Last week in Denver, several hundred people gathered in person for the Genspect conference, “The Bigger Picture,” while many more from all over the world joined online. Genspect’s founder, Stella O’Malley, has the intentional strategy of hosting their annual conference at the same time and in the same location as the annual World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) meeting.
Last year they gathered in Killarney, Ireland, when WPATH met there, and next year they will host their gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, piggybacking off of the WPATH dates and location. It’s an interesting strategy offering WPATH attendees to come to Genspect’s sessions for free whereby they can engage with a different perspective, as well as putting WPATH on notice that there is a growing movement of those who want to offer a “healthy approach to sex and gender.”
I was unable to attend their gathering last year in Ireland, but when O’Malley invited me to speak at the Denver conference, I was happy to accept. The speaker’s list was a who’s who of those fighting gender ideology, some for many years.
On the Front Lines of the Gender Wars
Michael Shellenberger opened the conference with a bold claim that time is up for WPATH and that soon he would release his “WPATH files” on his Substack, where he will show the receipts he has on the pseudoscientific standards of care and practices of WPATH. Amid robust applauses, attendees were encouraged to post on X using #TimesUpWPATH. A lifelong member of the Democrat Party, he lamented how far the left has fallen from the principles that drew him to that party.
Highlights for me were hearing from the brilliant Leor Sapir on “Institutional Capture (How gender ideology has been embedded within America).” Sapir chronicled Obama’s 2010 anti-bullying initiative, which was at first sex-based directed, and then expanded in 2011 to include gender language in the antibullying initiative.
Following this was the 2015 letter from James Ferg Cadima in the Office of Civil Rights, stating, “The Department’s Title IX regulations permit schools to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes under certain circumstances. When a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex in those situations, a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”
Wonder how America got to this place? Perhaps a well-intentioned initiative to combat bullying quickly led us down the path where boys can have access to spaces that were once protected for girls.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright and scientist Heather Heying did an excellent job, patiently and thoroughly stating the obvious, that there remain only two sexes no matter what others assert. They marveled at the fact that even once-trusted scientific journals are now claiming that “The idea of two sexes is overly simplistic.”
Two mothers, January Littlejohn and Erin Friday, gave impassioned speeches about their daughters who believed the lie that they were born in the wrong body. Littlejohn spoke about her daughter’s middle school working behind their back to encourage this idea and talked about her decision to bring forth a lawsuit, restoring rights and protections to parents over their own children.
Friday, an attorney by training who works with Our Duty, had many in tears using Hans Christian Anderson’s story of “The Snow Queen” to parallel her own efforts to save her daughter from the evils of gender ideology. She is a force in the state of California, fighting laws passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom while trying to raise funds to get initiatives on the ballot to put before voters which will protect children and parental rights. She appealed to the audience that if the transing of children can be stopped in California this will have an enormous positive effect across the whole country.
Stories of Destransitioning and Whistleblowers
Any conference like the one hosted by Genspect naturally needs to include the voices of those most harmed by “gender affirmation therapy,” those who transitioned and have now detransitioned once they realized their decision to transition didn’t fix any of their mental health issues, and as is often the case, made things worse. Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley both spoke about their deeply personal experiences. Many other detransitioners attended the conference as well. It was wonderful to see how their tragic stories have brought them together in the spirit of camaraderie.
And who doesn’t love a good whistleblower story like Jamie Reed? Reed blew up the internet back in February with her expose, “I thought I was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.”
Since 2018, Reed served as a case manager at Washington University, in their Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, until she came to the realization that she could no longer condone the treatment children were receiving. Her remarks at Genspect were a rallying cry for the political left to wake up and stop harming children. As a lifelong leftist, she implored the audience not to give up on the left, but to help them return to principles.
The title of my own talk — “Transgender Assisted Reproduction: where is this going?” — was a convergence on my years of work in assisted reproductive technology and how this technology will most likely be needed by trans-identifying people, especially children who are fast-tracked to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
When I first found out that children were being offered fertility preservation procedures, knowing
that “gender affirmation care” harms natural and normal fertility, I began speaking up and producing documentary films about the lack of medical ethics and evidence-based medicine supporting these practices. Pre-puberty, children are offered to cryopreserve their ovarian or testicular tissue because their gametes, (ova and sperm) are not yet mature. Post-puberty, the child will have mature ova and sperm, so they are offered to freeze and bank their gametes.
The data is clear. Most assisted reproductive technology cycles fail. Data is coming out about the harms and risks to children being created by these technologies. The maxim, “First, Do No Harm” is being ignored in offering hope of future children, when in fact this is considered an experimental procedure with no data on this population. From the audience’s reactions and comments, it was clear that this is a whole new level of doubling down on harming children to advance an ideology that ignores biological reality, evidence-based medicine, and medical ethics.
Times up, WPATH.
Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is a filmmaker and founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. She is on X @JenniferLahl
The mother of a Virginia teensex-trafficked twice after her school concealed her newly asserted gender identity has filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against school staff and a Maryland public defender who alleged parental “misgendering” and abuse. The complaint was filed Aug. 22 in the Western District of Virginia court on behalf of Michele Blair by the Child and Parental Rights Campaign (CPRC) with support from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).
