Men dressed as women are being brought into UK nursery schools as ‘queer role models’ for two and three-year-olds to stop them committing “hate crimes” later in life.

Drag Queen Story Time (DQST) holds sessions at taxpayer-funded schools, community centres, and libraries at which children learn songs about “transgender” teddy bears, as cross-dressers teach about homophobia, misogyny, and racism, and read books which promote ‘queer’ and LGBT lifestyles.

The project — which nursery bosses say will help children “see people who defy rigid gender restrictions” — is to hold sessions at seven nurseries run by the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF) over the winter, which if successful will be rolled out across all the foundation’s 37 sites, the Mail on Sunday reports.

Founder Tom Canham explained that DQST targets two and three-year-olds in order to prevent “hatred” later in life, claiming infants have yet to develop prejudice at that age.

“Racism, homophobia, misogyny and the like are all learnt behaviours – we aren’t born with any form of hatred, you get taught it over time,” argued the Bristol University Law graduate, who was inspired by U.S. project Drag Queen Story Hour.

According to its website, DQST seeks to “capture the imagination and fun of the gender fluidity of childhood while giving children a glamorous, positive unabashedly queer role model”.

LEYF chief executive June O’Sullivan told the Mail: “By providing spaces in which children are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions, it allows them to imagine the world in which people can present [themselves] as they wish.”

It was so lovely to see so many of you lovely people at Zion yesterday! We hope you enjoyed yourself and look forward to seeing you again! pic.twitter.com/o1eX9rkWUj — Drag Queen Story Time, UK (@dqst_uk) October 18, 2017

Speaking to BBC London Radio, the nurseries boss said exposing infants to men dressed as women is beneficial for society “because children are very open until about three”.

“At three they begin to absorb all the ‘isms’ that adults have developed very effectively,” she argued.

But critics have warned that the rush to inundate young children with information on “transgender” issues could have negative long-term consequences, with leading child psychotherapist Dilys Daws — co-author of Finding Your Way With Your Baby — saying she fears the sessions could sow the seeds of confusion.

“There’s this idea that’s sweeping the country that being transgender is an ‘ordinary situation’. It’s getting so much publicity that it’s getting children thinking that they might be transgender, when it otherwise wouldn’t have occurred to them,” she told the Mail.

Sex ed for toddlers https://t.co/Xx9GnnOAho — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 18, 2017

In The Times, veteran journalist Janice Turner said children in Britain are being “sacrificed” to appease the transgender lobby, pointing to the huge rise in children attending clinics for “gender identity issues”.

“If there was a 1,000 per cent rise in six years in any other field,” she cites a doctor as saying, “there would be a major inquiry. Instead no one asks why.”

Turner also blasted Scottish plans to let children change the gender on their birth certificate, which were reported by Breitbart London on Friday, and the government’s guidance for schools which she points out was “drawn up solely by activist groups such as Mermaids”.

“The Scottish guidance allows no one to dispute a child’s view, maybe acquired on Reddit and Tumblr, that he or she is in ‘the wrong body’. Or to suggest that a child may simply be gay,” she wrote.

“The apparatus of medical transition, a hormone regime causing sterility, plus surgical removal of healthy tissue, is seen as wholly positive,” said Turner, slamming “deluded” politicians for buying into the idea that “the new measure of an enlightened society” is based on “how quickly we transition kids”, despite the potentially life-destroying consequences.