During a student leadership and diversity club gathering, a Phoenix-area school district asked students questions about their sexuality, including how they knew they were straight.
According to emails released by the Arizona Daily Independent, the questions were part of a program used by the Unitown Club in the Scottsdale Unified School District to discuss sexual orientation with students.
The curriculum, created by the organization Anytown Learning, listed 16 discussion questions on sexual orientation. The questions included what students think caused their heterosexuality, how they decided they were heterosexual, why heterosexual relationships are unstable, and whether they had considered that heterosexuality was a phase.
The worksheet asks kids to question their heterosexuality by suggesting the following questions should be posed to minors by adults who are not their parents:
- What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
- If you’ve never slept with a person of the same sex, is it possible that all you need a good gay/lesbian lover?
- Is it possible that your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?
- To whom have you disclosed your heterosexual tendencies?
- Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality?
The questions appear to represent a bias towards expressing a negative nature of any heterosexual relationship, even implying with words like “phase” that it is not a normal sexual orientation.
The exercise also asks students: “Considering the menace of overpopulation, how could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual?”
The curriculum also notes that gender expression and gender identity are individual choices, and gender orientation is “an individual’s internal sense of their gender” that may not align with the person’s birth-assigned sex. It tells students that their gender is a social construct and is not directly tied to their external genitalia.
The program offers a “unicorn diagram” where students place themselves on the “gender spectrum.” Then they identify with other students by grouping themselves in different parts of the room.
Anytown Learning describes itself as “a human relations organization dedicated to educating, embracing, and empowering leaders to promote social change.”