Time for Parents to Resist Transgender Activism

Jan 23, 2017 by Jill

by Emily Zinos, First Things:

Gender ideology seemed a ridiculous and improbable threat when I first considered its claims of male brains trapped in female bodies, but its rapid ascendancy in law and public opinion has made the term “transgender” a household word. While some were scoffing at Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair, I was engaged in a battle over the meaning of sex and gender at my children’s school. Katherine Kersten’s December contribution to First Things, “Transgender Conformity,” was, in part, my own story: I was a parent at Nova Classical Academy.

Nova, a highly rated public charter school with a classical curriculum, had educated six of my seven children over the years. Nova wasn’t without its problems, but those problems paled in comparison with the bizarre clash that ensued last year. A kindergartener had arrived—or more correctly his parents, Dave and Hannah Edwards, had arrived—carrying the pink-and-blue banner of transgender activism. Claiming that their son was “gender non-conforming” (six months later they declared him to be a transgender girl), the Edwardses demanded that the school make special provisions for his “needs” that required infusing everyone else’s child with their peculiar version of reality. They closely followed the playbook for activist parents of transgender children disseminated by the Human Rights Campaign and other trans advocacy groups. Easily found in a Google search, these groups instruct parents of “gender variant” children to present their child’s transition as an impending bullying emergency to school officials. From the classroom reading of My Princess Boy, a book meant to normalize “gender expansive” behavior, to the adoption of a “gender inclusion” policy, parents and administrators at Nova were told that the Edwardses’ demands had to be met as quickly as possible.

Read here

Read also: It’s not transphobic to question transgenderism by Christian Butler, spiked