The Biden administration is offering a $500,000 grant to help teach the English language in Pakistan, in part by providing “intensive professional development courses for Pakistani transgender youth.”
According to the Notice of Funding Opportunity (pdf), the program will “increase participants’ English language proficiency, employability, and leadership and critical thinking skills, enabling them to become productive members of their community and society.”
The State Department says the grant is aimed at teaching English language skills to Pakistani youth so they can “better participate in the global community and prepare them for success in the workplace.”
To reach that goal, the grant gives focus to three components: 1) professional development for English language teachers from non-mainstream institutions; 2) professional development for novice Pakistani English language teachers; and 3) professional development for transgender youth and for Afghan teachers, students, and young professionals residing in Pakistan.
For the third component of the program, the award must be used to implement “(1) intensive professional development courses for Pakistani transgender youth from the ages of 13–25, and (2) and intensive professional development courses for Afghan teachers, students, and young professionals residing in Pakistan.”
The stated goal of the program is to strengthen “English capacity and professional capability of Pakistani transgender youth and of Afghan teachers, students, and young professionals residing in Pakistan.”
Participating teachers will “share what they learned in these trainings with English-language professional colleagues, thereby influencing pedagogy in their schools and communities.”
Applicants for the program are encouraged to address the question: “What is the most effective way to reach the greatest number of Pakistani transgender youth and Afghan teachers, students, and young professionals from diverse locations across Pakistan?”
The budget for the program has a $500,000 limit and a project duration of up to three years.
In 2018, Pakistan enacted the Transgender Persons Protection of Rights Act (pdf), which prohibits discrimination against transgender people in schools, workplaces, and public settings, and guarantees them the right to choose their gender on official documents.
However, at least one United States lawmaker has had enough of the efforts to normalize transgender ideology and to provide preferential treatment to transgender individuals.
In 2022, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) took umbrage with a move by the Department of Homeland Security to “implement policy changes that permit LESS invasive screening procedures for transgender passengers” by the Transportation Security Administration at America’s airports.
“This and other misguided policy changes were recently announced by DHS. We’re facing threats from every direction, and it is bewildering to see this agency seemingly focused more on gender ideology than its core mission,” Norman said in a statement at the time.
In an April 19 post on social media, Norman said, “I’ll say it: I’m fed up with transgender activism. It’s gone off the deep end.”
While he believes transgender individuals “deserve to be treated fairly,” he said “transgender activism is no longer about acceptance or even ‘pride’ in who they claim to be.”
Now he describes it as “an all-out assault on the senses” and “an attempt to desensitize Americans, in order to normalize something the majority of Americans view as abnormal.”
Norman is equally upset about the administration’s new move to fund a program in Pakistan that provides favoritism to transgender youth in another country.
Austin Livingston, spokesman and deputy chief of staff for Norman, provided a comment to The Epoch Times about Norman’s views on Biden’s funding opportunity.
“Just a cursory glance through this administration’s spending reveals dizzying amounts of taxpayer dollars being sent to all sorts of questionable programs, not the least of which is millions to Pakistan for ‘gender programs,'” Livingston said.
“We’re over $31 trillion dollars in debt, but this president seems hell-bent on spending money we don’t have on programs that are simply not the role or purpose of the federal government,” he said. “Congressman Norman has railed against that. It’s outrageous.”