How Florida’s Newly Enacted ‘Parental Rights in Education’ Law Actually Protects Gay StudentsLeor Sapir
01 Apr 2022
The White House has denounced a new Florida law as “cruel” and “harmful.” In an interview with CNN, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay cabinet member in American history, agreed that the law is “dangerous.” His husband Chasten, a best-selling author, was even more emphatic, declaring that “this will kill kids.”
The law in question does not lower the driving age to 12, permit teenagers to own guns, or eliminate funding for research on pediatric cancers. Instead, Florida’s newly enacted Parental Rights in Education law requires that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade three, or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
Another provision dictates that schools “may not discourage or prohibit parental notification of and involvement in critical decisions affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.” This latter provision has not attracted nearly as much attention (or criticism) as the former. But as discussed below, it will likely have a bigger impact on students—and a highly beneficial one.
Notwithstanding the legislation’s official title, media outlets, advocacy groups, corporate officials, and Democrats have taken to denouncing it as the “Don’t Say Gay” law. That framing is disingenuous and cynical.
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This brings us back to the Florida law. Both controversial prongs—the one limiting classroom instruction for young students, and the one requiring parental notification and involvement—serve to implement checks on schools’ de facto gender-affirming procedures. And as noted above, it is the latter provision that deserves more attention.
The standard narrative among many activists is that schools should keep their students’ cross-gender behavior secret if they believe that parents will not support it. This narrative is supported by groups such as GLSEN, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU, Gender Spectrum, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. And to be fair, it is true that there are cases of parents who dismiss the very idea of gender transition out of hand, irrespective of the grief that will come to their dysphoric children. But in most cases, parents aren’t being phobic; they simply want to know whether their child is being encouraged to begin what could become a painful, risky, and expensive process that can leave the child scarred and infertile. In some cases, this may be a price worth paying to address a gender dysphoric child’s suffering. But in other cases, it’s not.
Parents know their children better than anybody at school, and they deserve to be at the center of this kind of decision. They are in a much better position to evaluate whether a child’s gender-related distress is a symptom of some other disturbance, trauma, or mental-health issue; or is truly indicative of a lifelong struggle with dysphoria. If reserving all skepticism, and simply taking a child’s gender declarations at face value, is what activists mean by being a “supportive parent,” then most parents, fortunately, are “unsupportive.”
In some cases, it is only the involvement of the parents that can stop the transition process in its tracks, and allow a child time and space to process his or her feelings. As noted above, schools face strong incentives—legal and financial—to affirm their students’ gender self-identification, while it is families that will be left to address the fallout if the decision is incorrect. The Florida law aims to align the incentive structure of school officials with this reality.
The claim that the Florida law is homophobic is ironic—or rather cynical—given the studies showing that cross-gender identification in prepubescent boys is a better predictor of being gay than of being “trapped in the wrong body.” Reliable studies on natal females with no pre-adolescent history of dysphoria do not yet exist. But anecdotal evidence, coupled with the testimonials contained on online forums devoted to de-transitioners, suggest that many young women with same-sex attraction are being pressured to interpret their as-yet unsettled feelings as evidence that they are transgender. A recent webinar hosted by Genspect (which self-describes as “a voice for parents with gender-questioning kids”) featuring de-transitioned panelists brought this reality vividly to light.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/04/01/how-floridas-newly-enacted-parental-rights-in-education-law-actually-protects-gay-students/
