As a young woman growing up in Oklahoma, I learned from the stories of friends whose parents were stolen from their communities and sent away to grow up in English-only boarding “schools”. In these institutions, children were stripped of their languages, their cultures, and their families. The families were powerless to get their children back; when they did come back, psychological and cultural harms of family separation had scarred them. The Indian Boarding School system was eventually dismantled, tribal autonomy over their children returned, and the narratives of cultural and linguistic loss shared. Corrections to settler colonialism systems of child theft, indoctrination, and cultural erasure continue throughout the world and permeate many of our governmental systems today, however, the long shadow of institutional distrust in settler governments remains in our lifetimes and informs our sense of belonging in the institutional spheres of modern life. One area in which American society must reckon with our colonialist past is through our public schools. And if our compulsory public schools are to unite us all in a national commitment to education and democracy, then we must constantly include all those whose voices were not always included, and make sure that our schools are connected and responsive to the families themselves, in a shared sense of responsibility toward our children.
As a public school teacher I am mindful about my role as an elder and adult guide for our young people, and I must reflect on the power I wield as someone who shares her perspectives, her values, and her knowledge within a compulsory school structure. Here in the public sphere, we impart culture and language, narratives of our shared history, and how we understand and act in the world. And we are expected to be part of the communities that we teach, to work with our families and to inform our practices with rigorous training in multicultural competencies, experiences, and knowledge.
As a mother, I reflect on my role as teacher, am I creating the community I want to be part of? Am I part of a pluralistic collective that works together to engage and shape our young people? Is my work as an educator in alignment with my role as a mother, with the work of the mothers of my students? And am I working hard enough to include the voices of the other parents, the elders, and the families in the communities in which I teach? Is my work as a teacher worthy of the trust of my students and their families?
Decisively, the answer to these questions has changed radically over the past few years. And strangely, teachers are no longer expected to be in collaboration with the parents and families of our students, but instead may be required to act as guardians of secrets that your child may hold back from you – secrets that may hold devastating truths about her mental health and bodily autonomy. Specifically, I am talking about children and adolescents who voice concerns about having been “born in the wrong body”, a modern sociological concept rooted in “Queer Theory”, and divorced from multi-cultural understandings and the biological possibilities of the human species. When a child announces at school that they wish to change their gender identity with new names and pronouns, use opposite sex bathrooms and changing rooms, or play on the opposite sex sports teams, schools personnel in California are expected to take this new information at face value, hold it as a secret from the parents or guardians, and change the records without the families’ input. Yet, such a student is quite likely to be suffering from body dissociation and difficulties with self-acceptance - a common adolescent mental health issue that can be resolved through family connection, therapy, puberty rites of passage, and one’s own culture.
The origin of this California policy to hide a student’s gender identity at school equates same sex attraction with transgender ideation, that schools must not forcefully “out” an LGB or T child to the family. However, being same sex attracted is not the same as being trans. Being gay means that you are attracted to members of your own sex. There are no changes to be made, and you may choose who knows and who does not. Usually teachers and staff do not know the developing sexualities of our students, and it would be inappropriate for us to try to find out. I have never seen a reason to “out” a student to their family as I have no actual knowledge of a student’s sexuality. How could I? Unless the student were crossing boundaries and having actual sexual relations or sexually harassing another student at school, it would likely never be an issue. Trans ideation, on the other hand, means that you feel psychologically uncomfortable in the body that you have and that you wish that you had physical characteristics of the opposite sex. Many of us have feelings of insecurity around our bodies growing up in Western cultures, particularly during the time of puberty. However, today, the idea that a self-perception of “being born in the wrong body” is equated with same sex attraction in the LGBT acronym and California school policy. While same sex attraction requires a school to do nothing, a student’s declaration of a new name and new pronouns requires a change in the official school records, community acceptance of a student using opposite sex changing rooms and bathrooms, and the ability to play sports on the opposite sex team. Crossing single sex boundaries is a cultural shift that does not embrace the multiculturalism of our families, the shared understanding that men and women need privacy based on the biological realities of our sexual characteristics, or allow for the reality of human sexual dimorphism that defines the unequal power structures of our male and female ancestors and lived experiences. Single sex spaces and boundaries have been created in every culture that has been studied and that we know of. To dismiss their importance due to the modern conceptual belief in gendered souls growing in the wrong body is a radical shift, and many of us are rightfully concerned.
Yet, in California, education's and the Democrats' current response to youthful trans-ideation and body dysphoria, appears to be non-liberatory and culturally at odds with communities and families. Worse, it is a deeply dysfunctional and wrong-headed continuation of devastating colonialist mindsets and a renewed devotion to institutional power as all-knowing and superior to children and their families. As a leftist mother of a formerly trans-identified son, I have found the Democratic left’s positioning on secret guarding at school around young people who are struggling with untreated trans-ideation and body dysphoria to be an aggressive political stance that is divisive and threatens family stability through separation and adult secret keeping.
Worst of all, these secret school interventions are couched in the language of therapy and civil rights: “gender affirmation care” and “protect trans kids”. However, it is not, as some claim, therapeutic or opening up new frontiers of civil rights. Nor is that "therapy" being carried out by qualified experts. In fact, great harm is happening in our schools.
Far from liberating young nonconforming people from rigid, regressive structures of power, reactionary, unevidenced gender affirmation reifies them--along with the colonialist mindset that birthed and benefits from such strictures.
The first time I was told, as a teacher, to withhold information about a student, was last year. This particular young woman wanted to go by a new name and pronouns at school. She also had a diagnosed anxiety disorder and a 504 plan. She had self-harming tendencies. She dated a girl at school. The parents knew about the self-harming and the anxiety and had taken measures to help her manage her mental health issues. They likely knew that she had a girlfriend.
