having an opinion that other people don’t have, and for being punished for that. This is not how people outside elite culture were raised. But elite culture doesn’t care about open or liberal society. It cares about power, and it will throw everything else away before it gives that up. It will gaslight everyone else into submission.”
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