It alleges that the defendants’ actions—first in withholding vital information about the girl’s gender identification and related assault in the boys’ bathroom, then later by falsely alleging abuse to deprive her mother of custody—resulted in the child’s ordeal at the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice. Blair v. Appomattoxet al. will set critical precedents in two areas of roiling national debate: parental notification of gender transition in schools and parental custody relating to gender identity.
Public Schools Hide Kids’ Dysphoria
More than 10 million children this fall returned to public schools that conceal kids’ transgender identities from parents. A California case recently settled for $100,000 is one of several lawsuits filed by parents whose children were secretly transitioned in school.
The Blair suit, however, is groundbreaking for displaying the liability schools risk when secret-keeping results in tragedy. Safely back in her loving home for more than a year now, Sage still suffers persistent nightmares and panic attacks. She is receiving intensive therapy for complexPTSD, her mother reports, a diagnosis related to prolonged helplessness amid extreme trauma.
The reason for the secrecy that prefaced her ordeal no longer exists: Sage has embraced her sex, reflecting in hindsight that she had “just wanted to make friends” at her new school by claiming to be a boy.
How gender identity relates to “abuse” is fiercely debated nationwide. In some states including California, pending legislation categorizes parental non-affirmation of gender dysphoria as abuse. The political cost of angering parents of all backgrounds has begun to affect 2024 campaigns, as demonstrated by California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s unexpected veto of one of these bills.
In 2023, Virginia lawmakers debated “Sage’s Law,” requiring parental notification in schools and clarifying that raising a child according to his or her sex may not be considered abuse. Virginia Senate Democrats killed Sage’s Law, and it has become a campaignissue. In fact, the transgender delegate who vehemently opposed House Bill 2432 is now facing a veteran anti-traffickingleader championing the bill.
“Sage’s story is an absolute tragedy that no child should ever have to endure. But what is even worse is that it was entirely preventable,” said attorney Vernadette Broyles in announcing the lawsuit. “School administrators and public officials alike decided that their authority superseded that of her parents…This is about who has the best interests of the child at heart, who knows that child better than anyone else, and ultimately who must make important personal decisions for a child.”
An ‘Entirely Preventable’ Nightmare
Sage’s heartbreaking story was documented in The Federalist last winter, when Delegate Dave LaRock introduced Sage’s Law in the Virginia General Assembly. She was a 14-year-old freshman at Appomattox County High School in 2021 when her school allegedly reinforced her claim to be male and concealed it from her parents. She was severely bullied, then assaulted in the male bathroom school employees told her to use, according to the complaint.
Sage ran away, leaving a note expressing fear of further violence. She was caught by a predator who drugged and raped her, then drove her into Washington, DC, where other men sex-trafficked her into Maryland.
When the FBI rescued Sage in Baltimore eight days later, a public defender alleged “misgendering” and abuse at home, so a judge withheld custody from Sage’s loving parents for more than two months. Instead, the judge ordered Sage to a Maryland state home in male quarters, where she was assaulted again, the lawsuit says. Sage fled and was once again caught by a predator and raped, drugged, starved, and tortured, this time for months before law enforcement found her in Texas.
Seeking Justice for Sage
The 55-page complaint lays out nine causes of action, seeking “compensatory and punitive damages” plus court costs for “tortious interference with the parent-child relationship, conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, professional malpractice, and other rights” resulting in extreme harm to Sage and her mother. The first four causes of action target Appomattox County High School counselors Dena Olsen and Avery Via, Superintendent Annette Bennett, and the school board.
The remaining causes contain shocking charges against Maryland public defender Aneesa Khan and the school counselors of malpractice, perjury, and conspiracy “aimed at depriving Mrs. Blair of custody of her daughter and keeping [Sage] in Maryland to be affirmed in a male identity.”The complaint alleges the trio knowingly presented false testimony of abuse to Judge Robert Kershaw, and that their success in convincing him to keep Sage from her parents resulted in her subsequent abuse in a state home and in her second, months-long victimization.
Lawsuit: Hiding Info Led to Sex Trafficking
The Appomattox defendants, contends the lawsuit, concealed both the school’s unauthorized “mental health intervention” affirming Sage as male and the resultant student “bullying, verbal, physical and sexual assault.” It alleges they failed to take corrective action or to initiate a Title IX sexual harassment investigation, instead directing the girl into the male bathroom, where she was assaulted.
Among the most damning allegations is the counselors’ egregious disregard for Sage’s history of trauma and mental health concerns. Michele had provided these to the school expecting they would work closely with her like Sage’s previous school had, she described in testimony to Virginia’s legislature.
Sage lost her father as a baby and had been through six foster homes by age two when Michele, her biological grandmother, adopted her. Michele recalls Sage’s unusual silence as a child: she had learned not to cry because adults didn’t respond.
With years of love, she developed into a happy child. Then a wave of mental health issues emerged with puberty, compounded by Covid isolation. As a trained Virginia Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA), Michele sought professional help for Sage, including hospitalization the summer before she entered high school.
