Since our policy proposal doesn’t remove the recognition of gender non-conforming or transgender students, we can only assume it’s because they oppose a parent’s right to be made aware of their child’s gender choices. There is no legitimate argument for excluding all parents. Since our policy proposal provides for the extremely rare situations where a child may be at risk at home due to parental disclosure (and our proposal defines the process for handling such an occurrence) the only thing left for the opponents of updating the policy is to ignore the content of the proposal and continue to publicly label anyone that supports it as trans-phobic, bigoted, haters who want to take away a child’s rights and believe that whatever rights a minor child has supersedes the parents. They’ve done it in every BOE meeting and on social media.

And why shouldn’t they continue to name-call instead of providing a cogent and fact-based argument? It intimidates members of the community and creates a reluctance to speak up. It also makes the opposition to parental notification appear to be a civil rights issue, and that had influenced the BOE, as they made clear when the BOE V.P. said he was tired of hearing from parents that supported the changes after the board repeatedly declined our offers to explain the scientific, medical, and historical justifications that support parental notification.