Recently, my colleague at Alliance Defending Freedom, Senior Counsel Matt Sharp, and a former ADF client, teacher Deb Figliola, testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education. Lawmakers were reviewing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) with an eye toward updating them to face a growing, disturbing trend in public schools — school districts across the country engaged in social transitioning of students without informing parents and often against the expressed wishes of parents.
So-called social transition, including going by a name and pronouns that do not match a person’s sex, is a major intervention in a child’s life that can place the child on a difficult-to-escape pathway to medicalized transition, carrying the risk of life-altering damage. Yet over 1,000 school districts — attended by over 12 million students — have secret-transition policies that direct school officials to hide information about children from parents.
Comments