Should California Schools Keep a Child’s Gender Identity Secret From Parents?

As battles rage between local school districts in California and the state Attorney General Rob Bonta regarding whether or not schools should notify parents if their child identifies as transgender or nonbinary at school, I think it’s strange—as a California public teacher—that no one is clarifying the definitions of transgender and nonbinary.

According to the California Department of Education’s Health Education Framework adopted in 2019 (p. 353), gender identity is defined as ever-changing and ever-expanding. People assume transgender means a girl identifying as a boy or a boy identifying a girl. However, according to 2023 trainings on sexual harassment used as part of state-mandated training for teachers and other employees, it’s much broader than this.

Our training program said, “Gender Identity is a person’s identification as male, female, non-binary, or other. Transgender involves identifying differently from a person’s sex at birth or something else.” After the training, I asked my employer, “What does the word ‘other’ or ‘something else’ encompass? It’s so open-ended, it could mean anything and everything.” No one could give me an answer, so I researched it myself.

In my quest, I found authoritative sources telling Americans to throw rational thinking out the window in order to embrace radical group think.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines gender nonbinary in part as “gender creative.” This means kids can create or make up their own gender(s).

The California Department of Education defines nonbinary with these descriptive labels:  transgender, intersex, gender-neutral, agender, genderqueer, gender fluid, two spirit, bigender, pangender, gender nonconforming, or gender variant.

This long list of identities parallel the survey given Americans in crisis, of all ages, who call the 988 National Suicide Hotline. Callers are asked how they identify and are given 11+ genders to choose from. They are: agender, boy/man, genderfluid, genderqueer, girl/woman, intersex, non-binary, trans, trans-masculine, trans-feminine, two spirit, other. The hotline is funded by the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act, which was signed into law October 2020. It also has other potential funding sources as mentioned in the recent Surgeon General’s Call to Action (p. 55–56) to implement a national strategy for suicide prevention.

Planned Parenthood’s definition of gender is significant because they partner with many wellness centers in schools and offer “gender-affirming care” such as hormone therapy.  Planned Parenthood normalizes genderfluidity, saying a person’s gender can vary weekly, daily, or moment-to-moment.  It seems to me this is the normalization of split personalities or schizophrenia.  On top of this, Planned Parenthood says gender identities (of which there are many) can begin at age 2.

Unlimited identities are now being taught to kindergartners through books in California elementary schools. The book, “What Are Your Words?,” says, “My pronouns are like the weather, they change depending on how I feel.” The book provides many pronouns like ey, em, ze, zir, they, them, xe, xir, and hir. Another book is, It Feels Good To Be Yourself. This book says, “You might feel like a boy, you might feel like a girl, you might feel like both boy and girl—or like neither. You might feel like your gender changes from day to day or from year to year.” These books cause children to question their gender, and once a child questions, they are considered LGBTQ because the Q means Queer or Questioning.

After state schools intentionally confuse children, they want school personnel to hide the child’s “gender dysphoria” so counselors or mental health workers can affirm them while they decide on a gender that best suits them. The state portrays parents who do not affirm all these identities as dangerous. However, I think the harm is coming from the state and partnering agencies who are imposing extremist gender doctrines on impressionable children.

This article first appeared in the Epoch Times, and is published in the Globe with permission.