Despite this known vulnerability, contends the lawsuit, Appomattox kept Sage’s parents in the dark even once reports surfaced of assault in the boys’ bathroom. School personnel met repeatedly with Sage alone, culminating in an emotional session on August 25, 2021 where they threatened she could be sued if she made false allegations against the boys, the lawsuit says. Sage suffered a “psychotic break,” alleges the lawsuit, and ran away that night into the nightmare that followed.
Counselors, Public Defender ‘Conspired’
The night Sage was rescued in Baltimore, she spent hours alone at the hospital undergoing a difficult rape exam into the wee hours of the morning. As she was being driven to a detention center afterward, the complaint alleges, Sage asked that her mother be called to take her home. This request was denied and she was locked in solitary detention. Later that day, Khan was claiming in court that the Blairs were abusive and Sage did not want to go home.
Among the disturbing facts alleged are sudden, mysterious phone calls originating from self-described “mandated reporters” to the Appomattox County child abuse hotline hours after Sage was found on September 3, “before her rescue and location were known to anyone but law enforcement, Mrs. Blair and Ms. Khan.”
Other reports followed, claiming Michele had subjected Sage to “‘conversion therapy’ aimed at changing [Sage’s] gender identity.” This was “factually impossible,” as Michele allegedly only became aware of the gender identity shift the night Sage ran away. In fact, asserts the complaint, Khan conspired with Olsen and Via to “facilitat[e] the initiation of child protective services investigations in Virginia and Maryland.”
There are further allegations of grievous cruelty to a traumatized young rape victim: Sage was never informed her parents were waiting for her right outside the jail; Khan convinced Sage to lie to the court that her parents had abused her; Khan told the child her mother no longer wanted her, and withheld all the gifts and loving letters Michele sent to Sage at the Maryland children’s home.
These “extreme and outrageous actions intentionally aimed at harming…Mrs. Blair’s parental relationship with [Sage]” were allegedly “all because Ms. Khan believed that [Sage] must be affirmed as male,” the lawsuit says. According to a text from Sage to a friend, Khan had the stated ambition of taking her case to the Supreme Court.
Ideology Trumps Care for Trauma
Broylesstated to The Federalist Radio Hour that “ideology overwhelmed everything we know about trauma, about sex abuse victims, about children needing their parents and how they should be restored [to them] immediately…unless there’s actual proof of…abuse.” Instead, a 100-pound, deeply wounded girl with no criminal record was jailed for several days, then housed with troubled teenage boys, “where she was exposed to drugs, further sexual harassment and assault.”
Broyles reasoned Sage was treated “as if she’s a juvenile delinquent…in order to maintain control.” The legal maneuvering in Maryland lasted more than two months, with Judge Kershaw holding multiple hearings that delayed Sage’s return to Virginia required under the Interstate Compact for Juveniles (ICJ).
Khan’s alleged narrative of abandonment fell on receptive ground: Sage told Michele months later how much she’d missed her, but tried not to, because she “knew” Michele didn’t want her. The shame and unworthiness felt by victims of sexual exploitation is well-documented. “Trauma-related shame is an irrational and biological response…connected to the specific reactions of denial, hiding, and running away,” explains one study.
A Critical Precedent on School Secrecy
The school secrecy that allegedly facilitated Sage’s ordeal is an intense national debate. In Virginia, leftist school boards like FairfaxCounty’s are defying Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s new model policies requiring parental notification and use of privacy facilities by sex, not gender identity. California and New Jersey are suing their own constituents, at constituent expense, for the right to deceive them about their own children.
Significantly, records indicate Appomattox staff followed the same principle of instant, uncritical, and secret affirmation dictated by LGBT activist–craftedmodel policies that have infiltrated thousands of schools. The “Schools in Transition” model policy insists “affirming a child’s gender identity is in a child’s best interest,” and that school personnel have “unique insight into the student’s needs without the biases parents can or are perceived to have.”
An Essential Precedent on Children’s Rights
This raises the critical question: does refusal to affirm a child as the opposite sex constitute “abuse” and grounds for removal from parental custody, as Khan advocated in court? Activists are training legalofficials and law students that it does.
A bill California’s legislature passed would transfer children to state custody where, as Sage experienced, the risk of actual abuse skyrockets. Simultaneously, by dictating that foster parents “affirm” kids’ sexual identities, California is reducing the homes available to needy foster kids.
In some states, family custody is alreadydecided on this basis. While all 50 states are bound by the ICJ governing the return of runaway minors, some have passed “refuge” laws preventing the return of children who have run or been taken across state lines for “gender-affirming care.”
The fundamental question in Blair v. Appomattox et al. is whether fit parents or the state rightfully decide a child’s best interests. Sage’s story as described in the complaint shows the devastating potential harm to children when ideologically captured institutions wrest control of a child’s life from parents. While the case will set critical precedents in schools and courts, it also highlights the pressing need for laws reinforcing the right of parents to protect their children from state overreach.
