Demanding Schools Notify Parents If Their Kids Are Trans Endangers Children | Opinion

In the latest round of the American culture war playing out in classrooms and courtrooms, a judge in Southern California halted a school district from requiring schools to notify parents if their children change their gender identification or pronouns at school or use a bathroom of a gender other than the one listed on their official paperwork. The ruling "upholds the state rights of our LGBTQ+ students and protects kids from harm," Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. Bonta sued the school district in August over its policy, which he described as a "forced outing policy" and a threat to the wellbeing of "non-conforming students who lack an accepting environment in the classroom and at home."

Indeed. The 27,000 students of the Chino Valley Unified school district are lucky to have such a champion. Other students are less lucky. Chino Valley Unified is just one of several that has a policy requiring parents to be informed if their children are transgender. Conservative lawmakers nationwide have been moving to limit LGBTQ people's rights to access health care, use bathroom facilities, and participate in sports, in places as far flung as Texas and New Jersey.

These policies are being enacted in the name of parental rights, and according to the L.A. Times, most parents support the measure. But is it right to put educators in the crossfire between politics and parents? Of course, in theory, it is the joint responsibility of educators and parents to keep their children safe. But where does the right to privacy of the individual fall in all of this? And what happens to those kids whose gender identity differs from how their parents see them? For a lot of LGBTQ children, this privacy may be essential to their physical safety. If teachers have a moral responsibility to protect their students from harm, surely this doesn't mean outing a child to a family which may have dangerous consequences for the student?

Abuse at home is a major concern for teachers and educators. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported at least one in seven minors are abused or neglected by parents or guardians, and a 2021 article in Pediatrics reported that transgender adolescents experienced higher rates of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse compared to their heterosexual, cisgender peers.

The real question is whether teachers should be mandated to disclose information if there's even a remote possibility that in response, the reported student will be subjected to abuse or neglect or get kicked out of the house.

Sadly, that possibility exists.

While parents and teachers keep battling it out for what's best for the kids in their care, it seems like the people we should be listening to are the very voices that are getting lost in the debate. Is anyone listening to what the children want? Has anyone bothered to ask?

"We'll truly hit a milestone in our district when 'sensitive issues' aren't sensitive at all, and these children can choose to simply exist exactly how they are," Jessica Hardy, a third grade instructor who is the district's Teacher of the Year, told the board.

She's right. She's also right that we are far, far from such a scenario.

Reporting transgender kids to their parents isn't the responsibility of a teacher; the opposite: A teacher's job is to keep kids safe—which means not reporting changes in their gender to their parents.

Anushay Hossain is a writer and a feminist policy analyst focusing on women's health legislation. She is a regular on-air guest at CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, and her writing on politics, gender, and race has been published in Forbes, CNN, USA TODAY, The Daily Beast, and more. Hossain is also the host of the Spilling Chai podcast and author of "The Pain Gap: How Sexism and Racism in Healthcare Kill Women."

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.