The more we learn about the dangers of so-called gender treatments, and the more we discover the lengths to which school officials will go to keep secrets from parents, the more urgent it becomes for lawmakers to act quickly to protect students and families.

Arkansas lawmakers delivered a clear message to parents of K-12 students this week: You have the right to know how your child is being treated in school.
Lawmakers in New Jersey, California, and hundreds of other school districts across the U.S. operating under policies that do the opposite and allow school officials to hide information about children from their parents should prepare to receive an influx of student-transfer requests.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday signed legislation, the Given Name Act, which says that school officials cannot call a student by a name that does not match the name listed on the student’s birth certificate without a parent’s permission. Likewise, educators cannot address a child by a pronoun that does not match the child’s sex.
The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Wayne Long, a Republican, explains that a teacher contacted him and said her conscience would not let her “affirm” a student confused about his or her sex. “This single mom was willing to lose her job rather than go against her Christian beliefs,” Long said via email.
That teacher is not alone.
A survey in March commissioned by Parents Defending Education found that 71% of voters favor legislation that requires schools to inform parents when their child wants to “assume” a different “gender” at school. A survey conducted for The Heritage Foundation in 2021 found nearly identical results among a nationally representative sample of parents. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
And lawmakers are responding.
In Kentucky, officials adopted a proposal earlier this year that said schools “shall not adopt policies or procedures with the intent of keeping any student information confidential from parents,” and state and school personnel cannot require educators to use pronouns that “do not conform to a student’s biological sex” as listed on his or her birth certificate. Utah lawmakers adopted a similar proposal this year, and legislators in Arizona, California, Florida, and Louisiana are currently considering proposals with those provisions.
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Written by James R. Wood |
Monday, October 7, 2024
Safety, I assumed, required freedom from others: freedom from commitment, something as close to full material and psychological autonomy as possible. But freedom from others had left me enslaved to an untethered, empty self. In these times it became obvious that the freedom I was pursuing turned out to be utter isolation. Maybe I could just unburden the world of my presence. And that’s when I encountered God.

I remember the moment I told myself I would never talk to my dad again. I was sixteen years old, and my dad’s adoptive parents had just surprised me with my first car: a bright yellow used Geo Tracker (that I would soon trade for a truck). After a slight disagreement, we split into separate vehicles to drive back to my mother’s house. In the other car my dad was drinking while driving my little brother, and I drove my new car with his new wife. When we arrived at my mom’s, she chastised my dad because we were much later than expected (at this time we did not have cellphones) and she noticed the alcohol on his breath. He got out and yelled at her. And then he took my keys and told me he was going to tell my grandparents I didn’t want the car. For the first time in my life, I gave verbal expression to the anger I had internalized for years: “Get out of here. You can’t treat us like this. We don’t need you.”
I come from a stock of relationship-quitters. During my childhood, pretty much everyone in my life had divorced at least once, extended family connections were strained, long-term friends were nonexistent, and moves were frequent. Over time I came to adopt a conception of freedom that had destroyed the lives of many around me, and which would threaten to destroy my own as well: the popular idea of freedom as unconstrained choice. Since this is impossible, the default was a more achievable version: the ability to drop commitments and relationships at any point when they become too complicated. Freedom as the license to leave when things get tough. Live by the mantra of Robert De Niro’s character in Heat: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” If complications come, don’t worry. You can always go.
I eventually came to see that such freedom left me and some of those I loved unfree to love and to be known in love. Furthermore, this approach to freedom is a form of self-harm that also harms those dependent on you.
As Andrew Root has explained in his masterful work The Children of Divorce, divorce affects kids at a fundamental level. Their memories are tarnished and their family relations are frayed. Did we truly have any happy moments? Were we ever a loving family? Which cousins can we see now? Where will we go for holidays? How do we navigate the family gossip about our parents? Do we need to choose sides? Will we lose connection with those on one side of the family if we live with one parent as opposed to the other?
Children always complicate things – especially social theories that are fundamentally grounded in the autonomous individual. Children expose the lie that we are primarily individuals who only enter relationships voluntarily according to rational self-interest. The involuntary nature of the most important things in life can be experienced both for good or ill. No, we are not free to choose our parents, and that is a good thing: we do not choose to come into the world; our existence is the pure gift of our parents to us.
But the unchosen can be a curse as well. In divorce, children are not free to grow up in an intact family. And things are often (though not always) made worse with the introduction (and often quick exit) of new parent-alternatives. I had hoped that Michael, my mother’s first husband after my dad, would take care of us, would show the warmth to my brother and me that my father never did, would be a safe person for my mom. I mean, he even played guitar. We would sing together. But the emotional outbursts began shortly and became recurrent. And then one day he was gone. By the time John entered the scene a couple of years later, I had already built up defenses, and I kept him at a distance, certain that things wouldn’t work out and that he too would abandon us. Which is what happened. Frequent moves and multiple marriages meant that relationships were always on trial, always conditional. Best to hijack rejection by preemptively refusing to connect.
As C. S. Lewis vividly explained, connection makes you vulnerable: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.” This is inevitable. For some, though, the lesson is rubbed in one’s face early and often. Love, I learned, is not safe. Commitment is not real. What is safe is hardened independence, especially toward these parental figures. And for me this began to trickle into other relationships.
We moved every year or so, and thus I was always the “new kid.” This meant I had to regularly audition for friend groups. Since I wasn’t particularly funny or cool, I tried to ingratiate myself with others by letting them copy my homework – because at least I was a decent student. Later I would make friends through basketball, which became my first love. When things got difficult in a friendship, as inevitably happens, I would quickly abandon the relationship, knowing we would likely move soon anyway.
In eighth grade, I was living with my best friend’s family so I could finish the school year before rejoining my own family, who had moved to a new city. Right before one of our basketball games, I got in an argument with him and, instead of resolving it, I just phoned my mom to come get me and take me to our new home.
Commitment was for suckers, I was convinced. But what I eventually came to learn was that this “safety” was not so safe after all. Was I ever known? Did I even know myself? With whom was I connected in an enduring way? Was anything stable? Would anyone stick with me? Am I simply unlovable? Are we all alone?
Lewis was correct – safety through hardening is no real safety at all:
If you want to make sure of keeping [your heart] intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
I gave more and more of myself to school and sports, all the while running from difficult relationships. I became increasingly anxious. On perpetual trial in friendships, and never reaching the other side of conflict, I became excessively defensive with others.
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A subset of the French elite is taking a stand against gender ideology. In September, over fifty medical professionals, prominent academics, legal experts, doctors, philosophers, psychiatrists, judges, and psychoanalysts published a scathing open letter condemning aspects of gender ideology and gender transition in children. Published through the Observatory of Ideological Discourses on Children and Adolescents, the letter laid out their concerns.

