Schools shouldn’t conceal gender identity from parents

If your child lived as one gender at home and assumed a different gender at school, would you want to know? Should you have a right to know?

Gallup reports that one in 50 members of Generation Z self-report as transgender. That’s 30 students in a school of 1,500.

In North Carolina, “schools are not obligated to notify parents of their child’s gender identity,” advises Brooks Pierce law firm, which counsels a number of school boards in North Carolina. The law firm tells school districts to “consider policies” that, among other things, “provide students the right to control the disclosure of highly personal and private information such as gender identity [or] transgender status…including disclosure to parents.”

Brooks Pierce’s guidance tracks a loose legal framework that exists in other parts of the country.

New Jersey’s Department of Education directs school districts to “accept a student’s asserted gender identity; parental consent is not required.” Philadelphia has a similar policy.

The Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin goes further. It requires staff to refer to a transgender student with one set of pronouns when speaking with parents and a different set of pronouns at school, actively concealing gender nonconformity from mom and dad. (This policy is under active litigation at the Wisconsin Supreme Court.)

The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, advises schools to withhold a child’s gender nonconformity “if there is a concern that parents or caregivers may react negatively.”

There are no doubt instances in which a school has evidence that, say, a child’s father is likely to cause physical harm if he learns that his son identifies as a different gender.

Outside of those extreme scenarios, there’s a reasonable case that gender dysphoria – in which a person strongly believes he or she is another gender – is a health-related matter (a serious one at that) and that public schools should therefore, as a default position, notify parents.

Failure to do so turns on its head the principle that parents have primary say on how to raise their children. Implicit in that principle is the notion that parents should know about major health matters. Exceptions for extreme circumstances prove, not disqualify, the rule. It’s difficult to conceive how months- or years-long concealment from parents is healthy for a 12-year old.

That this conversation often devolves into claims of transphobia only widens the perceived gap between scared parents and school officials.

I’d wager there’s a large proportion of parents who don’t fear that their child is or will be gender nonconforming – they’ll love their child no matter what. But they may fear their child will be convinced at an impressionable age that she is gender nonconforming or dysphoric when perhaps she isn’t – and that nobody will bother to tell them about it.

It’s hard to review the landscape and discount such concerns as unreasonable. What does one expect from a father who, after just minutes of research, learns about elementary school gender curricula in major school districts? Seattle Public Schools, for example, recommends a lesson for kindergartners in which a literary character says, “In my heart, I’ve always known that I’m a girl teddy, not a boy teddy.” The objective of the lesson plan is for students to “understand that there are many ways to express gender.” This is for five-year-olds.

And it’s hard not to sympathize with that father when he’s looked down upon as backwards or, worse, some sort of bigot, when he raises his hand at a school board meeting and says, “What exactly are we doing here?”

Without a clear standard, teachers also face impossible choices. It should not be incumbent upon individual educators to decide which parents they can and can’t speak to about a child’s presentation as a different gender. Such a state of affairs is ripe for inconsistency, fear, and potentially explosive interactions with apoplectic parents.

A clear standard seems prudent, and absent awfully compelling reasons, that standard should skew towards parental involvement, not concealment.

This story was originally published April 25, 2022 at 5:00 AM.