President Barack Obama’s new transgender plan for K-12 schools recommends parents be secretly excluded from any decisive role when their children experiment with sexual “gender identities” as male or female.
The exclusion of parents from their children’s life-and-death, prosperity-or-suicide, teenage development is explicitly approved by Obama’s Democratic Party aides in a nine-page, May 13 legal directive, dubbed a “Dear colleague” letter.
The Departments interpret Title IX [law] to require that when a student or the student’s parent or guardian, as appropriate, notifies the school administration that the student will assert a [unusual] gender identity that differs from previous representations or records, the school will begin treating the student consistent with the student’s gender identity.
The instructions are repeated on page 8 of the 25-page guidance document, issued May 13, which is intended to govern 55 million children at 100,000 schools.
Parents are often the first to initiate a conversation with the school when their child is transgender, particularly when younger children are involved. Parents may play less of a role in an older student’s transition. Some school policies recommend, with regard to an older student, that school staff consult with the student before reaching out to the student’s parents.
The radical big-government sexual rules are being pushed even though only about one in every 2,400 Americans have changed their name from one sex to another, according to a recent study of the 2010 census. Even pro-transgender advocates say that only one in 300 Americans are transgender.
The 25-page guidance document is titled Examples of Policies and Emerging Practices for Supporting Transgender Students.
It provides examples on page eight and nine where Democratic-run school districts urged teachers to keep parents in the dark while immature children and teenagers experiment with their lifetime sexual character by pretending in public to be part of the opposite sex.
The District of Columbia Public Schools issued guidance (“DCPS Guidance”) noting that “students may choose to have their parents participate in the transition process, but parental participation is not required.” … the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education issued guidance [says] … School personnel should speak with the student first before discussing a student’s gender nonconformity or transgender status with the student’s parent or guardian … Oregon’s Department of Education issued guidance stating … transgender students may not want their parents to know about their transgender identity. These situations should be addressed on a case-by-case basis and school districts should balance the goal of supporting the student with the requirement that parents be kept informed about their children.
On page 10 of the guidance document, Obama’s deputies provide more tips for hiding children’s life-changing sexual experiments from their parents.
California’s El Rancho Unified School District issued a regulation … [that] reminds school personnel to be “mindful of the confidentiality and privacy rights of [transgender] students when contacting parents/legal guardians so as not to reveal, imply, or refer to a student’s actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”
However, in most schools, all kids and parents quickly will learn of a child’s sexual problem because the policy urges school officials to force other students — under threat of punishment — to call the student by his or her name, even when the name is obviously inappropriate for the child’s sex.
The other students will also be forced to lie to themselves — even in science class – by using the incorrect pronouns, such as “she” for a male child. For example, the document cites D.C. school rules;
The DCPS Guidance provides examples of prohibited harassment that transgender students sometimes experience, including misusing an individual’s preferred name or pronouns on purpose, asking personal questions about a person’s body or gender transition, and disclosing private information.
Although parents — or any of the other kids in school — should have no say in their chid’s sexual development under Obama’s plan, athletic directors are allowed a role in deciding what sports they can play. For example, when a boy wants to play in the girl’s league in California, “the California Interscholastic Federation establishes a panel of professionals, including at least one person with training or expertise in gender identity health care or advocacy, to make eligibility decisions,” says the guidance document.
In general, Obama’s rules are intended to advance the far-left ideology of “gender identity,” which is far more ambitious than just providing a private bathroom to a few role-playing “transgender” children who have not undergone surgery.
Progressives argue that men and women, young boys and young girls, should be free to fluidly adopt, create, and discard multiple varieties of temporary “gender identities” as they please, with or without the support of their parents and communities. That gender-fluid society, they insist, would be better than the civic rules which Americans have gradually developed to maximize benefits from the two distinct sexes’ different average biological capabilities and preferences.
For example, a gender-fluid society would not expect men to be the main breadwinner in a family, nor expect women to play a larger role in childrearing, not even expect childrearing families to consist of one man and one woman. This “gender fluid” society would also let government officials manage conflicts between parents and shape the adult character and education of supposedly sex-less, gender-fluid children.
In contrast, conservatives say the current civic and sex-related rules help children work with their changing biological bodies to mature into mature adults, then into parents, and then to form strong families that have little need for government direction.
Obama’s document includes these definitions of the hoped-for gender-fluid society.
Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt internal sense of being male or female, regardless of their sex assigned at birth. (Washington State Guidelines)
Sex assigned at birth refers to the sex designation, usually “male” or “female,” assigned to a person when they are born. (NYSED Guidance)
Gender expression refers to the manner in which a person represents or expresses gender to others, often through behavior, clothing, hairstyles, activities, voice or mannerisms.
To help children transition to a gender-fluid society, Obama and his deputies oppose any test, rule, procedure, double-check, scientific evidence or mechanism for verifying a minor’s claim of transgender feelings or of other sexually irregular feelings about their own body. They also oppose objections from parents. On page seven of the guidance document, Obama’s aides say that
Schools generally rely on students’ (or in the case of younger students, their parents’ or guardians’) expression of their gender identity. Although schools sometimes request some form of confirmation, they generally accept the student’s asserted gender identity.
When parents are excuded, Obama’s edict suggests that government-funded “social workers” can act as substitute parents.
School counselors can help transgender students who may experience mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress … Schools will be in a better position to support transgender students if they communicate to all students that resources are available, and that they are competent to provide support and services to any student who has questions related to gender identity.
Chicago’s practices are a model for other counselors, the document suggests.
[Chicago officials] convene a student administrative support team to determine the appropriate supports for transgender students. The team consists of the school principal, the student, adults that the student trusts, and individuals the principal determines may have a legitimate interest in the safety and healthy development of the student.
However, schools officials are urged to sometimes reach out parents — but only to ensure school-wide compliance the new “gender identity” rules.
Developing a clear policy explaining how to support transgender students can help communicate the importance the school places on creating a safe, healthy, and nondiscriminatory school climate for all students. Schools can do this by providing educational programs aimed at staff, students, families, and other community members.
Public opinion has shifted rapidly on the issue as voters realize the threat posed by “gender identity” to sexual privacy in bathrooms and to civic rules about the two sexes. For example, Target stores have been hit by a damaging consumer boycott after they imposed a pro-transgender policy that opened single-sex changing rooms to both sexes.