Nearly all public school districts in the Washington, D.C., region, including school districts in Northern Virginia, are now going to include gender identity as a protected class in their nondiscrimination policies. Arlington Public Schools, which is in Northern Virginia, right outside Washington, D.C., “added a new question on its form for students to indicate a designated gender, including male, female and ‘X,'” according to WAMU. “Next year, DC Public Schools is adding ‘non-binary’ as a gender option to its forms, and Alexandria City Public Schools will add a space for preferred name and gender identity in the district’s online form.”
WAMU reported about a student named Addison Moore, who “identifies as non-binary, which is when a person doesn’t identify exclusively as male or female” and, though Moore is already graduated, struggled the first few years of high school because these provisions did not exist. Moore is glad these new requirements are in place.
However, even this change is at odds with federal requirements. The state of Virginia only requires schools report what matches a student’s birth certificate. Virginia follows federal reporting requirements, which list male or female as the two gender options. This makes sense. Sex, via gender, is assigned at birth and so it is merely an inherent fact. However, the LGBTQ lobby now mandates gender is actually fluid, is based on feeling, and can change. This is a frustrating place for children to find themselves and schools that are trying to make it better are actually trading short-term solutions that seem easy and which will set in motion long-term consequences which may well hurt a generation of transgender kids grappling with their own sex and gender.
“It was cool seeing some people step in the right direction of trying to make me feel comfortable towards my senior year, but still going through my first three years of high school was always a struggle,” Moore said in the piece.
You can’t help but read this statement and feel a measure of compassion and empathy for Moore. It’s clear the now-graduated Moore struggled, not just with identity. That Moore’s parents and school administrators accepted this angst as merely a struggle with identity and not something deeper, more emotional and psychological, is disheartening.
The state or federal government should refrain from interfering in the social makeup of a child’s home unless there is overt abuse. Likewise, it does not seem like a wise use of time and resources for school administrators to take part in the dance of the identity cause de jure. The state of Virginia’s various school administrators who are ardently making this a priority prove this themselves when they describe the clerical gymnastics they need to perform to make a student “feel comfortable.” Is the comfort of a couple students, a handful at best, really what’s driving this? I simply cannot believe that is the case.
Gender dysphoria is a very real thing, and if schools wanted to meddle in the cause of “gender identity” they would be better served to aid students in counseling presented with compassion.
If a student came to a school administrator and said she was binge-eating and vomiting her food, would she be given a package of Oreo’s and told where the bathroom was located? Of course not. Likewise, schools should not be playing into this cause and coddling the ones struggling but making real effort to aid in their own frustrations with gender and sex.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