In less than a decade, the transgender movement has taken the West by storm. Gender ideology spread swiftly from campuses to public schools; the media obediently changed their language and their ledes; the entertainment industry flung themselves enthusiastically into producing propaganda for all ages. There was a sudden rise in female rapists who looked suspiciously masculine; women were told to shut up and welcome their new penis-packing sisters into female-only spaces; religious people were informed that they were guilty of a brand-new phobia, having just gotten used to the previous ones.
But most worryingly, untold thousands of children—usually girls—became convinced that they were born into the wrong bodies. A medical industry sprang up almost overnight to remedy this, providing double mastectomies, sex change surgeries, and hormone blockers to transform their human subjects into the people they thought they were. There were dissenting voices—they were shouted down. Heads of state obediently fell into line, conditioned to snap to attention when the ever-expanding LGBT movement informed them what was next on the agenda. Suddenly, parents were faced with girls who insisted they were boys and boys insisting they were girls, and everyone was telling them to head down to the new gender clinic to get the drugs and snips their children needed.
It was staggering to see how swiftly dissent was crushed and gender ideology became a new dogma. And yet, in the last several years, there have been signs of hope—cracks in the transgender narrative. Those cracks are growing across Europe, and there is a very real chance that this horrifying civilizational medical experimentation on the young may finally be forced to face the facts.
In the United Kingdom, gender ideology spread far and fast. Even Boris Johnson transitioned, backing away last year from plans to ban sex change surgeries for minors at the behest of trans activists and, according to some Tory parliamentarians, due to influence from his millennial live-in fiancée, Carrie Symonds. Prince Harry, the Windsor wokeling, endorsed the radical transgender charity Mermaids, which promotes sex change treatments for children. Feminist critics of the transgender movement were attacked: J.K. Rowling was doxed and received death threats; philosophy professor Kathleen Stock resigned from the University of Sussex after a wave of harassment and intimidation from trans activists.
But while it is too early to say that the tide is turning, there are indications that the trans movement has hit the high-water mark. In 2020, the UK government announced that it was scrapping plans for “self-identification,” which would have allowed people to change their gender via a statutory declaration as opposed to attaining certification from the Gender Recognition Panel. LGBT activists decried this move as “a major blow to LGBTQ rights.” Trans activists are also warning that opinion may be turning against key elements of their cultural project, especially gender transition for children.
This aspect of the pushback bears the face of Keira Bell, who went to the Tavistock clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service in London at age 16. Bell, struggling with gender dysphoria, was promptly prescribed puberty blockers, which stop natural physical development. Trans activists claim that puberty blockers give children time to grapple with their gender identity and that they can resume puberty if they choose, but the reality is these drugs can have permanent effects. By age 20, Bell had her breasts removed and the treatments she’d taken had given her body hair, a beard, a low voice, and impacted her sexual function—and she realized that none of it had helped her.
“What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation,” she wrote later. “As I matured, I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause.” Bell became what is known as a “de-transitioner” and once again lives as a woman. She took the Tavistock clinic to court, where her team argued that “Tavistock had failed to protect young patients who sought its services, and that—instead of careful, individualized treatment—the clinic had conducted what amounted to uncontrolled experiments on us.” Bell won a unanimous verdict.
To the horror of the trans movement, the judges ruled that children under 16 could not give consent to puberty blockers, and clinics seeking to prescribe these drugs to 16 and 17-year-olds might need to obtain permission from the courts. Mermaids called the judgment a “devastating blow;” Stonewall, a UK LGBT charity and the largest gay rights organization in Europe said it was “stunning.” Earlier this year, an appeals court overturned the judgement, and Bell is seeking leave to take her case to the supreme court. The futures of thousands of children hang in the balance.
Bell’s case broke through the monolithic discussion on gender identity, which for several years has been almost totally dominated by trans activists. The BBC and other major British media outlets have reported on Tavistock scandals, medical misdemeanours, and dozens of resignations from gender clinics. Criticisms of trans ideology that would never get published in countries like Canada now appear regularly. Slate even asked in 2019 “how transphobic discourse has become so mainstream in the UK” and called the UK “the motherland of ‘gender criticism.’”
In a little-noticed but significant event, last month Vice reported that the BBC is planning to withdraw from “Diversity Champions,” a program run by Stonewall.
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