Parents of Israeli school children have expressed outrage at a religious school over its “progressive coercion” after a second grade “transgender” student was permitted for years to present as a boy – Jewish skullcap included – without their knowledge.
In August, the Hebrew-language Besheva outlet reported a national-religious school in Givat Shmuel, a majority-religious, conservative suburb of Tel Aviv, had supported an eight-year-old female student in her “transition” and had allowed her to be addressed as a male and wear boys’ clothing on campus, including a yarmulke, or skullcap, and tzitit (ritual fringes worn by Jews), for more than three years.
The student’s real identity was kept a secret both from other students and their parents. Officials from both the Education Ministry and within the state-religious system were aware of the case, the report said.
Since the student’s identity was revealed, little has changed and the student in question is still studying there as a boy.
According to Israel National News, parents have been turned away from both municipal administrators and school administrators, who have instructed faculty to address the child as a boy.
Encouraged by high profile rabbis within the Religious-Zionist movement, parents formed an alternative class to “protect their children, who, parents say, have suffered psychological harm from the situation,” the report said. The Chief Rabbi of Tzfat in northern Israel, traveled some distance to the school to teach a class there and show his support.
The parents launched a fundraising campaign to raise money to pay educators for their breakaway class, under the banner, “Our children, our education — Stop the progressive coercion.”
“Media reports are portraying us as primitive and narrow-minded. That couldn’t be further from the truth,” an anonymous father told Israel National News.
“In our particular case, we’re ‘mildly religious’ and my wife wears pants. But we sent our son to a religious school because of the values we wanted him to absorb. The national-religious system has to have boundaries,” he said. Many, but not all, observant Jewish women forego pants and other garments also worn by men in deference to a Jewish law forbidding the women to dress like men and vice versa.
Another parent, named only as Sara, told the newspaper mainstream media reports portraying them as isolating the student were untrue: “We have nothing against the child concerned, and we feel very sorry for her.”
“We respect everyone, no matter who they are,” Sara continued. “But we, as religious parents, chose to send our children to a religious school that educates them toward certain values, and we have a legitimate right to choose what to expose our children to, and to shield them from concepts that are incompatible with our faith at this young age.”
Sara added that “we’re talking about a class of eight-year-olds. Of course they were totally shocked to find out the truth. These are little children not even old enough to cross the road by themselves. They’re not capable of digesting what’s going on here.”
She added some of the children are now dealing with a range of psychological issues since discovering the truth about their classmate, and one student is already taking psychiatric medication.
“The children have nightmares and one has started to wet his bed. The class was once a quiet, well-behaved class but now the students are acting out and even being violent at times,” she said.
“Children are asking all kinds of questions about this issue and they’re worried that there may be other cases that they don’t know about.”
The Education Ministry said the breakaway class violated educational guidelines and was harming the transgender student, to whom it referred to as a male.
Schools are “required to provide educational solutions for all students in an inclusive and equality-based manner,” the statement read.
“The Ministry is vehemently opposed to any isolation or calls for isolation, which primarily harms the student concerned.”
“The Ministry will not sanction the opening of a class which does not follow Ministry guidelines,” the statement continued.
“The issue is being dealt with professionally and with sensitivity by the head of the national-religious education system and the head of the local education authority. Due to privacy concerns, we cannot elaborate on this further.”