Michele says she’s filing this lawsuit in the “hope…that no parent ever has to go through what [she] did to protect their child.”
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
“At this point, parents need to assume they will be deceived by their school if their child makes a gender identity declaration to a teacher or counselor at school,” Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon says. Pictured: Books are on offer at a school board candidate’s event Oct. 16, 2022, in Vero Beach, Florida, from Jennifer Pippin, president of the Indian River County chapter of Moms for Liberty. (Photo: Giorgio Viera /AFP/Getty Images)
A new report sounds the alarm on the growing number of schools embracing transgender ideology and keeping parents in the dark. According to Parents Defending Education, at least 1,040 U.S. school districts have adopted policies instructing or encouraging faculty and staff to keep students’ gender identities a secret from parents.
Those districts include over 18,000 schools responsible for nearly 11 million students. The vast majority of those school districts (593) are in California.
“I am grateful to Parents Defending Education for their attempt to quantify this problem,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “It is important to support with evidence what many parents know by instinct or experience: Our educational system that is supposed to work with parents will often work around parents instead.”
“At this point, parents need to assume they will be deceived by their school if their child makes a gender identity declaration to a teacher or counselor at school,” Kilgannon said.
Commonly called “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies,” such dictums have been the subject of controversy and even protest across the nation, with parental rights organizations such as Moms for Liberty and Mama Grizzly forming to combat the policies and others like them.
“[I]f we have the ability to do so, we must engage with people and systems that view this parental deception as good for children,” Kilgannon said of the role of parental rights groups. “Obviously, something is very wrong if some people can believe the answer is government first, parents second or never.”
A recent example of the controversy may be found in New Jersey, where a state judge last week blocked a trio of school districts from enforcing a policy requiring faculty and staff to inform parents of students’ gender identities at school, effectively forcing the school districts to keep parents in the dark.
Those policies would require teachers, coaches, and other school staff to inform a student’s parents if that student used a bathroom that didn’t correspond to his or her biological sex, requested different pronouns be used in addressing him or her, or asked to play on a sports team that didn’t correspond to his or her biological sex.
The controversy over “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies” comes as debate continues on why an increasing number of children are identifying as transgender or nonbinary.
One study from earlier this year, for example, classified the increase as part of “a socially contagious syndrome,” stating that it’s likely that “common cultural beliefs, values, and preoccupations cause some adolescents (especially female adolescents) to attribute their social problems, feelings, and mental health issues to gender dysphoria. That is, youth[s] … falsely believe that they are transgender.”
Some theorize that standard peer pressure, coupled with the social popularity of transgenderism, largely is responsible for the increase in children identifying as transgender. However, others—such as Mama Grizzly founder Stacy Langton—argue that it’s largely rooted in the sexual grooming of children by teachers.
“[T]his is where our own action as parents are so important,” Kilgannon said. “We must be present to our children, engaged with them, being the most important person in their lives. … [L]ike everything in life, it starts with ourselves and our relationships to the people God has put in our lives, especially the children we are blessed with and responsible for.”
Parental rights advanced last week in deep blue California, as another school district required teachers to notify parents if their children begin to identify as transgender.
The school board of the Murrieta Valley Unified School District adopted a Parental Notification Policy by a 3-2 vote Thursday. Under it, teachers must contact a parent or guardian within three days if their child attempts to use a name, pronoun, restroom, or changing facility of the opposite sex, or compete on a sports team of the opposite sex.
Murrieta Valley school board members Paul Diffley, Nicolas Pardue, and Julie Vandergrift voted yes; members Linda Lunn and Nancy Young voted no.
“This policy is especially helpful for the younger kids who start dabbling with this,” Pardue told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., the day after the vote.
Gender transition at increasingly younger ages “has become a fad,” Pardue said, “because there are some activist teachers who push this agenda.” Families must be able to shield their children from the predatory transgender industry, said an eyewitness who regrets the brief time she identified as transgender.
“Parents deserve to know if their child is adopting a trans identity at school, because [gender] transition is not harmless. There are kids like me being seriously injured by this,” Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy at age 15 before embracing her biological sex within two years, testified at the Murrieta Valley school board meeting.
“The reality is, sex cannot be changed,” Cole told the school board. “As an educational institution, you have a duty to stand for truth. Your policies need to reflect reality and not opinion. You have a duty to stand against ideologies that are held up by low-quality research.”
“The entire trajectory of my life has been altered by delusional ideas that were pushed on me from a young age” and “weaponized by doctors to push a political agenda for monetary gain,” she added. “Socially transitioning is not benign. … It takes away years of necessary social development as your real, biological sex.”
Cole’s testimony “really stuck in my heart, because we all know that teenagers make bad choices, and it is up to us as adults to help them make better choices,” Perdue told Hice.
“I was allowed to grow up as an innocent kid,” the school board member said. “When they talk about ‘a safe space,’ the classroom should be a safe space from politics.”
Murrieta Valley is the second school district to adopt a parental notification policy in less than 30 days; neighboring Chino Valley Unified School District adopted a similar policy July 20.
