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June 26, 2023

In the week of June 12, 2023, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) published a document titled “Creating a Safe, Supportive, and Affirming School Environment for Transgender and Gender Expansive Students.”   The document instructs teachers that if the student doesn’t want their parents to know that they are transitioning they should hide the information from them.  The document gives a hypothetical example of a student with the legal name Kevin coming out as a transgender girl who asks teachers to call him Kimi but who wants teachers to still call “her” Kevin when talking to “her” parents.  Teachers are instructed to do what Kevin wants in order to keep Kevin safe.

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The authors of the document explain:

The paramount consideration in those situations is protecting the health and safety of the student, assuring that the student’s gender identity is affirmed and that their privacy and confidentiality are safely maintained.

The assumption the NYSED is making is that affirming students’ belief that they have a different gender identity than their biological sex, makes them safe and that parents who disagree with such students are heteronormative oppressors who make those students unsafe.

NYSED headquarters in Albany, NY

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The NYSED document also says that to satisfy the requirements of Education Law §801-A that requires that students receive instruction in civility and respect for others:

…schools will want to consider adding inclusive curricula; for example, teaching about and reading books by authors of diverse identities and including a multicultural representation of images, decorations, and artwork around their classrooms.  If offered, sexual health curriculum must be inclusive of all identities. There are opportunities and avenues for diverse identities to be included in every academic discipline.

In other words children should be taught to celebrate different gender identities in every class, be it math, history or sex ed.  Such inclusive classes lead children to identify as having different genders.  The NYSED’s document in effect is instructing schools to persuade children that they have a different gender and when the children are persuaded, to hide that information from their parents.  Although the document writers say doing this will make children safe, once children are persuaded that they are a different gender, they become very unsafe.   They are likely to start taking puberty blockers, cross-hormones and undergo surgery to alter their bodies. 

Thousands of people who transitioned regret having done so but the changes are irreversible.  The NYSED instructs teachers to prevent the only people who might prevent children from ruining their lives, their parents, from knowing what is happening.  The NYSED policy is only one example of the policies of more than 168 districts governing 5,904 schools nationwide that prevent faculty and staff from disclosing to parents a student’s gender status without that student’s permission. 

An underlying problem that leads to the above disastrous polices is the lack of recognition by teachers, who should know better, of how suggestible children are and how well intentioned but misguided efforts to help these children can persuade them of self-destructive beliefs.  Dr. Lisa Littman showed in 2018 that adolescents sometimes adopt a transgender identity in response to social cues and pressures.   This phenomenon is known as social contagion and its occurrence among teenage girls was described in Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage. 

One only has to look at the Satanic panic that started in the 1980s to find examples of how therapists trying to help children can convince them of destructive false beliefs.  In their zeal to help their patients, therapists recovered false memories of sexual abuse by their parents.  Patients who didn’t remember any such abuse were told to keep trying to remember in order to get well.  This led to the breakup of families, to innocent parents being sued by their children and long prison sentences for those parents.