By Jeff Charles | 1:30 PM on March 19, 2023
Another school district has been caught helping children suffering from gender dysphoria “transition” to the opposite sex. Amid a national backlash against the move to push transgender ideology on children in K-12 schools, a new report shows that a school district in Orange County, California, has been facilitating the social transition of a number of students to the opposite gender.
This is already problematic, but the fact that they did so without the parents’ consent is another example of how local and state governments are violating parental rights.
The Epoch Times reported:
A parental rights group in Orange County, Calif., claims 23 students—eight of them elementary age—began social gender transitioning at a local school district without informed parental consent from January 2020 to October 2022.
The group, California Alliance for Education, obtained hundreds of pages of emails and documents from the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, which oversees pre-K through grade 12 schools for Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.
A parental rights advocate involved with the alliance who goes by the pseudonym Kim Davis for fear of retaliation told The Epoch Times that in all 23 cases, parents were either not informed about the initiation of their child’s Gender Support Plan, known as a GSP, or were told and did not consent.
Davis told the news outlet that these Gender Support Plans “were offered to students without any knowledge of the parents” and explained that school staff asked these children “if they want their parents included in the meeting, or to know about it.”
To reflect a student’s new non-binary or transgender identity, social transitioning involves changing their name, pronouns, and email address. This can also involve letting the student use bathrooms designated for the opposite sex.
The Epoch Times obtained emails that revealed several incidents, including plans by the district to have mental health counselors in elementary schools initiate GSPs with students without parental consent. In one case, an elementary school principal and director of student services discussed adding counselors to help with GSPs. The principal instructed a counselor to ask about preferred pronouns without consulting with the parents.
Additionally, a local LGBT activist advocated for the social transition of an elementary student against a parent’s wishes, and some elementary students were socially transitioned without parental consent. Even further, the district celebrated more than 500 mental health check-ins by counselors at district elementary schools, and room assignments for sleepover camps were made based on gender identity rather than biological sex. Lastly, a high school student’s parents did not attend a gender support meeting because the student did not want the parents to know.
The report noted that public records show how district counselors and psychologists were given teaching materials called Gender and Sexuality Galaxies by Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, a far-left organization. One of the mental health providers in a middle school pushed back against these materials.
The diagrams included in the materials depict 10 gender identities and 12 sexual orientation choices, emphasizing the “infinite possibilities” of gender expression. They were distributed on Trans Visibility Day, March 31, 2021. The document instructs teachers to have students envision themselves as space travelers exploring the Gender Galaxy and the Sexuality Galaxy and to write or draw their own stories of planetary and space exploration.
According to Annette Franco, a public relations officer for the school district, the district was not aware of the 23 cases that the California Alliance for Education had documented. She stated in an email to the Epoch Times that the district is bound by antidiscrimination and privacy laws, including Assembly Bill (AB) 1266, to maintain confidentiality concerning a student’s gender support plan and preferred pronouns. The district must keep this information confidential unless a student gives staff permission to inform their parents or guardians.
“We have an obligation as public school employees to put our personal beliefs aside and abide by all applicable laws that govern public school districts,” Franco said.
Teachers and counselors have received guidance from the California Department of Education stating that they should not inform parents or guardians if a student requests a social transition unless the student specifically requests that their parents be informed. However, Davis points out that these mandates are not legally binding.
In contrast, the School Success and Opportunity Act of 2014, also known as AB 1266, does require that students be allowed to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities and use facilities that align with their gender identity, regardless of their biological sex.
“That’s all the law says. It says nothing about socially transitioning kids without parental consent,” Franco said. “So, it’s not the law. The California Department of Education guidelines appear likely to be unlawful in that respect.”
Davis also said that mental health “check-ins” for students are another violation of parental rights.
Davis alleges that teachers are required to refer to transgender students by their birth name during parent-teacher conferences, thereby concealing the student’s social transition from parents. She claims that some teachers and administrative staff are afraid of losing their jobs for violating state mandates that are presented in a manner that instills fear of legal repercussions if teachers disclose information to parents without the student’s consent or do not use the student’s preferred pronouns. This is a practice that has been enacted in school districts across the country.
“The district has just spent an enormous amount of resources on this army of mental health counselors who are coming into the classrooms and initiating ‘check-ins’ with students all without parental consent,” she said.
“This is actually pulling kids out of class to check in with them about their mental health, and so there is no survey that parents can opt out of, there is no transparency over when and how these check-ins are occurring,” she continued. “It’s alarming.”
This is already alarming enough. But how much worse will it be when other parents and organizations force school districts to disclose how many children they are “transitioning” to the opposite sex without parents’ knowledge or consent? We have already seen a tremendous backlash to these practices, but it will grow even more fiery when more of these atrocities are exposed.
Still, the tragedy of this situation is that many of these children will have already been conditioned to believe they are transgender even though the vast majority of kids dealing with gender dysphoria eventually grow out of it. In the meantime, there will be even more kids who go further with their “treatment” and start taking puberty blockers and other drugs. There will be others who go so far as to have irreversible surgical operations that they will later regret. When their stories start emerging over the next decade or so, that might be when we can finally put a stop to this. The sad part is that many lives are going to be destroyed in the process.