“It’s exciting to see parts of California waking up,” Cole said after the vote. “Chino Hills and Murrieta schools are leading the way.”
School boards enacting such parental notification policies follow their “democratic mandate in ways consistent with medical ethics and court doctrine on parental rights,” Substack writer Wesley Yang said.
Pardue, the school board member, said every level of government should ensure that parents, not government, guide children’s formative views of controversial issues.
“Our constitutional rights are what we are supposed to defend as adults and as teachers,” Pardue said at the board meeting. “The world is surprised and shocked to know there are people who believe in the Constitution who live in California.”
If the momentum continues, Cole said, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, “will soon be forced to respect local communities and the U.S. Constitution.”
Yet school districts’ decisions to stand with parents come at a cost. Radical LGBTQ activists immediately barraged Chino Valley school board President Sonja Shaw with threats to kill and dismember her, murder her children, and slaughter her pets.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, also began investigating the Chino Valley school board—a move leftists urged him to take against the Murrieta school board six daysbeforeit voted on the parental rights policy.
“[H]ere we go again,” Voices United for CVUSD, an activist group that opposes parental rights, told Bonta. “Please continue to investigate” such “extreme school boards.”
Bonta promptly announced that he has Murrieta in the crosshairs. The attorney general said he felt “deeply disturbed to learn another school district” had adopted a parental rights policy. He described it as a “forced outing policy” that “put at risk the safety and privacy of transgender and gender-nonconforming students.”Parental notification indicates a school district will “target or seek to discriminate against California’s most vulnerable communities,” the state’s attorney general said. “California will not stand for violations of our students’ civil rights.”
“The anti-Christian rhetoric is really intense,” Pardue told Hice on “Washington Watch.”
Adherents to extreme gender ideology “assume that Christian parents aren’t going to love their children if they’re struggling with gender identity issues,” the Murrieta school board member said. “But having a good, strong relationship with your parents is really the [best] step towards making sure that the children are safe. Knowing that they’re getting a loving response from their parents is really a game changer.”
The board’s vote has brought positive feedback, as well, Pardue said
“Ever since the vote, I’ve had quite a few emails thanking me” and the entire school board for “being a strong voice [and] reestablishing a relationship between the teachers and the parents in our community,” Pardue said.
But pro-family advocates say thankfulness should extend nationally.
“Parents all across the country owe a debt of gratitude to people like Mr. Pardue, who are willing to stand in the gap for our kids,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at the Family Research Council, said later on “Washington Watch.”
“We’re really grateful,” Kilgannon said.
Leaders of the Murrieta Valley school district have received national recognition for its students’ loyalty and enthusiasm. Vista Murrieta High School won a $25,000 prize and the title of America’s Most Spirited High School for the third time this year.
Pardue predicts enthusiasm for parental rights also will sweep far beyond the Murrieta district.
“We are not going to be the only district to stand on parental rights,” Pardue told fellow board members before the vote. “There are a lot of people with traditional values who are figuring out that the state of California has pulled something over on them.”
Bonta’s harsh administrative crackdown on parental rights proves that “the Left wants believers to stay on the sidelines,” Hice said.
“They want you to think that you really don’t matter. But history shows that it only takes one person to spark an enormous change, a movement.” Pardue is living proof that “it does only take one person to make a difference,” the former congressman said.
The most important person who can make a difference in a child’s life is Mom or Dad, because “no one … loves children like a parent does,” said Hice. “And government simply cannot fill the gap.”
As naked men parade in front of kids and pride marchers chant “we’re coming for your children,” a few LGBT activists are beginning to worry that things have gone too far. For example, Andrew Sullivan, an early and ardent advocate for same-sex marriage, is unhappy about reaping what he has sown. And he should be — from sterilizing and mutilating children via “gender-affirming care” to flashing children at pride festivities, the LGBT movement is proving social conservatives right.
Sullivan is repulsed and worried about a backlash, but he still denies any responsibility for the fruits of his labor. He argues his ideas needn’t lead to the illiberalism and radicalism his side is indulging. He is adamant that we could have, however uneasily, agreed to live and let live if the LGBT movement had taken his advice and closed up shop after its legal victories. He insists, “There is no slope in the case I made. There is a clear line: formal legal equality alongside cultural and social freedom on all sides.”
He is wrong. Same-sex marriage was always a radical project with implications for all of society, which is why there is a direct line from Sullivan’s case for it to the extremism he now deplores. Same-sex marriage reduces the differences between men and women to a matter of personal sexual preference, rather than a fundamental ontological one upon which civilization is based. If the sex binary doesn’t matter in marriage, it doesn’t matter anywhere.
Instead of a lifelong covenant that unites the two halves of the human race in a relationship that provides for the future of the human race, marriage was redefined as the mere legal recognition of an indefinite and androgynous pairing. The collapse of the older understanding of marriage began before the LGBT movement, but the triumph of same-sex marriage sealed it.
As Pastor Hans Fiene has put it, expecting that same-sex marriage would have no significant social effects is like blowing up the Hoover Dam and expecting Lake Mead to move only a few inches. And so, less than a decade after the Supreme Court invented a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, men think they can be women, women think they can be men, doctors are amputating the healthy breasts from increasing numbers of troubled adolescent girls — and our leaders from President Joe Biden on down are cheering them on.
