(Johnny Edwards, The Center Square) The Georgia police department that fired an officer for asking a biological male to stay out of a women’s restroom will begin putting all its officers through sensitivity training this month. The mandatory “LGBTQIA+” class will push several tenets of transgender ideology that remain in dispute, The Center Square has learned.
In training costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars in work hours, DeKalb County Police officers will be told that biological sex isn’t fixed, but rather “assigned at birth.” They’ll hear that sex is actually on a spectrum – a controversial concept espoused by left-wing gender activists.
And “gender pronouns matter,” says a PowerPoint being shown to officers. Some people should be referred to as “they/them.” Refusing to use that language is like saying, “I would rather hurt you repeatedly than change the way I speak about you.”
Officers will also be directed that if they encounter a transgender person, it’s a major no-no to ask their real name. They’ll be told male crime suspects should be given the option to have “female” checked when entering their information on an official police report.
That’s all within class materials for the DeKalb County Police Department’s new “LGBTQIA+ Awareness & Sensitivity Training,” which The Center Square obtained through a request filed under the Georgia Open Records Act.
One of the nation’s foremost opponents of extreme gender ideology, evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, reviewed the course materials and called them “shocking.”
Wright, a Manhattan Institute fellow and editor-in-chief of the Substack “Reality’s Last Stand,” said the training goes beyond teaching officers to be respectful and follow procedure. Wright said he recognized several hallmarks of trans activism, including quasi-religious metaphysical concepts that the training presses officers to buy into.
“I don’t think we should be indoctrinating our officers to really highly-politicized world views, especially if the individual officers don’t themselves ascribe to this view,” he said. “It’s a form of speech policing – compelled speech on behalf of the government or the specific police department.”
The new one-hour classes don’t start until later this month, so it’s unclear how instructors will present the material. Department leaders refused to grant interviews.
The department’s chief of staff told The Center Square by email that the course will be offered about eight times per month until all sworn personnel have taken it, which could take until December. The department numbered just under 600 officers at the end of last year, so based on officers’ average hourly pay plus benefits, putting them all through the class will cost taxpayers around $25,000 to $30,000.
DeKalb County joins dozens of police departments across the nation requiring some form of LGBTQ training. Among the major cities whose police departments already have it: Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., according to online records and media reports. In California, all police departments must train officers and 911 dispatchers on sexual orientation and gender identity minority groups, as mandated by state law since 2018.
Greg Miraglia, a veteran law enforcement officer who conducts police trainings on LGBTQ awareness in California, said concepts such as sex-assigned-at-birth and sex as a spectrum are commonly incorporated into curricula. The website for his nonprofit, Out To Protect, lists 88 law enforcement agencies that have participated in LGBT awareness training, spanning through Colorado, Texas, Maine, Alabama, Virginia, and the Carolinas, among others.
“What we tell officers in our training is, look, your religious values, your personal morals and beliefs are absolutely yours. And you are entitled to them and we respect them,” Miraglia said. “But you swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, which includes the 14th Amendment. And that requires, as a law enforcement officer, that you provide equal protection under the law.”
DeKalb County Police Chief Greg Padrick wouldn’t discuss any of this, declining to schedule an interview or make available the staffers who developed the class materials or will be teaching it. Instead, the department sent a written statement through spokeswoman Officer Elise Wells.
The sensitivity class “reflects our proactive approach to modern law enforcement training and our responsibility to ensure officers understand the communities they serve. Agencies across the country incorporate similar topics into professional development as part of best practices in policing,” the emailed statement says, in part.
Steve Gaynor, secretary and spokesman for the police union covering DeKalb, the Georgia Fraternal Order of Police, said after reviewing the PowerPoint, “I don’t see the training as being that bad.”
He said it could be something needed to protect the county government in case of any future lawsuits. “I think DeKalb is just going along with it to check the box,” Gaynor said.
The new training follows an incident in October where a DeKalb County reserve police officer faced a complaint – along with heat from the Atlanta media – for telling a transgender biological male to stay out of the women’s restroom at a public library.
The Center Square obtained the Internal Affairs investigation and reported last month that when the officer confronted the library patron, he was acting on a complaint from an upset mother who was in the restroom with two children at the time. The mom reportedly told a security guard, “How can we allow men to go into a women’s restroom?”
In DeKalb County though, transgender rights outweigh such questions. The Democrat-led metro Atlanta county passed an ordinance in 2023 forbidding discrimination based on “perceived gender-related identity.” The DeKalb library system allows patrons to use whichever bathroom “aligns with their gender identity.”
