According to reports from Charlotte, N.C., local school districts are continuing to defy state laws restricting regarding bathroom policy. However, this isn’t even the worst part of the debacle.
The Christian Post reports that training materials for Charlotte-area teachers are encouraging them to minimize parental involvement with any identity crises related to gender or sexuality.
“Involvement of parents… is determined in working with the student, considering the student’s age and health, wellbeing and safety concerns,” one presentation slide states.
The same slide also cautions educators to “take care not to ‘out’ a student to others, including the parents of an older student, without the student’s permission” and suggests that any communication with parents should “use the student’s name/pronoun on birth certificate” unless permission to do otherwise is given.
The presentation goes on to use a “gender unicorn” character to try to explain and normalize gender fluidity.
Gender dysphoria, the medical term for transgenderism, is a major psychological disorder. Medical professionals, especially pediatricians, are increasingly worried that dedication to LGBT ideology is getting in the way of compassionate treatment.
As Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins’ medical school, wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, “policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.”
Particularly children, McHugh wrote, are put at risk by the kind of social experimentation LGBT activists are trying to implement as policy. Confusing them about gender and sexuality at a young age can cause serious psychological and mental trauma.
In defiance of established psychological practices, this Charlotte school district’s classroom training materials actually instruct teachers to help their students hide serious mental illness from their families. Ideology is more important to the writers of this presentation than sound medical treatment.
Of course, this should come as no surprise. One of the major goals of progressive policy is to attack traditional institutions of American society, particularly the family.
Take, for instance, the Common Core. By bureaucratic maneuvering, education “experts” are creating more and more space between schoolchildren and their parents, discouraging meaningful parental educational involvement in favor of an omnipresent, federally-sanctioned education establishment.
Leftist abortion policy also reflects anti-family tendencies. Any time conservative state legislatures pass regulations requiring young and underage women to confer with their families before getting an abortion, the left is quick to sue in an attempt to strike these laws down.
The left has shown an ideological commitment to a kind of radical individualism. They believe that familial obligation is, itself, a kind of tyranny, and that mediating institutions ought to be supplanted by government programs. They do not believe that parents should be the primary educator of a child — in fact, they simply believe the family should get out of the state’s way.
The good news in Charlotte, however, is that parents are fighting back. The school district offices have received nearly 2,500 letters from concerned parents, many of whom are partnering with advocacy groups like the NC Values Coalition to strike back against radicalism in education.
This whole fiasco underscores the importance of parents’ involvement with local education. When policy drives a wedge between children and their families, parents have a responsibility to reassert their role as their children’s primary educators. The American family cannot afford to become even more fractured and splintered.
Michael Lucchese works for the American Principles Project.
