The National Legal Foundation has joined a law suit against the Montgomery County, Maryland, school board because it has adopted a transgender policy that requires its personnel to hide from parents that their minor child is going “trans” at school if the student or school personnel believe that the parents may not be “supportive.” The policy requires school personnel to revert to “birth” names and pronouns when speaking to “unsupportive” parents and hiding an intake form prepared by school personnel for the student on which parents are rated for how “supportive” they are assumed to be.
This is not unique to Maryland. Similar policies have been adopted in many places, including Milwaukee. But such policies violate the fundamental principle, established in the common law, the U.S. Constitution, and multiple state and federal laws, that parents have the primary responsibility for the care, health, welfare, and education of their minor children. While parents consent to hand over some of their control of education when they send their children to public schools, that does not include agreeing to let schools hide from them that they are assisting their children in a transgender lifestyle.
Minor children with gender dysphoria need help. Montgomery County’s board apparently think they know how to do it. The board is aware of the staggering statistics that adolescents who go trans think about, attempt, and commit suicide at rates an order of magnitude greater than the normal student population. Thus, the unstated assumptions undergirding the board’s anti-parent policies are that (a) increased suicide among trans students is solely because of social stigma and (b) unsupportive parents may add to that social stigma and so must be circumvented. Even if schools circumventing parents were permitted by law, which it is not, the board ignores studies that show that the same rates of suicide ideation and consummation are experienced even in societies that are the most accepting of transgenderism. Even pro-transgender organizations urge that professional counseling be provided for children with gender dysphoria, but those schools that hide from parents that their minor children are exhibiting transgenderism at school prevent parents from providing such assistance to their children.
Parents whom public school personnel fear may not toe the “party line” about how “normal” transgenderism is do not thereby forfeit their rights to care for their children’s health and welfare. Science does not support the position of these schools, biology does not support it, and the law does not. While these schools obviously believe that they are helping the children who question their birth gender, they are taking over responsibilities for which they are ill-equipped and ill-trained and are increasing the risk to the children.