The department fired the officer, 28-year veteran Glen Weaver, 70, in December over the incident, also citing other policy violations such as not activating his bodycam or properly obtaining department permission to work at the library.
The training documents say nothing about to handle a complaint from a woman about a man in her restroom. The purpose is “to provide DeKalb County Police officers with the knowledge and skills to effectively interact with the LGBTQ+ community,” the PowerPoint says. There’s instruction on legal rights and protections, securing a crime scene, identifying hate crimes, and supporting victims.
Wright, the evolutionary biologist, said there’s also misinformation and pseudoscience.
What’s clear – the training makes assertions that are scientifically and politically under debate.
One red flag Wright noted: the course uses the “Genderbread Person” diagram, which has shown up in elementary schools throughout the U.S. and Canada. The diagram asserts that biological sex isn’t binary, but on a spectrum, just like sexual orientation and gender expression. DeKalb’s presentation also has a video featuring Katie Couric.
“This is a document that is designed for indoctrinating children,” Wright said. “It’s a little cartoon poster of a gingerbread person, and now we’re making police officers watch a 2½ minute video on this.”
Miraglia, of Out To Protect, said he uses the Genderbread Person in police training, too.
“It’s a good model to help people understand the differences in identity between sexual orientation, gender identity, sex assigned at birth, and gender expression,” he said.
On its assertion that biological sex is a spectrum, “I think you’ll find that there’s a lot of science around that,” Miraglia said. “Intersex people are born with variations of genitalia, though it’s rare. It’s 1½ to 2 percent, somewhere in there … If you want to get in the weeds with it, you can research what the American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association and American Medical Association have said.”
Wright says sex is binary. Not only is intersex a fraction of 1% of the human species, “it’s not like a new variation of a third sex. It’s some sort of genetic anomaly,” he said.
“What makes someone male or female is if they have the biological function to produce either small gametes, what we call sperm, or large gametes, which we call ovum,” Wright said.
The DeKalb County training materials follow a contrary line of thinking, setting up scenarios to put natal men into jail cells with women. There are detailed instructions for deciding which side of the jail, male or female, an inmate should go into.
“If a male has had a sex change to reflect female genitalia they will enter on the female side,” the training says. “If a female has had a sex change to reflect male genitalia they will enter on the male side.”
At one point, the presentation says when writing citations or police reports officers should use whatever name is listed on a person’s government ID. But then it goes on to say that suspects, victims and witnesses can be asked which gender, male or female, they would like to have recorded on official reports.
On another slide, on a list of words “NOT to use,” it says, “Never ask ‘what is your real name?'”
“When we’re talking about criminal data, it’s important to get correct data,” Wright said. “What if the criminal wasn’t apprehended but is on the loose, and you’re reporting that you’re searching for a woman who’s 6 feet tall? If it’s just a man, I think that matters and could endanger the community.”
Following the library incident, the county’s top elected official, CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson, called the matter a “teachable moment” in a statement to one TV station. Police spokesman Blaine Clark was quoted in another media report, saying the department would “continue expanding our training programs to ensure our officers are equipped to serve every individual with fairness, empathy, and professionalism.”
However, in its written statement to The Center Square, DeKalb PD said the new training isn’t related to any publicized incidents but is “part of the Department’s ongoing evaluation of training needs.”
The Georgia Peace Officer Standards & Training Council, which certifies officers and sets statewide standards, approved DeKalb County’s new class for official training credit months before the library incident, in April, according to an email from Executive Director Chris Harvey.
Harvey said he would only answer additional questions from The Center Square in writing. In response to a list of questions about the contents of DeKalb’s lesson plans, the executive director emailed a statement saying the council “is not empowered to render any verdict on specific practices” unless they violate state law or council rules.
“Any political or ideological views within a law enforcement agency are determined by its leadership and the locally elected officials who oversee that agency,” the statement said. “Review and approval of any local law enforcement training material by POST does not equal an endorsement of any ideological views included in said training, nor does it reflect the official views of any state government entity.”
DeKalb County Commissioner Ted Terry, who has advocated for the police department to expand its community inclusion strategy, said the goal of the class is better communication with diverse people who may be experiencing crime or crisis.
“I’m not sure if it’s pushing or forcing anyone to believe something,” Terry said. “I think the whole point of these trainings is for awareness, so that the officers are equipped to deal with all the types of individuals that they might encounter during the job.”
