Schools tread dangerously helping kids keep gender dysphoria secret from parents

This is among the trickiest questions policymakers must consider when weighing parental rights against the protection of children at school: Do parents have a right to know that their child has made a major gender-identity declaration to teachers and fellow students while deliberately keeping the parents uninformed? Parents in several states have discovered by accident that their child was going by a different name, different pronoun and different personality at school — and that teachers and administrators were helping the child keep it secret.

This situation threatens to become a new battleground in the Republican fight to intervene politically in schools unless teachers and administrators find smarter approaches to address gender-fluidity issues among students without automatically assuming parents don’t have a right to know. That said, non-supportive parents have been known to lash out harshly and order their kids to leave the home when they do find out, which helps explain the high levels of homelessness among trans youths. That’s partly why it’s such a tricky question.

The decision is hardly riskfree if teachers or administrators inform parents about a child’s gender-identity decisions. At the same time, keeping parents in the dark about such a momentous development seems to feed the agenda of conservatives like Missouri state Sen. Andrew Koenig, who is promoting parental-rights legislation. Schools must make smart choices instead of feeding further into conservatives’ efforts to meddle with book choices in libraries and to muzzle teachers trying to explain the historical context of racism.

Surveys show a sharp increase nationwide in young people declaring new gender identities, and it’s apparent that many are doing it more out of experimentation and youthful rebellion than genuine gender dysphoria. Though teachers should not let themselves be put in a position of nurturing or encouraging what they see happening among their students, it’s hard for them to avoid involvement when the student demands to be addressed by a different pronoun or completely different name. How are parents supposed to react if the teacher and student collude to keep such decisions secret?

In an exhaustive report Monday, The New York Times cited examples from around the country of teachers helping students hide their gender-identity decisions from their parents. One parent, Jessica Bradshaw of California, noticed a strange name at the top of her 15-year-old child’s homework assignment, which led to a shocking revelation: The daughter she had raised was now using the boy’s bathroom and using male pronouns at school.

The Times report is replete with examples of parents, including some who define themselves as liberal, angry because teachers have unilaterally decided to shut them out of major developments in their kids’ lives. Considering the growing current trend of conservative political intervention in the classroom, schools must be vigilant about actions that hand potent ammunition for politicians like Koenig to rally parents — including liberals — to their cause. Reprinted from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch