Keep grown-ups’ pronoun fights out of grade school classrooms

In the 1990 movie “Kindergarten Cop,” it is a five-year-old boy, not Arnold Schwarzenegger, who blurts out the actual biology lesson: “Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.”

Schwarzenegger’s character, an undercover detective drafted into substitute teaching, doesn’t linger on the matter or turn it into a discussion. Rather, he offers a dry, one-line brush-off and moves the class along. Even a Hollywood tough guy playing a novice teacher can tell that topic isn’t his to raise with a room of five-year-olds.

That instinct — an adult sensing the conversation was above the room’s maturity level and shutting it down rather than encouraging it — is exactly what a school board in Wake County, North Carolina, forgot this summer.

I have coached youth track, football, and rugby for years and raised three boys of my own. I know how a five-year-old processes the world — literally, and through whatever script the adult in the room hands him. That is not a knock on any teacher’s character. It is a fact about child development that North Carolina’s legislature has conveniently written into law.

The problem is the gap between the statute on the books and the practice in the classroom. Middle Creek Elementary in Apex hired a new music teacher, previously known by his male name, who now goes by Aria Derrick and asks students to use “she” and “Miss.” Parents learned of the arrangement not from a letter home but from photos at a PTA luncheon.

The class is mandatory. There is no opt-out. When parent Aaron Driver and the group Middle Creek Parental Rights raised the issue at board meetings this month, some board members defended the hire. At least one commenter told objecting families that homeschooling was the option if they wanted to “keep the bigots away.” State Rep. Erin Pare (R), who floated a sex-based dress code for staff after hearing from constituents, has reported receiving death........

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