Those of us, including the National Legal Foundation, involved in litigation resisting the pushing of the new gender identity gospel in the schools have observed something quite telling: Those defending school policies of hiding from parents that the schools are helping their children exhibit as the opposite sex—whether requiring teachers and administrators to use “preferred” names and wrong-sex pronouns or allowing such children to use wrong-sex bathrooms and locker rooms—have no problem speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
Those pushing the transgender ideology apply no age limit. Teachers read stories to children beginning in kindergarten about their peers being “born in the wrong body,” about their living “happily ever after” when they realize that “only they know who they really are,” and about “accepting themselves” by switching genders. From this, we are meant to believe that children as young as four or five are fully capable of deciding what their “true” gender is, i.e., that they are little adults that should be given unobstructed “rights” to “transform” themselves. According to these advocates, early adolescents are fully competent to decide for themselves that they should begin taking cross-sex hormones that will have lifelong effects. Parents who disagree, these advocates argue, are damaging their child’s psyche, enhancing the chance that their child will commit suicide, and such parents are obviously unfit. Don’t even think about fostering a child if you will not agree to help your ward speedily along the transgender pathway, as you obviously don’t understand how children “work” and are a religious bigot.
The advocates’ tune changes when parents complain about being kept out of the know and when teachers complain about being forced to push this ideology. Yet, parents have a fundamental, constitutional right to make health and educational decisions for their minor children. And requiring teachers to use wrong-sex pronouns is a form of compelled speech that violates the Free Speech Clause. These constitutional rights can be overridden by the government if there is a “compelling state interest.” Those advocating in defense of the schools and foster care agencies then turn on a dime. Instead of talking about how mature these children are and how they are capable of making their own decisions, suddenly they portray the same children as immature, impressionable, thin-skinned, and on the verge of psychoses leading to suicide. A teacher using the child’s birth name and correct-sex pronouns, even once or twice, could cause devastating psychological damage, as could the parents disapproving of their child exhibiting as transgender at school.
Now, which is it? Are these troubled children mature enough to make their own decisions about what gender they wish to “appropriate” for the rest of their lives, no matter what their parents think, or are they so fragile that hearing someone call them their name from birth will do them incalculable emotional damage? If they are mature enough to make life-altering decisions, are they not, by definition, strong enough to hear people with a different viewpoint than theirs? Are they strong trees or fragile flowers?
They can’t be both.
