The WSJ Editorial Board put in a FOIA request to get training materials from various government agencies related to the Biden Administration’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program. The published editorial, “The U.S. Government’s Woke Training,” is presumably intended to demonstrate outrageousness of it all.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has a gender gingerbread person. NASA says beware of micro-inequities. And if U.S. Army servicewomen express “discomfort showering with a female who has male genitalia,” what’s the brass’s reply? Talk to your commanding officer, but toughen up.
These are details from hundreds of pages of diversity and inclusion training materials used by the federal government in 2021 and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Everyone in corporate life knows such training, lampooned in the second episode of the TV show “The Office.” Yet taxpayers might be curious how their money is being spent to instruct the federal workforce these days.
Here’s the DVA gingerbread person:
And the Army’s shower vignette:
These seem rather innocuous, to be honest. Presumably, neither of these constitutes the entirety of the training; they’re literally just one graphic.
The gingerbread person image itself strikes me as a silly way of teaching adults but the infographic otherwise really packs a lot of information into one slide. I suspect many, if not most, in the target audience don’t understand the differentiation between gender identity, gender expression, biological sex, and sexual orientation. Establishing that vocabulary is quite useful as a launching point for conversation on these issues.
The Army’s shower vignette is going to be more controversial because many are outraged and more are uncomfortable with the idea of subjecting young women to having to shower with biological males. Frankly, I’m not thrilled with it, either. But the message conveyed is decidedly not “Talk to your commanding officer, but toughen up.”
It is Defense Department policy, established by civilian leadership and reinforced by numerous federal court rulings, that servicemembers will be treated according to the gender identity they have officially registered with. That has implications for commanders, transgender soldiers, and cisgender soldiers (likely mostly women) who are uncomfortable with being housed with transgender soldiers whose body does not conform to their gender identity.
This training, therefore, serves multiple purposes. It tells servicemembers that the DOD policy in question is a reality. So is the fact that military life sometimes comes with a loss of privacy. As is often the case in the military—particularly for junior enlisted personnel—the thing to do is utilize the chain of command to address the concern. It turns out that commanders have the discretion to take reasonable measures to enhance privacy for all concerned. They can put up shower curtains, dividers, and the like. But, importantly, they can’t do so in a way that ostracizes transgender personnel.
Look, I get it if people think it’s just outrageous that people with penises who identify as women are being treated as women by the United States Army. But that’s the law of the land. Given that, it makes good sense to have training sessions to let junior personnel know what the policy is, what accommodations might be available, and the like.
There are other examples in the piece but they’re all of the same piece. The only one I find even somewhat problematic is this slide used by the National Science Foundation:
And, honestly, that’s only because there are a lot of rabbit holes down which this can lead depending on who’s running the training. In particular, I’m queasy of the White Fragility and Anti-Racism pop psychology and the way it leads to really unproductive sessions that backfire. Otherwise, this is much like the DHS training on sex/gender: it introduces some common vocabulary that would seem useful in having the necessary conversations around these issues.
The editorial concludes:
These examples are, well, non-inclusive. Many of the materials are dull recitations of anti-retaliation policies or polite reminders, for example, not to pet somebody’s service dog. But one lesson is that there is now a conveyor belt from academia to the diversity-industrial complex. The portmanteau “misogynoir” was coined in 2010 on a blog called Crunk Feminist Collective. Eleven years later it’s in a training for government workers.
This type of re-education was accelerated by President Biden’s 2021 executive order directing agencies to “increase the availability and use of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility training.” It’s a form of political indoctrination intended to impose woke values on the vast federal bureaucracy and U.S. military.
You’d think the agencies would be proud to post all of these materials online, where it doesn’t require a long wait and a records request to read them. But since they don’t, we thought readers might like to see their taxpayer dollars and government values at work.
Even aside from the ideological baiting here, this just demonstrates a misunderstanding of how this stuff works.
I’ve been in my current job with the Defense Department, for going on a decade and have worked in other jobs in and out of government going back almost 40 years now. My wife has a doctorate in education and has worked in various training development positions for the Defense Department for the past five years or so. I have seen a whole lot of government-mandated training over the years and a lot of it is just bad.
The reasons are manifold.
Mass training is typically aimed at the lowest common denominator. If millions of people have to take the training every year, the assumption that some of the people taking the training have zero background in the subject matter simply has to be assumed. Ditto that they have little formal education.
For local-level training, the people doing the training are often not subject matter experts. If some poor lieutenant or GS-12 is directed to come up with training on a complicated subject, they’ll likely get on the Google machine and see what they find. If it’s from some goofy blog, they may not know the difference.
Alas, sometimes the people who are supposed to be subject-matter experts aren’t. So they, too, might just Google up something and paste it into the PowerPoint slide deck. That’s especially true if they’re on a tight deadline and don’t have time to do proper research.
Having worked for the U.S. Government in some capacity off and on for going on 40 years now, I don’t think it’s particularly “woke.” But, because we’re paid by the taxpayer, we’re subject to all manner of laws passed by Congress and various executive orders and departmental policy directives. And, because we’re such a large and diverse workforce, this leads to all manner of annual and occasional training sessions.
Again, much of the training is bad. The amount of time I waste on annual online training that is either completely unrelated to my job or which anyone who’s not an idiot already knows is frustrating as hell. But I get why it’s mandated and why the bureaucratic Powers That Be require that it be constantly renewed. Most of it is really bad because the people who are experts in the subject matter don’t talk to the instructional designers and vice-versa.
