It was early morning one day in 2017. The Lord’s Angel Longsuffering spoke to Satan. “Where have you been?”

Then Satan answered. “Well, I had just set about my daily round of going to and fro in the earth. Walking up and down on it. You know, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom I may devour? Standard stuff.

“But I made the mistake of starting at a department of Sociology. At the University of Michigan. Ask me why starting there was a mistake, radiant Longsuffering.”

“Oh, very well. Why was it a mistake, dark Satan?”

“Because they stole my job! They’re even sinking their fangs into children. They don’t need me any more! And after all I’ve done for them.”

It’s Science!

Perhaps the Father of Lies had in mind UM’s Heidi M. Gansen. She has written a peer-reviewed paper: “Reproducing (and Disrupting) Heteronormativity: Gendered Sexual Socialization in Preschool Classrooms” in Sociology of Education.

Gansen fears that normal children acting in a normal fashion in preschools “facilitates the construction of gender.” Instead of promoting more creative forms of what we once called “perversion.”

Allowing little girls to kiss little boys “may contribute to the larger rape culture.”

The scientist was perplexed by normal, sane behavior on the part of kids and their teachers. So she set out to discover sources of the “pervasiveness of heteronormativity.” Of “early socialization messages.” Because allowing little girls to kiss little boys “may contribute to the larger rape culture.”

In Gansen’s paper we learn what scientists, working as only elite, well-funded scientists can, have discovered:

Schools are heteronormative social contexts that often mirror the dominant beliefs and structures of society, including and especially the norms and behaviors associated with ‘acceptable’ sexuality. … As a result, schools are critical sites in which dominant beliefs about sexuality and gender are (re)produced and enforced.

Who knew?

This stuff is scary. Indeed, “Hidden curricula” exist. There are “covert lessons that often act as means of social control,” Gansen warns. “[W]e know very little about how teachers’ practices inform or disrupt heterosexualizing processes in schools.”

So Gansen sat and watched what happened in several preschool classrooms. Here’s what she discovered.

The Horrors of Pretending

In one class, “teachers often talked about two children, Carson and Lydia (both three years old), as if they were in a relationship.” Later, these two were observed playing house. We might be concerned that these two grow up to be adults and play the game for real.

Some anecdotes make for rough reading. “When a preschool teacher was about to get married, she talked to one child, Willow, about how the child too will wear a wedding dress when she gets married.”

The story does not turn out happily. Willow actually then wore a dress to school soon after. Worse, a teacher “complimented Willow on how beautiful she was and what a pretty bride she would make someday.”

Obviously, this teacher could have told Willow her other options. That she could some day pretend to be a man if she wanted. Or that she could dye her hair purple. Then seek out sexual relations with older women. Or that she could tattoo every inch of her skin that escapes piercing. And become a feminist sociologist.

Indeed, the options for Willow are so various. Her teachers could spend every working minute explaining to the child all the ways she doesn’t have to be normal or sane. Instead, they wasted their efforts encouraging her to be a little girl.

Normal Is Not Acceptable

If Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia taught us anything, it’s that you have to work hard to suppress normal behavior.

Gansen says her “findings demonstrate the importance of teachers actively working to disrupt heteronormativity, which is already ingrained in children by ages 3 to 5.” Disrupt heteronormativity. “Efforts to ‘correct’ heteronormative socialization cannot focus just on teachers,” of course. We have to go after parents, too.

Why? Because “even in preschools that utilized the most restrictive approaches to sexual socialization, children still engaged in some heteronormative practices with their peers (e.g., kissing and relationships), albeit less frequently and more covertly.” If Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia taught us anything, it’s that you have to work hard to suppress normal behavior.

Now, as the fanciful dialog at the beginning suggests, the problem is not one researcher at one institution. Gansen cites dozens of others, and they in turn cite hundreds, thousands more. Take for example Martin and Bobier who wrote the article “Preschool Sexuality Education?!” that “critically assesses formal sexuality education for preschoolers.”

This is wide-spread and spreading wider. When a culture’s “best minds” decide that it’s not normal to be normal, that culture cannot long survive.