A federal government agency tasked with promoting scientific progress and securing national defense is dumping nearly one million taxpayer dollars into an effort to make biology “inclusive” by denying that there are only two genders.
The National Science Foundation is granting three institutions the large sum of money based on the claim that “biology courses often inaccurately categorize sex and gender as binary.” The study, titled “Collaborative Research: A qualitative inquiry into sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming students,” hopes to make undergraduate biology classes more “inclusive” for transgender students, in part by denying the fact that sex is binary.
The effort to deny biological reality with taxpayer dollars comes amid a broader push from the Biden administration to leverage the federal bureaucracy to advance far-left beliefs, with large grants flowing towards efforts to embed extreme ideologies in America’s institutions. The National Science Foundation calls the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda a “high priority,” and boasts that it has multiple identity-based employee resource groups, including one for “LGBTQ+ and Allies.”
Three academic institutions, the University of Minnesota, Colorado State University, and Florida International University, have all received government funding to partake in the study, with a total of $905,694 taxpayer dollars slated to go towards the effort, according to government funding disclosures. The government funding was awarded by the National Science Foundation, a federal agency tasked with promoting scientific progress and securing national defense.
“The oversimplification of sex and gender into binary categories can make biology classrooms particularly challenging for TNG students,” the award abstract reads, referring to those who identify as transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming. The description goes on to claim “early data suggest that how sex and gender topics are represented in the biology curriculum impacts TNG students’ sense of belonging and interest in biology.”
The National Science Foundation did not directly answer a Daily Wire inquiry asking whether the federal agency believed that there are more than two genders, with a spokesperson instead doubling down on the federal agency’s financial support of the effort to deny the binary nature of sex.
“There is a strong theoretical foundation on which the research questions are based,” a foundation spokesperson told The Daily Wire, also boasting that its “merit review process is recognized as the ‘gold standard’ of scientific review.”
The spokesperson added that the effort to make biology more inclusive for those who identify as transgender was “identified as having intellectual merit and broader impacts because the proposers made a strong case to the peer reviewers.”
The study specifically intends to examine “how a more accurate curriculum about the diversity of sexes found across species, the role of the environment in sex determination, and the complex relationship between sex and gender can create a more inclusive environment for transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming (TNG) students in undergraduate biology courses.”
Three primary goals are also articulated for the government-backed study, which hopes to “explore how sex and gender are currently represented in the undergraduate biology content,” “describe the impact this content has on classroom climate and belonging for [transgender, non-binary, and gender non-confirming] students,” and finally “characterize the current efforts of biology instructors to create a more inclusive climate for [transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming] students.”
The government-backed effort also seeks to “support the design of interventions and curriculum inclusive of both TNG and intersex students” and will allegedly “help all biology students develop inclusive and scientifically accurate understandings of sex and gender.”
Data collected via interviews with students and professors will be analyzed using “[f]eminist phenomenology, qualitative content analysis, and document analysis.”
Carrie Hall, who works for the National Science Foundation’s Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM, was listed as the Program Manager for the effort. The individual universities did not respond to requests for comment on their ongoing studies.
The foundation’s funding of the study is far from the only time that the federal government has used taxpayer dollars to push radical gender ideology and the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), for example, allocated just under $700k in taxpayer funds to an organization by HHS for the purpose of developing transgender-inclusive sex education programs for children as young as 14 years old, The Daily Wire revealed.
While taxpayer funds have been repeatedly used to push extreme leftwing efforts on gender, the Biden administration was recently exposed for relying on just two pages of literature to support so-called “gender-affirming care.” Meanwhile, a growing number of studies have found that so-called “gender-affirming” medical interventions do not benefit patients.
Various agencies within the federal government have aggressively pushed ideological initiatives under President Biden, who signed multiple executive orders intending to use the federal government to advance leftwing beliefs on race and the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.
Former Trump administration officials, as well as former President Trump himself, have advocated for plans to gut the administrative state under the next administration, intending to reign in and fire unelected bureaucrats who may obstruct the president’s objectives.