The Lie of Being ‘Born This Way’
Evils such as this were baked into the arguments used to establish same-sex marriage. In particular, the claim that people are “born this way” — that LGBT identities are intrinsic and immutable — ensured that dissenters would be persecuted and children would be groomed into rainbow identities. However, though the mantra of “born this way” was a public relations triumph, it was false. The search for a “gay gene” quietly ended in failure a few years ago. The experiences of same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria are often fluid and felt with varying intensity. The causes are diverse and complex; that these feelings and desires may be unchosen does not mean they are determined at birth, or that environmental and psychological factors play no role.
Nonetheless, the lie of “born this way” enabled the hijacking of civil rights law to serve the LGBT agenda, which ensured that opponents of the LGBT movement were not only defamed as the equivalent of racists but that the enormous state power used to break segregation would be deployed against them. And so every wedding cake artist and photographer must bow before the state-enforced metaphysical doctrine that sex is irrelevant to the meaning of marriage. And the dogmas of gender identity demand that women and even little girls must get comfortable with males ogling and flashing them in what used to be female-only spaces.
Worse still, the false doctrine of “born this way” demands the grooming of other people’s children into rainbow identities. After all, if we are born with our sexual orientation and gender identity already fixed for life, then some children are necessarily born into the rainbow elect. Affirming these identities is seen as essential to their flourishing, for the sexual self is seen as the authentic self. Therefore, in order for the children born into the LGBT elect to live as their true selves, they must learn who they really are. And because we do not know which children are born with a rainbow identity until they tell us, then all children must be taught about sexual orientation and gender identity as young as possible, and encouraged to explore any hints of rainbow identity.
Of course, because “born this way” is a lie, the result has been a surge in children and young adults claiming to be LGBT. Consequently, we are now debating whether public schools should encourage children to transition and then hide it from their parents, and whether the government should take children away from parents who don’t affirm a child’s transgender identity. Somehow, “love wins” has become a mandate to seize children from their parents and mutilate them.
Social Conservatives Vindicated
These evils show that though social conservatives have been defeated, we have been vindicated. And there is more than the logic of social and legal revolution at work here. What religious conservatives understood — and what almost everyone else overlooked — is that sin stays hungry. Indulging and endorsing falsehoods about the nature of marriage, sex, and what it means to be embodied as a man or a woman only leads to more lies and more injuries.
If the cause of same-sex marriage had been righteous, we might have seen a result like that Sullivan imagines. That matters have instead gone so wrong, so quickly, should prompt us to look for where we went astray.
This reevaluation will often be uncomfortable, for the premises of the LGBT movement are derived from the sexual revolution as a whole, and that implicates almost all of us. Same-sex marriage was not the top of the slippery slope, it was just a point where it got steeper. The slide began with the effort to separate sex and its pleasures from obligation and commitment — the lie that we could and should separate sex from marriage, and marriage from the natural family of mother, father, and children. This is, of course, a perennial temptation, but the wealth and technological prowess of our age made it seem less harmful than it did in less prosperous times that lacked the pill and penicillin. But money and technology are poor substitutes for virtue and justice, so we have kept sliding down the slope.
Same-sex marriage accelerated this, building on past lies and adding new ones. And it also prevents recovery, insofar as it institutionalizes lies about sex, marriage, and family. Truth must be the foundation of any effort to rebuild a healthy sexual and family culture. And that will require rejecting government dogmas declaring that men and women are sexually and relationally interchangeable, subject only to the sovereign whim of adult preference.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Bureaucrats in President Joe Biden’s Department of Education just put their thumb on the scale of a book dispute in Georgia by not only smearing parents’ concerns about sexually explicit books in schools but also leveraging their federal power to intimidate districts that have successfully purged porn from campuses. In the Biden administration’s latest attempt to weaponize an arm of the federal government against parents, the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) wrote a letter to Forsyth County Schools Superintendent Jeff Bearden on May 19 outlining everything it deemed wrong with the district’s decision to pull several inappropriate books from school bookshelves.
Not only did the federal agency demand that the district offer “supportive measures to students who may have been impacted by the book removal process,” but the OCR also ordered the Georgia school district to administer a “climate survey” to middle and high school students so bureaucrats can “assess whether additional steps need to be taken.”
The OCR predicated its probe into Forsyth schools on allegations from an unnamed complainant that the administration, at the bidding of parents, “created a hostile environment for students”based on race, color, or national origin. Using the Supreme Court’s expanded definition of “sex” as determined in the 5-4 Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020, the OCR also claimed it was investigating whether Forsyth County schools “created a hostile environment for students” based on sexual orientation and identity.
The Bostock ruling specifically pertained to sex differences in employment, not education. Still, after reviewing district documents, emails from parents to school staff, and school board meetings as well as interviewing several district staff, the Biden administration attempted to justify its involvement in this local education dispute by claiming it is a top enforcer of the 1972 Title IX and the 1964 Title VI laws.
