NCERT ‘gender variety’ handbook taken down from web site after public outrage: Details

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) appears to have taken down the handbook titled ‘Inclusion of Transgender Children in School Education: Concerns and Roadmap’ that was revealed by the Department of Gender Studies at NCERT.
The handbook had claimed to be aiming at “sensitization of teachers and teacher educators regarding aspects of gender diversity keeping gender-nonconforming and transgender children at centre stage.”
The handbook is inaccessible to the general public on the NCERT web site. Source: NCERT Website
The 115-page handbook was ready by Dr Poonam Agrawal, Professor and former Head of, Department of Gender Studies, NCERT, and a number of other different educators. There have been a number of issues within the doc that have been identified by many. One of the facets that raised eyebrows was associated to the infrastructure. The doc had acknowledged that bathrooms are used to ‘brainwash children into believing that there are only two sexes, men and women’.
The doc learn, “The use of toilet, an infrastructural facility, is used to condition children into binary gender; female children are conditioned to use the toilets labelled ‘girls’ and male children are to use the toilet marked for ‘boys’.” It additionally blamed ‘Caste patriarchy’ for the stigma in opposition to the transgender group. The handbook had even claimed that there have been a number of genders within the Vedic age.
The doc additionally appeared to lend help for puberty blockers, remedy that has gained widespread notoriety in latest occasions. The medicines are used to dam the event of puberty in youngsters, which completely alters their pure course of improvement. It was seen as one other main crimson flag within the handbook.
After the outrage on social media, NCERT has eliminated the doc from public entry. The hyperlink to the handbook now reveals error 403, which suggests the server has denied entry to the doc. It is feasible that the doc nonetheless resides on NCERT servers, however the public can’t entry it.
The inclusion of Vikramaditya Sahai raised questions
Vikramaditya Sahai was one of many exterior workforce members of the workforce that ready the handbook. Sahai has an Instagram profile vqueer, which is filled with obscene content material. Even Twitter flags the screenshots of the now-locked Instagram account Sahai. Notably, Twitter is usually thought-about as a liberal social media platform that hardly censors something posted on it.
Warning: Adult content material
This is without doubt one of the “External Team Members” of the mission that produced the woke NCERT coaching handbook for academics pic.twitter.com/lwbwDKqCUK— Sensei Kraken Zero (@YearOfTheKraken) November 1, 2021
Sahai’s profile on Centre For Law & Policy reads, “They are interested in sex, feeling, and the structure and narrative in their relation with forms of sociality, law and politics.”