All that communication, collaboration and goodwill evaporated the moment my female student decided her “gender” was male. Instantly, her parents were assumed to be unloving and uncaring, and we, her teachers, were told to lie to the parents if we communicated with them. If this young woman were living in real danger, why would we not inform CPS as mandated reporters? Establishing a secret between the young woman and adults at school should be a red flag. In the mandated training videos that educators watch each year, we learn that predatory grooming tactics include secret keeping. When I was asked to keep this young woman’s trans identity at school from the parents, I could not imagine why we would think we knew her better than them. A young person suffering from gender dysphoria / body dysmorphia is dealing with a mental health concern that needs therapeutic support. As school personnel, is it our duty to affirm her belief that her body is wrong? In what other circumstances would this play out for the benefit of the student? If a student were bulimic at school, would we hide this information from her parents in order to affirm her self-perception that her body is too “fat”? Indeed, such mental health issues and body distortions often overlap, and we should be curious about the reasons why as Eliza Mondegreen does here on her Substack, reflecting on a recently published German study on teen girls’ eating disorders and gender dysphoria.
This is not how educators develop trusting relationships with families. We know that families love their kids and support them in the best ways they can–that they will be there for their children years into the future and in ways we are not part of. We are not–and should not try to be–their cultural mentors or saviors. Often, our ways of thinking do not represent the culture or understanding of the family. We have to be careful not to impose our beliefs on students in a misguided attempt to "save" them from their families.
In the case of this student–and many of the others I have today who claim nonbinary and opposite-gender identities–there is much more going on psychologically. My son, for example, also suffered from gender dysphoria and body dissociation, due to social anxiety and prolonged time spent online during the pandemic closure. The more people affirmed his new identity and pronouns at school, the more his mental health deteriorated. After considerable work, therapy, family outings, hands-on learning and job experiences, my son learned to accept himself as he is, to love himself, and gained much confidence. He now identifies as his own sex again and has experienced love, work, friendships, independence and normal academic ups and downs. This would not have been possible had the school determined that we were unfit parents and kept his new identity a secret from us. Perhaps even more concerning are signs that affirming gender at school without the supervision of qualified therapists and family involvement is actually a harmful psychological intervention that we as educators are not equipped to carry out.
Indeed, we as educators know that students thrive when we are all working in partnership. Other places struggling with the rise of new metaphysical beliefs about gender, including England and Northern Europe, which have implemented evidence-based policies that include family members and strive to center the child’s wellbeing through real-life connection, family therapy and psychological work. Observers predict that, sometime soon, the California law on school secret-keeping will be overturned. For more on this topic, you can read trans psychologist Dr. Erica Anderson’s Amicus brief on why schools should not socially transition a student without parental consent.
Over the course of the last three years, I have spent countless hours reading studies and scientific papers on gender transition, particularly on youth, in order to understand why so many of my quirky students and the children of so many of my friends–and my own–seek cosmetic medical treatments to change the course of their natural healthy development through puberty. It does not make logical sense that we should allow these obviously experimental treatments on so many young people who are struggling with self-acceptance. I imagine that, if I were young today, I too would latch onto this false promise of a way out of the confines of my body, as I sought escape in my teens and early twenties in the ways that were then available to me. Indeed, the huge increase in adolescents that experience gender dysphoria and body dissociative disorders seems to have arrived in tandem with massive increases in all sorts of teen mental distress, stemming from social media and the introduction of smartphones in the hands of children, plus the deep lack of connection that people report in modern cultures.
So many, in fact, that March 12th is now Detransition Awareness Day. On this day, the UK announced its decision to ban puberty blockers except in a very few cases that must undergo a rigorous approval process. I am hopeful that the scientific evidence coming out of Northern Europe will begin to take hold in the US and other Western countries in which young people–many of whom are gay, gender nonconforming, neurodivergent, survivors of abuse, or suffering from comorbid mental health issues–will be able to get the evidence-based therapeutic support they need. I am hopeful that we, as educators and progressive society, will help vulnerable youth regain connection with others and allow them to grow into their bodies and minds with no endocrine disruption, cross-sex hormones, and invasive surgeries.
The group of recovering youth who call themselves detransitioners–who realize that they medically “transitioned” to appear as the opposite sex as a means of psychological escape– is growing exponentially, reporting a laundry list of harms to their health, many of which appear to be serious and permanent. Many of these detransitioners realize that they are gay and that homophobia, internalized and societal, influenced their decision to transition. Some realize that they hated themselves–hated what it means to be a “man” or a “woman” in a culture filled with pornography and regressive gender roles. Some were horrifically abused or sexually assaulted or both. Some speak to the enormous influence of online communities that celebrated their transitions, but excommunicated them as heretics when they expressed doubts about transition. All of them speak to how easy it was to get drugs and surgeries, yet no one asked them basic questions about their mental health first.
Their stories must be heard to prevent further harm and engender healing. I hope that more of us will listen.
Who am I? I am a lifelong leftist. A progressive. A registered Democrat on the far left of the party. An activist, even. Before the new narratives of gender came along, I was part of the “queer” sex positive communities of San Francisco and Spain in the 90s. I was bisexual, I experimented, I was (and still am) gender “non-conforming”. I pushed boundaries, I played, I was thoughtful, I was even “transgressive”.
I have created a shareable list of resources on gender dysphoria and trans ideation in young people. I am happy to answer questions on my journey as a parent of a desisted son.
Thanks for this perspective. So often this issue is framed incorrectly as a progressive vs. conservative fight. There are many lefties who disagree with the Democrats on keeping secrets from parents.
I would love to read your opinions as you continue looking into the matter of what is happening to the democratic left. Your experience and expression is highly valued.