“In my opinion, this is not about books,” Cindy Martin, an FCS mother, told The Federalist. “This is about the federal government using bully tactics against our school system to indoctrinate our children into their LGBTQ ideology.”
District and Parents Agree: Porn Shouldn’t Be in Schools
Clamor over inappropriate content in Forsyth schools first surfaced in 2021 when parents discovered several titles including sexually explicit material were made available by schools to their children. One parent told The Federalist that despite several attempts to contact the district, she never heard back until January 2022. After months of ignoring parents’ calls for change, the district called a District Media Committee meeting to independently discuss how to address ongoing concerns about unsuitable content in the classroom. By Jan. 21, 2022, FCS Superintendent Dr. Jeff Bearden asked the chief technology and information officer (CTIO) to “pull from school libraries books that were obviously sexually explicit or pornographic.”
“…how to address ongoing concerns about unsuitable content in the classroom”? Simple really. If you are uncomfortable reading the material Sunday Morning in Church Service, then should our children be READING IT?
“For us, it’s not about censorship because, obviously, students and parents have the right to choose to read whatever they want outside of the school,” FCS Chief Communications Officer Jennifer Caracciolo told one local media outlet at the time of the decision. “They can purchase it or they can go to the public library. But we have a responsibility whenever it comes to sexually explicit content in the walls of our buildings.”
Following a review, the CTIO asked Forsyth County Principals to indefinitely pull nine books from “all school libraries” and restrict another six books to high schools only.
“The content in them was what we would consider pervasively vulgar, and it’s not about whether or not a parent or guardian liked or disliked the ideas contained in the book or liked or disliked the author or the author’s identity, we focused on content that was pervasively vulgar,” Caracciolo clarified.
For a while, it seemed like the schools and the parents were beginning to get on the same page. But the fight wasn’t over yet.
“The conservative parents in our community were grateful that the school chose to stop providing children with this harmful, low-quality material. It fantasizes sex and leads to negative consequences such as sexual harassment, teen pregnancy, disease, and poverty,” Martin said. “However, we had done intense research and knew that eight books did not even come close to the amount of sexual explicit books that needed to be removed. This is how and why the Mama Bears of Forsyth County formed. We expected the school to make the libraries a safe place for all children. A school system should never provide sexual reading material to children.”
Twisted Tales
During its investigation, the OCR was quick to overlook the role parents and taxpayers have the right to play in the education of children, instead complaining that “the District did not make an announcement to, or have other communication with, students about the removal of the books.”
The OCR admitted in its findings letter that the school administration made it clear that the books in question “had not been reviewed for LGBTQI+ content or moral dilemma issues, just sexual explicitness.” Yet, OCR accused FCS parents of making what it characterized as “negative comments about diversity and inclusion or critical race theory.”
“Many parents called for the removal of additional books, with most of their comments focused on sexually explicit content; however, some comments focused on removing books for reasons related to gender identity or sexual orientation,” the letter stated.
The OCR additionally accused the district of giving the “impression that books were being screened to exclude diverse authors and characters, including people who are LGBTQI+ and authors who are not white, leading to increased fears and possibly harassment.”
Several local media outlets also expressed outrage at the district’s decision and spread the lie that FCS leadership was “banning” books at the bidding of parents. The OCR, in turn, cited the media’s rage as proof that parents and the district somehow overstepped their bounds by protecting minors from sexually explicit content.
One Atlanta Journal-Constitution article lamented that “Juliet Takes a Breath,” a book known for, as Common Sense Media put it, “detailed scenes of kissing and lovemaking between two women, sexual fantasies, masturbation, and periods, as well as extensive discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity,” would no longer be available to students. Another book called “Monday’s Not Coming,” one reviewer noted, is filled with “homosexuality, promiscuity, intercourse, and prostitution” as well as child abuse. That book was sent “to local media center review committees for further analysis” by the school district.
Similar coverage dominated corporate media pages after the OCR’s letter was published in May.
Shortly after the school district pulled the handful of explicit books, parents gathered at a Feb. 15, 2022 Forsyth County Board of Education meeting to express their concern that children were being exposed to even more explicit books via the school system.
One attendee, Alison Hair, only got a few words into reading an excerpt from one of the other explicit library books that still sat on FCS shelves before she was cut off by the board for allegedly violating meeting rules.
“If you continue with your statement just please, we have other people that are younger in this [room],” one board member told Hair.
“If it is inappropriate to read in this building, then it is inappropriate, inappropriate to be in a library,” Hair said. “How dare you say ‘Oh, well, there’s minors in here.’ Wait, what is it? My son’s a minor and this book that you all have copies is in my son’s middle school.”
Hair’s frustrations were echoed by more than a dozen other parents.
“I have an 11-year-old and this is not allowed in our house nor would I allow him to pick this book up at Barnes and Noble or your school library that you provide for my children,” Ann Christopher, a mother to a Forsyth County middle schooler, said. “Also, you say respect the rules. You’re telling Alison to respect the rules. Excuse me. This is in my child’s face if he chose to check it out. What rules are you respecting for my child who can’t speak for [himself]? I’m the one here to protect my child, nobody else is. That’s why we parents are here.”
