In the war of parental rights over their children, a huge setback has occurred under our noses. According to Parents Defending Education, at least 1,040 U.S. school districts have adopted policies instructing or encouraging faculty and staff to keep students’ gender identities a secret from parents.
Majority of the school districts, 593 of them, are in California. The districts make up more than 18,000 schools and are responsible for about 11 million students. A new report notes that the issue is a “growing number of schools embracing transgender ideology and keeping parents in the dark.”
“At this point, parents need to assume they will be deceived by their school if their child makes a gender identity declaration to a teacher or counselor at school,” Meg Kilgannon senior fellow for education studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand.
Leaning on actual numbers and not just emotion or perceived bias, Kilgannon added: “It is important to support with evidence what many parents know by instinct or experience: Our educational system that is supposed to work with parents will often work around parents instead.”
The Daily Signal writes about one incident that is indictive of what is happening nationally:
A recent example of the controversy may be found in New Jersey, where a state judge last week blocked a trio of school districts from enforcing a policy requiring faculty and staff to inform parents of students’ gender identities at school, effectively forcing the school districts to keep parents in the dark.
The judge wrote that “if implemented, [the policies] will have a disparate impact on transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary youth.”
Those policies would require teachers, coaches, and other school staff to inform a student’s parents if that student used a bathroom that didn’t correspond to his or her biological sex, requested different pronouns be used in addressing him or her, or asked to play on a sports team that didn’t correspond to his or her biological sex.
The controversy over “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies” comes as debate continues on why an increasing number of children are identifying as transgender or nonbinary.
“[I]f we have the ability to do so, we must engage with people and systems that view this parental deception as good for children,” Kilgannon said of the role of parental rights groups. “Obviously, something is very wrong if some people can believe the answer is government first, parents second or never.”