As if Nevada parents didn’t already have their hands full, including helping their children navigate the waters of adolescent sexuality. Now gender activists increasingly are using the public schools to lead students down a path their parents may know nothing about.
And the Biden-Harris administration is making it worse.
Nevada is hardly alone. Nearly 20,000 public schools across the country, attended by 11.5 million students, now have policies that cater to kids’ current sense of “gender identity” but that deliberately keep parents in the dark about that same thing.
The Elko County School District’s gender policy, like many others, defines “gender identity” as “a student’s inner sense of being male or female.” That sense might be nothing more than a fleeting feeling, prompted by a suggestion on social media, or a clinically significant diagnosis of gender dysphoria requiring medical intervention.
These policies not only don’t distinguish between these radically different situations, they actually prohibit anything beyond taking a student’s self-perception at face value. And by shutting out parents, the schools exclude the very people who are the best source of information about that student’s health and well-being.
There’s little dispute that, in general, schools should take the lead on matters such as curriculum or school administration. Sex and gender identity, however, fall in a different category. A federal judge in Pennsylvania put it this way: “[T]eaching a child how to determine one’s gender identity” strikes “at the heart of parental decision making in a matter of greatest importance in their relationship with their children.”
But Nevada public schools don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Instead, they are imposing their own opinions, theories, and ideology about this volatile and controversial subject and establishing a significant range of policies based on nothing more than a youngster’s current feelings.
The Washoe County School District policy, for example, defines gender identity as “an individual’s understanding, outlook, feelings, and sense of being masculine, feminine, both or neither.” While such things can change at any time, for any reason, school policies dictate that a child’s latest “outlook” will dictate how a school responds.
That school’s policy also states that students “have the right to be addressed by the names and pronouns that correspond to their gender identity.” They may use any restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities, as well as participate in physical education classes and intramural sports for the same reason.
Needless to say, implementing school policies that cater to a student’s current “sense” of his or her sexuality tells the student to expect that others will conform to his or her feelings. Parents may have a very different idea about how to develop their child’s character, but these policies deliberately shut parents out.
The Washoe County policy, for example, prohibits school personnel from disclosing any information related to a student’s gender identity “to others, including parents/guardians … [unless] the student has authorized such disclosure.”
These same schools, however, handle far less significant matters very differently. Washoe County School District has a 51-page manual dictating procedures for field and activity trips, requiring both parental permission and a liability waiver. The district requires both parental consent and health-care provider authorization for any medication, including over-the-counter medication such as Tylenol.
The upshot is that Johnny needs his parents’ permission to go to the zoo, but his parents need his permission to know that he’s undressing in the girls’ locker room.
The Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Education just issued a sweeping rule that will push more public school districts in this direction. It reworks Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funds.
The administration’s rule redefines “sex” to include “gender identity”—something Congress certainly didn’t intend when it passed the law in 1972—and redefines “harassment” so that staff and teachers could face disciplinary action if they “misgender” a student.
This massive federal mandate carries the implied threat that billions of dollars in federal funds could be revoked if schools don’t knuckle under and enforce it.
Parents might not agree that their child’s latest feelings always deserve indulgence. They might have a well-considered idea of how to guide their children through the challenges of adolescence and establish their own identity. The bottom line is that this is the parents’ decision to make.
But by pushing parents aside and imposing the government’s preferred gender ideology, these policies violate the parents’ constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children. The Supreme Court has called this “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests” it has ever recognized.
It’s time for parents to fight back against policies in local schools, state laws that allow those policies, and federal rules that promote this agenda at their expense.