There’s an old riddle, “What are the three most-famous lies?”
The answer usually concludes, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you!”
Parenting is the most awesome role that most of us ever will have in our lives.
The state of Delaware’s new proposed Regulation 225 aims to step in between parents and their minor children, risking unprecedented damage to that most sacred of relationships, encouraging the children to keep secrets from the parents, if not lie outright to their parents, and creating unique opportunities for misbehavior that could follow them the rest of their lives.
That’s help from the government that we, as Delaware parents and grandparents, don’t need.
Parents, grandparents, in fact, all of us, need to reach out to our legislators and Gov. Carney and tell them that this absurdity never should see the light of day on the state’s books.
If a curious boy wants to tell school officials that he is transgender, or if a teacher or administrator encourages him to make that assertion because they may regard him as less than some subjective “masculine” criteria, the proposed Regulation 225 says the school will “accept” that gender reassignment without any requirement to collaborate or consult with the boy’s parents.
And it goes on his official state of Delaware records, forever imprinted for that chapter of his life – records that his parents have no right to see, know or much less change.
If a girl has an unusual empathy with another racial or ethnic group – maybe she speaks another language or she has a close playmate of another race – she’s able to go to school officials and reclassify her racial or ethnic heritage on official state records without telling her parents of her empathic “support” for her playmate.
That the state would propose to usurp the sacred quality of the parent-child relationship, collaborating with the child to keep such secrets from the parents, is a total misfire of the role of the state.
Worse, the opportunities for mischief abound.
Part of it is the importation of sexual curiosity, if not sexual vulnerability, into an environment that’s not well prepared to manage it.
To the root of the joke, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” it’s just not something that state or education bureaucrats are good at. That rules abound as a product tends to give the rules a sacred quality that formerly belonged to the parent-child relationship.
When I was a kid, when sex education was de minimis, the boys I knew had a pretty high level of sexual curiosity about what the other gender looked like. Undressed. (Of course, not me, I wasn’t one.)
Applying the State’s Regulation 225 standard, it’s certainly conceivable if not likely that some of them would have gone into the school office, registered as transgender, so that they could go to girls’ phys ed class and take showers after with the girls.
Bureaucracies – particularly state bureaucracies – simply are not good at preventing that kind of thing once the right has been entrenched in law and policy
and procedure.
So, do you want your young daughter, or granddaughter, to be the token display to satisfy that curiosity?
Every day, the paper has a photo of another educator or administrator sentenced for some sexual crime with a minor student. Even where the student is confused, do we want that vulnerable minor boy or girl becoming prey to such a situation as a result of policy change?
Gender, racial and ethnic identify are issues that belong with parents of minor children, not with school teachers and administrators, who should focus on the proper education of their students.
