More than 100 years ago, the Supreme Court recognized that the right to direct the care, education, and upbringing of one’s children is both fundamental and predates the Constitution itself. In 2000, it reiterated this premise, saying that the parental right was perhaps “the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests” ever recognized by the court.
In education, though, one would be hard pressed to find school districts that recall the preeminence of this right. Roughly 11.5 million students attend nearly 20,000 schools in 1,100 school districts across the country that have instituted policies hiding a minor’s gender identity from his or her parents.
Schools require parental permission for field trips, sports participation, and dispensing Tylenol. But somehow, in what has become the upside-down world of American education, they can hide critical mental health information from parents simply on a minor’s say-so. Catering to a minor’s subjective self-identification at the expense of parental guidance and involvement makes actions like Huntington Beach City Council’s “Parents’ Right to Know” ordinance even more necessary.
In a piece written by the Los Angeles Times called “Doesn’t Huntington Beach have something better to do than harass transgender kids?” the editors write that “teachers have enough to do. It is not their job to interject themselves into potentially sensitive family matters.”
Yet that is precisely what they have done. They have broken the bonds of trust between parent and child and relegated parents to uninformed bystanders in the development of their children’s very identities. Policies like this are—as some federal courts have noted—“as foreign to federal constitutional and statutory law as [they are] medically unwise.”
Whether in Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California or elsewhere, parents of minor children have a right to—and must—be involved in matters as fundamental as how their children self-identify. This is especially the case when data indicates that up to 62% of those children expressing a divergent gender identity have co-morbid mental health diagnosis that can often be missed in the rush to “affirm.”
The Supreme Court has long recognized the diminished capacity of children, having written that they “are more vulnerable … to negative influences and outside pressures,” and have “limited contro[l] over their own environment … because a child’s character is not as well formed as an adult’s, his traits are ‘less fixed.’” Children are vulnerable. And in our “trans-obsessed” age, they need their parents more than ever.
Huntington Beach should be commended for recognizing that.