Congressional hearings have not checked Pentagon “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies that include helping soldiers’ kids get life-altering transgender surgeries and hormones without their parents’ knowledge, finds a report out Thursday. The report from OpenTheBooks, a government spending watchdog, also finds the military told Congress and the public it was ending DEI efforts while actually embedding them deeper into U.S. military agencies and establishing a new “DEI Steering Committee.”
The report comes as Congress works on reauthorizing billions in Pentagon spending through the National Defense Authorization Act. Last year’s NDAA continued requiring taxpayers to fund transgender treatments for soldiers and their children. Twenty House Republicans joined all Democrats in defeating a measure to defund drag shows on U.S. military property, despite evidence many are marketed to children.
Records show thousands of U.S. military members’ children have already used taxpayer-provided health insurance to obtain transgender interventions that multiple European countries have recently restricted from children after medical review. Transgender interventions can leave children disabled for life with heart, liver, bone, mental, and more serious, debilitating, and expensive side effects.
Online U.S. military medical records hide from soldiers detailed medical information about their children ages 13 to 17. Military medical providers on bases and in DOD K-12 schools offer soldiers’ kids access to transgender interventions without their parents’ knowledge.
Teacher training offered in 2021 via the Pentagon’s Education Activity agency, or DODEA, explained how to help soldiers’ kids access life-altering transgender interventions on the public dime without their parents’ knowledge, the OpenTheBooks report notes. The training also recommended introducing queer ideology to soldiers’ children “as young as 4 years old.”
“These children are subject to frequent moves and unique family stressors, making them particularly vulnerable to the emotionally manipulative pedagogical methods described in the report,” write the report authors, Adam Andrzejewski and Thomas Smith.
Ducking Elected Civilian Oversight
The report also highlights that the DODEA has been extremely secretive about its use of public institutions and billions in tax dollars to push queer practices on soldiers’ children. DODEA routinely stonewalls members of Congress and citizens seeking information, such as salaries, curricular materials, and job titles, that is legally public and therefore divulged by every other school district in America, the report says.
DODEA also has been “deleting public access to links” to curricular and other publicly funded materials after transparency prompted public outcry, found an earlier investigation. OpenTheBooks has been able to find, it said, that “Millions of dollars have been found to go to purveyors of DEI-related content used in the classroom.”
Even when pretending to respond to transparency requests, DODEA has blacked out even the names of what public officials serve on the agency’s new “DEI Steering Committee.” Here, for example, is one of multiple documents DODEA divulged in response to an OpenTheBooks records request. Nearly all information is blotted out, making the disclosure functionally useless and therefore out of compliance with the intent of federal open-records law.
DODEA oversees 160 schools, in the United States and abroad, for more than 69,000 children of U.S. military members. Drawing on open-records requests, whistleblowers, and other reports, this OpenTheBooks report covers fiscal years 2017 to 2023, “with a specific focus on policy at the agency from 2020.” DODEA’s fiscal year 2023 budget was $2.26 billion.
The U.S. military has a long history of disobeying law and policy from Congress and the commander-in-chief on behalf of sexual politics, as I detail in chapter five of my new book, False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America. For years, both homosexual and transgender soldiers “served in direct contradiction” to bans “on their military eligibility, with the knowledge and support of their commanding officers.” This occurred under Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.
“It’s pretty insurrectionary that hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers with publicly acknowledged gender dysphoria continued to work in the military while legally ineligible to do so — at a time it was against official military policy to employ transgender soldiers,” I write. “That means that dozens, if not hundreds, of military officers also knowingly defied military policy — and therefore their oaths to obey their commanders, especially their commander in chief, as prescribed in the Constitution.”
The Biden administration has proceeded to promote many of these policy-defying officers on the basis of their support for race and sex politics. Indeed, Biden Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin falsely declared to Congress last year that the U.S. military does not sponsor drag performances. And Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., says the U.S. military lied to him about funding a Navy seaman wearing drag in military promotional videos on social media.
In line with this long line of military defiance against law and command to promote cultural Marxism, it appears DODEA continues to use its massive taxpayer resources to push sexual extremism and racial enmity on soldiers’ children while often claiming the opposite.
Military Pushing Queer on Kids
The OpenTheBooks report includes images of a textbook, Goodheart-Willcox’s Comprehensive Health Skills for Middle School, that “is used across DoDEA for health education.” The images show the textbook quizzing children on the definition of homosexuality and asking them to explain a lie: “Why are the characteristics associated with each gender constantly changing?”
Secrecy seems to be a constant theme within the military’s sexual education of children. The report notes previous investigations showing DODEA staff and teachers recommending the Schoology app “to facilitate secret chatrooms around sexuality and gender topics, outside of the eyes of parents.”
The sentiment was echoed in a presentation given to DODEA teachers in 2021 in which a middle school teacher said, according to the report, that she uses LGBT books to introduce children to queer sex topics: “using diverse and inclusive books in your classroom and school libraries; this is a huge one for me as a as a [sic] language arts teacher. … I wish I was at school now because I have a massive classroom library and I have a ton of books that have main characters who are everywhere on the [gender and sexuality] spectrum and off the spectrum.”
In a chat at that conference, DODEA employee Mari Jones claimed treating heterosexuality as normal causes conflict. As I also explain in False Flag, queer ideologues’ publicly stated goal of “ending heteronormativity” requires recruiting children into queer sexuality. That’s because if something is the norm, it is the majority practice. Ending heterosexuality as the majority practice requires recruiting children into non-heterosexual practices.
Jones appears to be still employed by DODEA, according to a U.S. military staff directory listing her with a .gov email address as part of Pacific Region ISS Support.
“The men and women serving the United States abroad often have no choice but to send their children to DoDEA schools — unlike counterparts at the Department of State stationed on the same bases, soldiers do not get stipends for homeschooling or to send their kids to local private schools,” the report notes. “DoDEA has proven to be an untrustworthy steward of these children’s minds, and agency leadership has gone out of their way to hide practices administrators must know the public and military families find objectionable.”
