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Two members of the Orange Unified School District board have been removed by parents who opposed a policy requiring school staff to out transgender kids.
Parents in Southern California have voted to remove two conservative school board members after they spearheaded a policy that forcibly outs transgender students to their guardians.
Members of the Orange Unified School District board voted 4-0 to enact the policy in September. It was passed at 11:30 p.m., after the three opposed members walked out and withheld their votes.
The policy states that parents must be notified when a student seeks “to be identified as a gender other than the student’s biological sex or gender listed on the student’s birth certificate or any other official records.” This includes names, nicknames, and pronouns, and applies even if the student hasn’t taken action but has discussed the matter with a counselor.
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At the initial meeting in September, the board was overwhelmed by crowds who showed up to either protest or support the policy. However, the majority of the attendees voicing support did not have children in the district’s schools, and most were not residents of the area, according to the Times.
Let’s take a step back and look at the mandate in question because the scenario it puts forward is so farcical that I can’t imagine a situation where it’s true.
The idea of a kid being publicly out at school but not at home makes no sense. Kids might be out with their friends, sure, but having the entire school recognize them as a different gender than their parents? The only situation where this mandate would take effect is one where a kid has privately confided in a teacher or counselor, or maybe at a school LGBT group or something. All of which are situations where breaking the kid’s trust and consent are the worst way to go about things. A kid’s consent is just as important as an adults.
In the above scenarios, the way to go about it is encouraging the kids to help them gain the confidence to come out on their own or protect them from transphobic and homophobic parents. Snitching on them won’t help either way.
The only purpose of this mandate is to make trans kids afraid of being outed to transphobic parents. The cruelty is the point.
If the mandate is to keep it from abusive parents cool. I approve of this. My original comment had very little to do with the article. It has more to do with the comment that kids hide things from their parents because of their parents. Kids hide things because they don’t want to get caught in some instances. Especially if they are lying. Which is the original comment parent to the comment I replied to.
From the parent comment.
The comment you replied to and the parent comment were both about the mandate in the article, which is why you’ve gotten the pushback that you have. Neither had anything to do with kids lying to hide things other than protecting themselves from transphobic parents. The mandate in the article was expressly created for the purpose of outing kids to transphobic parents, hence the comment about kids not trusting their parents usually for good reason.
The parent comment absolutely said they did not know how the felt not knowing if their kid reported to school as transgender and then not to the parent.
Right, it also said this:
To which the comment you replied to said that when kids don’t trust their parents, there’s usually a reason. Which you disagreed with and called a “hot take.”
The whole conversation is about kids lying to their parents about being transgender, in regards to a mandate that forcibly outs them to their parents. We’re not talking about kids lying about drugs and alcohol or something like teenage rebellion, but about kids lying about a fundamental part of who they are. And the most likely reason that they would do so is because telling the truth would be dangerous. There’s no sensible scenario where a kid would be publicly out to the entire school without their parents knowing, so this would be the kind of thing a kid would confide in a counselor or something privately, and if this were a therapist or a doctor the kid was telling, there are literally laws preventing them from telling the kid’s parents without the kid’s permission.
There’s also the fact that the OP is based on a zero sum fallacy in which schools are either telling all parents or telling no parents, and that’s not how things work. Plus, now that I’m looking at that quote, “keeping the secret could also be dangerous to some”?? How could not telling a parent that their kid is trans be dangerous for the kid??
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Except the person you replied to was specifically talking about trans kids not telling their parents that they’re trans. So you’re arguing against a point that nobody made.
And in cases like that, where a trans or gay kid won’t tell their parents, it’s usually because their parents have made it abundantly clear their entire lives how they feel about LGBT people. There’s plenty of other reasons. Anxiety is completely irrational, for example. But those cases are just a matter of not telling them yet. And that’s a choice for the kid to make, not the school. There’s literally laws preventing pediatricians and therapists from telling parents stuff like that without the kid’s consent. Schools can provide counseling to help kids gain the confidence to do that, but they don’t have the right to forcibly out kids. Kids have just as much a right to privacy as their parents.
More importantly, you’re falling for the same zero sum fallacy as the parent comment, which is the exact intention of this mandate (besides hurting trans kids). They want to remove all nuance from the issue and make your immediate emotional reaction bias your opinion. It’s never an all or nothing situation. Every single day, schools make case by case decisions about how to best take care of the kids there. Some things are best dealt with without, or simply not important enough to bother, getting the parents involved. You probably don’t need to be called and told that Robert asked a teacher to call him Bob instead. And yet, under that mandate? The school would be required to do exactly that.
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I think you’re potentially right in some cases. But the much more LIKELY scenario when a child wouldn’t be out to their parents like this - a pretty rare scenario - would be when there’s a good reason for it. Which I think is the root disagreement here.
Otherwise if the parents and kids are communicating so poorly there’s also something pretty broken in the home.