Parents should be told if their child is involved in violence at school, expresses suicidal thoughts or identifies as transgender, a California school board decided. When the state's superintendent, Tony Thurmond, showed up to oppose the policy at a Chino Valley Unified school board meeting, he was ejected, reports Robert Kovacik for NBC News.
Thurmond spoke briefly -- speakers got only 60 seconds -- and left the dais. But he returned when the school board chair called a "point of order" to say he represented the problem. She wouldn't let him respond, and called security to escort him out. “Teachers aren’t trying to keep secrets from parents,” said Angela Chang, a Pomona Unified School District teacher. "We are not trying to lock parents out, but it is not our place to assume kids feel safe talking to their parents about something."
Is it your place to assume they're not?
Here's the video.
"More than 10 million American children attend public school in districts that require employees to hide students' gender transitions from their parents," writes Michael Torres in City Journal. He cites a list compiled by the parental-rights advocacy organization Parents Defending Education, which has released a poll showing 71 percent of voters oppose withholding information about a child’s gender identity from parents. That "aligns with other recent polls," Torres writes.
The legal theories supporting secrecy are dubious, he writes. Minors do not have a right of privacy from their parents. In the 2000 Troxel case Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, citing the Fourteenth Amendment, wrote: “The liberty interest at issue in this case — the interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children — is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.”
The safety argument is dubious as well, he writes. "A recent study from the U.K. found that social transition in itself was not associated with better mental-health outcomes," and "concealment of gender identity, including from parents, may actually contribute to a child’s distress. As it turns out, leading a double life might be destabilizing for children."
Since social transition is public, I don't see how privacy applies. Everyone at school knows that "Eva" is now "Adam." It's not a secret.