The debate over how schools should accommodate students experiencing gender dysphoria has become so divisive in part because both sides speak different moral languages.
Activists on the Left insist that “gender affirmation” is “lifesaving” care. When conservative state legislators in Florida proposed the Parental Rights in Education Act, it was quickly, and spuriously, labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics. Conservative activists, in response, labeled it the “Anti-Groomer” bill. Things didn’t get less vitriolic from there.
As conservative state legislators ponder what steps to take next, they could consider eschewing rhetorical warfare and homing in on the most important word to any child: his or her name. State legislators could propose and champion “Child’s Given Name” acts, which would simply and plainly declare that school staff should not refer to a student by any name or pronoun other than those provided to the school by the child’s parents.
To date, the debate over gender identity in schools has focused more on what schools are doing to accommodate gender dysphoria than what must be done before those steps are taken. Issues such as bathroom access, athletics, and curricula have all proven deeply politically polarizing. Liberals have argued that bathroom access is simply a matter of human decency, that the question of athletics is largely overblown, and that students deserve to see a diverse array of lifestyles represented in curricula. But before and above all of these “what” questions, there is the “whether” and “how.” And this should actually be far less controversial.
School districts across the country are adopting so-called “gender support plans,” which leave the question of how children should be treated exclusively up to the children themselves. These plans insist that for the sake of “safety,” it should be up to the children whether the parents are even clued in to the fact that their child is being treated as the opposite sex. Chicago Public Schools’s plan, for example, which was developed through a cooperative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, insists that “school staff shall not disclose a student’s transgender or gender nonconforming status to parents/guardians without the student’s permission.” National groups, such as the American School Counselor Association, have declared that parents only need to be consulted “as appropriate” and that students “have the right to decide when, with whom, and to what extent” to share information about their gender identity.
Whatever one’s opinion on gender identity, these policies ought to outrage parents on the Right and Left. Even if parents are inclined to be “affirming,” they won’t take kindly to the notion that their school could facilitate a gender transition behind their back and without their consent. These policies are being advanced in the name of “safety” — but such arguments are facile and false. They wrongly assume that parents, who love their children more than anything in the world, might be “dangerous” if they don’t “affirm” their child’s dysphoria. The real danger, rather, is putting a child in a position where he or she is leading a double life, going by one name and gender at home and another name and gender at school. This is all but certain to cause immense psychological distress, exacerbating rather than ameliorating any comorbid psychological problems such as depression or anxiety.
The bad news is that the Biden administration has telegraphed through its Title IX regulation that it intends to pressure school districts to adopt parental nonconsent policies. The good news is that it’s hard to imagine any higher moral ground that state legislators could find on this issue. It is, indeed, all but impossible to imagine a passionately articulated direct defense of the proposition that schools must be at liberty to call a child a different name and treat them as the opposite sex without parental permission or consent. State policymakers would be well-advised to home in primarily, if not exclusively, on the issue of who decides what to call a child by championing a “Child’s Given Name” Act.
Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America page.
