This school year, Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), one of the largest school districts in the country, instituted a curriculum whose selection for pre-K, “Pride Puppy,” encourages 3-year-olds to search for images of the “‘intersex [flag],’ a ‘[drag] king,’ ‘leather,’ ‘underwear,’ and a celebrated sex worker.”

Resource guides for children’s books on transgender people instruct the teacher to tell students that people only “guess” gender based on body parts. What’s more, religious parents with opposing beliefs about gender are no longer permitted to opt their child out of the elementary curriculum.

Now, there is a pending lawsuit by Muslim and Christian parents against MCPS. And at a recent Board of Education meeting, Muslim families testified about their concerns, only to be told by one council member, Kristin Mink, that (the entirely brown or Black) Muslim families were on the “same side” as “white supremacists.” She has since understandably expressed regret for saying such a thing.

Evidently preposterous on its face, Mink’s statement also got to the core of the conflict: a clash of victimhood and a stark inability to value the religious vulnerabilities at the core of the dispute. 

Mink went on to say, “[T]o allow Muslim families to opt their children out of those books … harm[s] the LGBTQIA+ community.” Meanwhile, Muslim students also shared stories of harm. For example, one student spoke of religious students “being bullied when they say this is against my religion.”

Each side feels deeply wronged, as if the other’s position inherently legitimizes harm to their children and to their community. Such competing victimhood is a common dynamic that functions across multiple chasms — between American Muslims and white conservative Christians and between gay rights activists and religious Americans who have traditional views about marriage and sexuality. In each scenario, the parties devolve into warring factions, incapable and unwilling to speak across vulnerabilities because of entrenched divides. 

The MCPS context is, however, importantly different. The protesting Muslim families have consistently acknowledged the importance of inclusivity and fellowship with students and families potentially marginalized due to sexual identity. As MCPS middle school student Saad Baig testified June 6, “I’m not here to take away the right of anyone being recognized in the community.” Similarly, community member Hamza Ewing emphasized that: “Our stance, as stated clearly, is not to remove LGBTQ material from the MCPS curriculum. … We are not spreading hatred … and, in fact, we firmly stand against hate speech or the degradation of any human being.” 

In contrast, there has been scant consideration of the deep relevance of religion — including religious beliefs about gender and sexuality — to the lives of Muslim, Christian and other religious families at MCPS. Religious parents seeking to opt their children out of the sex curriculum have been portrayed as “brainwashed” and “hateful.” One member of the Board of Education said religious families are seeking a “dehumanizing form of erasure.” The rhetoric consistently reflects a dismissive attitude, a sense that the harm to religious families is unimportant — or worse yet, not even real.  

The myopia is startling. Multiple aspects of the curriculum are deeply impactful to religious families with traditional views of not just gender and sexuality but also on the appropriate role of parents (and schoolteachers) in their children’s lives. Three-year-olds are being taught vocabulary such as “cis-gender” and “pansexual.” The fourth grade curriculum instructs the teacher to explore their students’ romantic attractions, including same-sex attractions. With a book about two girls finding love on a playground, the teacher is to invite students to “acknowledg[e] how uncomfortable we might [be]… when we feel our heart beating ‘thumpity thump’ & how hard it can be [to] talk about our feelings with someone that we don’t just ‘like’ but we ‘like like.’”  

Fifth graders are to read a book about a young girl who believes she’s transgender and is encouraged on this path by parents who don’t ask questions and instead embrace a “child-knows-best approach,” which is complemented by a “school-knows-best-approach.” The curriculum prioritizes the teachers’ role in these intimate aspects of young children’s lives and deprioritizes parents. In fact, if parents are not fully affirming of children’s self-diagnosis, this curriculum directly makes them the objects of opposition. 

The tension inherent in religious dissent to this sexual curriculum is not a black-and-white issue. The approach to it as such makes it even more difficult to find workable solutions. And to even begin to understand the nuances, the other side must be seen as worthy of engagement.

It should never be acceptable to dismiss sincere religious concerns as akin to “white supremacism,” and to selectively focus on the harm to only one side of a dispute. Both sides stand to be harmed, and neither can nor should claim “harm” completely. To survive these ongoing political contests, we must have the capacity to listen to others’ stories on their terms, not on our own.  

Asma T. Uddin is an attorney and author of “The Politics of Vulnerability: How to Heal Muslim-Christian Relations in a Post-Christian America.”