Federally-funded teen-led sex ed program in Berkeley could be axed by Trump orders

A peer-to-peer sex education program at a public high school in California funded by taxpayers nationwide may be on the chopping block after President Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting federal funds from going toward what he called gender ideology “indoctrination” for K-12 students.

The federally funded AmeriCorps program at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, told students in the Sexual Health Information from Teens (SHIFT) program that sex does not equal gender and featured a gender unicorn to illustrate the difference between sex, gender and attraction.

Trump signed an executive order in January to “end the federal funding of gender ideology.”

“‘Gender ideology’ replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true,” the executive order reads.

“Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex,” the executive order continues.

As Chalkboard News has previously reported, the SHIFT program pays students to learn about sexual health topics and present that information to their younger peers in the high school’s freshman ethnic studies course.

One of the emails from AmeriCorps volunteer Kaye Bergamot to the director of the City of Berkeley’s Public Health Division Janice Chin obtained through a public records request shows that program reached about half of Berkeley High School, which serves around 3,200 students.

“We had a total of 14 students who facilitated 60 presentations (30 on STIs, 30 on birth control methods) for approximately 1,500 students,” Bergamot wrote to Chin last May.

For those students in the SHIFT program, the topics were more wide-ranging, Bergamot noted.

“Students covered topics beyond these in our weekly meetings and discussed anatomy, gender and sexuality, healthy relationships, menstruation, body image & sexuality, consent and presentation skills,” Bergamot wrote.

In one of the slides to students in the program, the SHIFT coordinators or health educators, as they sometimes call themselves, included information on gender that would likely disqualify it from federal funding under Trump’s executive order.

One slide contained a depiction of “The Gender Unicorn” which shows how gender identity, gender expression, sex assigned at birth, physical attraction and emotional attraction can all be any combination of male, female or other.

“Sex =/= gender,” the presentation on that slide reads.

Another slide given to students discussing intersex individuals said that “Just like [assigned female at birth] and [assigned male at birth] anatomy, intersex people can identify as any gender!”

The program is funded through the Bay Area Youth Agency Consortium (BAYAC) AmeriCorps, a local program of the federal agency. Participants are paid a monthly stipend. Students also are paid for their participation in the program.

Another Trump executive order requires federal agencies to investigate all federal funding that “directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” for either K-12 curricula, instruction and activities as well as K-12 teacher education, certification, training, licensing, employment or training, as Chalkboard previously reported.