Among transgender ideology and its advocates, there is one defining rule: What they say goes, and anyone who questions the movement must be silenced — even parents. Nowhere does this play out more clearly than in the public school system.
Take, for example, Jay Keck, a Chicago resident whose biological daughter became convinced she was his son. In a column for USA Today, Keck wrote that his autistic daughter befriended a girl who had recently come out as transgender. Not long after, she, too, declared she was a boy trapped in a girl’s body. Keck’s efforts to counsel and help his daughter, whose mental health contributed to her gender dysphoria, according to a psychologist Keck consulted, did little, because as he would soon discover, they were actively undermined by public school officials who affirmed and encouraged his daughter’s new identity.
Without alerting Keck or his wife, school officials began to refer to his daughter by a new name, using male pronouns and giving her access to a gender neutral bathroom. When Keck found out, he asked the school to use her legal name at all times while he figured out next steps. His requests were not followed. Instead, a school social worker began to advise Keck’s daughter about halfway houses where she could go to get away from her unsupportive parents.
Keck is not alone. Parents across the nation are discovering that the public schools to which they entrust their children are a breeding ground for social justice activism and cultural leftism, often at the expense of what’s good for children. Whether out of fear, ignorance, or the desire to appease, Keck’s public school bowed to the transgender movement the same way so many have. And who can blame them? The alternative is endless discrimination lawsuits that lead to long, drawn out court battles that the school districts often lose, as Virginia’s Gloucester County Public Schools recently discovered.
Rather than face down a legal system stacked with judges potentially in thrall to transgender ideology, public schools have chosen appeasement. When confronted, Keck’s school claimed legal authority, citing Obama-era guidelines. But Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter was never law, and the Trump administration repealed it in 2017, allowing individual states to set their own policies.
Keck discovered that the American Civil Liberties Union sends intimidating letters to schools who do not conform, discouraging officials from involving parents and threatening them with a lawsuit if they do. Thus, schools have chosen to respect so-called social justice rather than parental rights.
At the heart of this debate is the right to parent, the right to raise your child as you see fit so long as it does not bring harm. The problem, however, is the transgender movement has successfully labeled any approach to parenting that does not accept transgenderism as harmful. Here, again, the schools are complicit. Keck’s school took it upon itself to preemptively decide he was a bad father, simply because he did not agree that his daughter was his son. Was that ever the school’s decision to make?
According to the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan T. Anderson, author of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement, transgender activists “discount the authority of parents” by pushing gender fluidity dogma and pro-transition medical care, all while labeling parents’ hesitation as “parental neglect.”
“I’ve heard some activists analogize puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to inhalers,” Anderson told the Washington Examiner. “The argument being that it would be parental neglect — or worse — to deny an asthmatic child an inhaler, so, too, if you deny a ‘transgender’ child puberty blockers or cross sex hormones. Never mind that there is solid medical evidence that inhalers help, while there is not a single long-term study on the long-term outcomes for children placed on puberty-blocking drugs. It is entirely experimental.”
By elevating the spontaneous and probably ill-founded choices of young children, the transgender movement has eroded the parental right to determine what is best for one’s child. Though the right to direct the upbringing of one’s children isn’t specifically listed in the Constitution, it is indeed an “unalienable right,” according to the late Justice Antonin Scalia. “[I have] the right to raise my children the way I want,” Scalia told an audience at Georgetown University Law Center in 2016, “to teach them what I want them taught, not what Big Brother says.” Well, not anymore.
Keck’s story might not be common, but it should raise concerns. After all, if transgender rights advocates have their way, the U.S. laws will soon look like Ontario’s, which allow state agencies to prevent families who do not affirm a child’s chosen gender identity from adopting or providing foster care. Or Norway’s, which allow the state to perform gender reassignment surgeries on children as young as 6 years old regardless of the parents’ wishes. Raise your child the way we see fit, says the cultural Left, or risk losing your child altogether.
Concerned parents should act rather than allowing transgender rights activists to bully them into silence, Anderson said.
“They should insist on evidence-based medicine,” he said. “They should demand that schools teach fact-based science, and not allow schools to indoctrinate children with gender ideology. And they should defend their authority to direct the education and medical care of their children.”
If they don’t, the transgender movement will continue to blur the line between family and state, using the public school system as its weapon. Perhaps there is an argument to be made that Keck should have respected his daughter’s choice. But that is between him and his daughter, not between him and his daughter’s school. If only the school agreed.
