Yesterday, the Trump administration announced that California’s Department of Education had violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA, signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1974, guaranteed parents access to their children’s “official records, files, and data”. In the wake of growing concerns about privacy following the Watergate scandal, FERPA was designed to allow parents to maintain their kids’ privacy from the government.

But in the past decade, public institutions have re-envisioned the act as schools’ right to protect students’ privacy from their own parents — at least when it comes to gender identity. Schools across the country implemented policies and practices which facilitated students’ social transition — taking on a name, pronouns, and identity of the opposite or neither sex — and then hiding it from parents.

The practice sprang not from the education sector but from LGBTQ+ advocacy groups. While there was plenty of debate among mental health professionals about whether social transition helped or hurt gender-dysphoric youth, advocacy groups pushed it as a human right and a suicide deterrent rather than a psychological intervention. They also gathered research indicating that schools must become “safe” spaces for gender- and sexual-minority students, because those kids fared poorly when bullied.

Eventually, the criteria for safety changed: instead of being protected from real bullying, children needed to be protected from “harm” — which, in the 21st century, meant not being immediately affirmed. Thus, if their students suspected their parents wouldn’t immediately hop on board, those parents were deemed harmful.

The way advocacy groups aimed to create safe spaces without parents was to retrain school personnel, fashioning them into a combination of activists and clinicians. Welcoming Schools, a project first of PFLAG and then of the Human Rights Campaign, launched a segment to its gender curricula called “Affirming Gender in Elementary School: Social Transitioning”. It advised that the first step for those who “feel that their internal sense of gender and their biological sex do not match” was to socially transition.

In 2015, HRC teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union, Gender Spectrum, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the National Education Association for “Schools In Transition: A Guide for Supporting Transgender Students in K-12 Schools”. The guide included two sample documents created by Gender Spectrum’s Joel Baum, the Gender Support Plan and the Gender Transition Plan. Both were marked “Confidential”, to allow the option of withholding them from parents, and asked: “Are guardian(s) of this student aware and supportive of their child’s gender transition? If not, what considerations must be accounted for in implementing this plan?”

The support plan advised that kids must never be “asked, encouraged or required to affirm” their gender identities because it could “cause significant emotional harm”. In other words, skeptical parents should be kept in the dark.

Other schools actively recruited kids to various GSA clubs — school groups once known as gay-straight alliances that are now known as gender and sexuality alliances — which they gave benign names so as to avoid suspicion from parents. A California mother named Jessica Konen discovered that teachers in Spreckels Union School District, south of San Francisco, had, as she put it, manipulated her 11-year-old daughter Abigail into identifying as transgender. These practices alienated kids from their families, cast their parents as untrustworthy, and disrupted the family unit.

Konen eventually won a settlement of $100,000. But in America’s polarized environment, few Democrats and liberals understood that the practice of secretly socially transitioning wasn’t sound, let alone legal. When Florida passed a parental rights law guaranteeing parents’ rights to their children’s school records, it was labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

That’s because, historically, “parental rights” was a Right-coded issue. It began in the Seventies with religious conservatives objecting to the progressive materials to which their kids were exposed in schools, including a resistance to sex education and to gay and lesbian teachers. In other words, it really was anti-LGB. But this century, the problem has shifted. Facilitating minors’ psychological interventions is very different from having a gay person teach them Spanish.

Unfortunately, America’s polarization means that necessary legislation will be seen by many liberals as anti-trans, rather than preventing a dangerous practice from continuing.

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Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

LisaSelinDavis

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