'Gender Unicorn': University Students in Western Carolina Fume Over Mandatory 'Woke' Training

The so-called Gender Unicorn - a cartoon illustrating different sexual and gender identities - has emerged in Western educational initiatives over recent years. In Alberta, Canada, for example, it received criticism in 2017, and the Alberta Teachers Association removed it from handbooks when aspiring to create LGBT-friendly classrooms.

Resident Assistants (RAs) at Western Carolina University have been mandated to attend "woke" training in gender and racial sensitivity on how to avoid the usage of certain potentially offensive phrases and were offered the "Gender Unicorn" illustration to help with the said studies, Fox News has reported.

According to one of the slides obtained by the network, the training urges students not to use phrases like "When I look at you I don't see colour" or "America is a melting pot". The problem with the latter, for example, might occur when someone assumes that the phrase means one should "assimilate to the dominant culture".

Another class, said to be titled "Rainbow 101", offers students a "Gender Unicorn" illustration with charts for "gender identity", "gender expression", "sex assigned at birth", "physically attracted to", and "emotionally attracted to". It is also said that students have been asked to watch a video titled "Human sexuality is complicated".

In some school districts, starting with Charlotte-Mecklenburg in 2016, the Gender "Unicorn" shown below is shown to kindergartners so that they can "self-select" their gender identity and the gender they’re physically attracted to. Shouldn't parents be handling this? pic.twitter.com/MbANm1qN0v

— American Party® (@AmerPartyPublic) January 3, 2022

The trainings are mandatory for both new and existing RAs, causing outrage among many with whom the contents of the lessons do not sit well.

"The Rainbow 101 class goes against my beliefs but I have to be in that class or I could possibly be fired", one student told Fox News. "I'm not allowed to speak against that".

According to some students, the university appears to have been "hijacked by wokeness".

"It seems that the W in WCU now stands for woke", one of them lamented to Fox News.

Concerns about so-called "woke" tendencies have been on the rise recently, with many parents objecting to their children being "indoctrinated" when their schools tried to introduce subjects to the curriculum that included theories related to gender or race. In December 2021, parents and students in Virginia's Albemarle County reportedly sued the county school board and the district leadership after the school allegedly tried to "indoctrinate" children with critical race theory, which suggests that practically all social systems in the US are based on racism.

The "Gender Unicorn" illustration has made headlines over the years, and not only in the US. In 2017, according to CBC, the Alberta Teachers Association had to revise a resource guide for LGBTQ-friendly classrooms and ditch the cartoon from it after it sparked controversy and criticism.