Teacher Skye Tooley uses stuffed animals to teach kids lesson on being ‘gender-fluid’

A California teacher posted on social media about using a “gender-fluid” stuffed animal to teach children how to use the proper pronouns. 

TikTok user Skye Tooley is a teacher at Saturn Street Elementary, located in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The teacher identifies as “trans demiboy non-binary.”

A description of the teacher’s philosophy appears on the school’s website. “I diligently push to create a safe space and brave space for my students. We work on being uncomfortable, challenged, and communicating. We work to understand our identity, bias, and privilege,” Tooley said.

On TikTok, Tooley discusses a lesson in which the teacher explained the “gender binary” with children and how there are “many more genders out there in the universe” than just boy and girl. Tooley also discussed teaching children how to use pronouns with a stuffed animal. 

“This is a lama unicorn… I thought it was so cute to let my kids name the llama unicorn. It was a mistake. So this little llama is gender-fluid; we will be practicing pronouns with this little llama,” Tooley said.

Gender fluidity refers to change over time in a person’s gender expression or gender identity, or both

“[Children] are very much ready for these topics and are way more accepting than adults when it comes to discussing these topics and talk about gender, gender assumptions, pronouns, all the things. And it is child development appropriate and age appropriate,” the teacher said. 

Tooley provided another example of a stuffed animal that had they/them pronouns.

“I started talking [to students] about Norbert the Narwhal … who uses they/them pronouns, and we practice making mistakes with their pronouns as well as correcting them.” 

Tooley disclosed that Saturn Street Elementary has a “rainbow club” that the teacher was looking to implement for third-graders. 

“The rainbow club is effectively a GSA for elementary… One wonderful thing about the rainbow club is talking about different identities, talking about who we are, and talking about how to support the LGBTQ+ community. Students may not necessarily be out, but they are excited to learn and help others,” the educator said. 

Fox News Digital reached out to the principal for comment, asking whether parents’ permissions were solicited before students were invited into the club but did not immediately receive a response. 

The educator added that classroom discussions include hashing out how “dynamics of power leads … into the gender binary … I realized so many of my students were already looking at themselves and at their bodies and even at their gender negatively.”

“All of this to say that the gender binary is constantly harming us day to day. Only a few people gain power from it. Everyone else is trying to conform to the societal norms. This harm, as we’re already seeing, starts at a young age,” Tooley said. 

Tooley said the discussions were “developmentally appropriate, part of our curriculum” because “we know our gender at a young age, and we know our sexuality at a young age.”

The teacher went on to blast elementary school educators for not introducing gender ideology to children. 

Tooley said, “educators specifically on the elementary side will be like, ‘Well, I can’t teach LGBTQ+ because they’re just not ready for that.… Our kids … are queer. They’re questioning, they’re wondering. They want to see this. You should just be discussing it so that people know how to show respect and empathy.”