Thursday, March 28, 2024

Maryland School Official Wants to Keep This Transgender Policy Secret from Parents

The Washington Times and HotAir.com report that parents in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Public School District will be kept in the dark when their daughters are forced to share sleeping quarters with boys. A training video entitled “Supporting Transgender Students in School,” posted in July (video contained in the HotAir.com article — see about the 27-minute mark) shows the district’s chief communications officer lecturing teachers that boys who identify as girls are allowed to share sleeping quarters with girls on overnight field trips — and that parents of the girls should not be warned. The CCO tells the teachers:

So, many of you might be asking yourselves, “So I’m at an overnight field trip, and I have a student who’s biologically a male, identifies as a female, and we’ve worked with that student and her (sic) family, and that student wants to sleep in the dorms, or whatever sleeping arrangements are, with the females. They don’t want to sleep in a room by themselves; they want to sleep with the rest of the females. So what do we do?

And the answer is, they sleep with the females. That’s not the easy answer; it’s the right answer. And in some cases, it’s going to cause issues, because . . . the private information piece doesn’t allow you to share that with parents of all of the other campers. Right? So that’s difficult.

It’s not clear what the CCO meant by the “right answer.” Presumably he meant “right” according to the district’s new transgender policy, not “right” as in “moral.” Because no one could make that case.

We warned when the Obama administration issued the unlawful transgender edict in May that one of its more insidious parts is the intention to obliterate parents’ moral and constitutional authority over their children’s education. At the time, the issue at hand was whether a school may tell parents of a child suffering from gender dysphoria that there’s a problem (the administration’s answer: no, unless the disturbed child agrees).

But now we see that the truth must be withheld not only from those parents, but from parents of all children whose privacy and perhaps safety may be violated by radical accommodations. Where is the sensitivity to a teenaged girl — perhaps one with a history of sexual abuse — who feels threatened by the presence of a male in the next (or same) bed?

Parents in Anne Arundel County and every other county in the nation should make it clear that they will not stand for this. Your children are at risk.

Jane Robbins is an attorney and a senior fellow with the American Principles Project. Emmett McGroarty is the American Principles Project’s Director of Education.

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