Judge Orders Doria to Return Recalled Textbooks Addressing Gender to Schools

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – A São Paulo court has determined that the State Governor of São Paulo has 48 hours to return the textbooks that were recalled on September 3rd, under the allegation that they promoted “incitement to the gender ideology”.

The decision is the result of a citizen’s class action filed by a group of professors from public universities in the state of São Paulo, on Tuesday, in which they called for the suspension of the collection of materials from schools and their return under full conditions of use.

In addition to granting a favorable preliminary injunction to professors, Judge Paula Fernanda de Souza Vasconcelos Navarro determined, in addition to the deadline for return, a fine in case of non-compliance of the order.

The lawsuit, authored by professors from UFABC, Unifesp, UFSCar, IFSP, USP and Unicamp, was based on the understanding that the governor was in violation of the Constitution, educational legislation, the Common National Basic Curriculum (BNCC) and the State of São Paulo curriculum itself, based only on an ideological view on the subject.

Doria claimed that the textbooks that would be used by students in the 8th grade of Elementary School contained “unacceptable errors” and that promoted “gender ideology,” alluding to texts that addressed the issue of sexuality and gender identity.

The Secretary of Education, in turn, claimed that the issue of gender identity would be at odds with the Common National Basic Curriculum, approved in 2017 by the Ministry of Education, and also with the New São Paulo Curriculum, approved in August 2019.

The documents, however, do not dismiss the issue of sexuality and state the need to recognize it in its entirety, based on arguments that evidence the biological, socio-cultural, affective and ethical dimensions, valuing and respecting the diversity of manifestations and expressions of human identity and understanding prejudice and discrimination as a social construct”.

For UFBAC professor Fernando Cássio, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, “it is unacceptable that a recently approved curriculum document that advocates the teaching of socio-cultural, affective and ethical aspects of sexuality be used to justify acts of censorship. There is no justification”, he contests.

Professor Salomão Ximenes, who also subscribes to the lawsuit, adds: “The authoritarianism of the act of censorship has violated basic operating rules of the educational system and the right to education. It is not up to the Governor to produce the curriculum based on his own ideology, this is a task that the law assigns to education professionals, following the curriculum guidelines approved by the competent bodies”.

The professors involved in the lawsuit were supported by the Human Rights Advocacy Collective (CADHu). Lawyer Eloísa Machado, a member of the collective, explains: “Censorship is prohibited by the Constitution. The Governor cannot interfere in educational material because he likes or dislikes its content”.