In a complaint filed in July 2022, Mama Bears of Forsyth members Hair, who was barred from school board meetings after attempting to read from another explicit passage in March, and Martin alleged that the Forsyth County Board of Education violated their First Amendment rights as parents to speak up about what kind of reading materials their children are exposed to.
“This lawsuit does not try to resolve the question of which books should be available in school libraries, but instead addresses unlawful attempts to sanitize how parents speak about those books in the presence of elected officials and other adults,” the lawsuit states.
In February 2023, a judge ruled that the FCS board violated Hair and Martin’s constitutional rights and must pay $100,000 in legal fees.
Despite these particular books’ inappropriate content, parents’ ongoing pleas for the taxpayer-funded district to stop supplying pornographic material to children, and the district’s expensive legal defeat, multiple problematic books were eventually approved to return to school shelves, along with more than half a dozen other titles for high schools, after review by a committee.
The Biden administration’s OCR investigation and demand for a mea culpa from FCS over its decision to pull bad books is likely only going to deter the district from taking any further drastic action when it comes to porn and inappropriate content in schools.
FCS parents, Martin reassured The Federalist, are not deterred.
“Wake up parents,” Martin said.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
My daughter ‘was terribly bullied, but no one told me. … Please don’t let ideology harm another child,’ pleaded the mother of a 14-year-old girl who was isolated from her parents by school and court authorities and sex-trafficked twice.
A subcommittee in the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill on Monday that mandates public educators notify parents if their child “self-identifies” as something other than his or her natural sex. Introduced by Republican Dels. Dave LaRock, Tara Durant, and John McGuire, the measure (HB 2432) would provide parents with greater oversight into their children’s lives at school and increase transparency in public education. According to a summary of the legislation, if a school official “has reason to believe” that a student “is self-identifying as a gender different from the student’s biological sex,” said official is required “to contact as soon as practicable at least one of such student’s parents to ask whether such parent is aware of the student’s mental state and whether the parent wishes to obtain or has already obtained counseling for such student.”
Under the bill, school officials, such as counselors and clinical social workers, are barred from “encouraging or coercing a minor to withhold from the minor’s parent the fact that the minor’s perception of his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex” or “withholding from a minor’s parent information relating to the minor’s perception that his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex.”
Monday’s subcommittee vote came along party lines, with five Republicans voting in favor and three Democrats opposing.
Known as Sage’s Law, HB 2432 was introduced after it was revealed that a then-14-year-old Virginia girl ended up in the hands of sexual predators after her school failed to disclose her gender dysphoria to her mother. As The Federalist previously reported, the chain of events began in August 2021 when Sage began identifying as a boy and suffered intense bullying and harassment at school. Eventually, Sage ran away and was “found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault.”
Appomattox County High School, which affirmed Sage’s new “identity” without notifying her mother, was following model guidelines issued by then-Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration on so-called gender affirmation. Such guidance has since been terminated by current GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Throughout Monday’s hearing on Sage’s Law, witnesses supporting the bill discussed its importance in keeping parents involved in their children’s livelihoods, especially in the school classroom. During her testimony, Sage’s mother Michele called on the subcommittee to put commonsense before ideology.
“If I had known [what was going on], this would be a much different story. [Sage] was terribly bullied, but no one told me,” Michele said. “Please don’t let ideology harm another child. Let parents do our jobs. We know our children best and we love them a million times more.”
Also called to testify at the hearing was Dr. Erin Brewer, a former “trans kid” who spoke about the importance of schools helping children through their gender dysphoria without affirming such confusion or concealing it from parents.
“I was insistent that I was a boy when I started first grade after a brutal sexual assault. If I had been affirmed by my teachers, it would have allowed me to completely dissociate from myself as a girl and create a new persona who could pretend that the horrible trauma that triggered my gender dysphoria hadn’t happened to me,” she said. “Instead of encouraging my confusion and hiding it from my mother, the school contacted my mother, got permission for me to be assessed by the school psychologist, and they came up with a comprehensive program to help me resolve my gender dysphoria. … I [one] hundred percent support this legislation.”
Erin Friday, a lifelong Democrat and co-founder of Our Duty, a national and international parent and child advocacy group, also spoke in support of Sage’s Law. Throughout her remarks, Friday noted her personal experiences with a gender-dysphoric daughter and stated that “schools should never keep secrets from parents.”
Opponents to Sage’s Law also spoke at the hearing, with one man claiming to be a “trans woman” arguing that such legislation is “ridiculous” and that schools should be able to conceal a child’s gender dysphoria from that child’s parents.
“It should be that child’s own choice,” he said. “If we wanna tell who we wanna tell, like, that’s on us.”
Despite leftists’ support for deceptively-termed “gender affirmation” and the “transitioning” of children, research has shown that “upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty” and that “children who are ‘affirmed’ as the opposite sex … particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization.” Children who undergo such protocols are subjected to lifelong damage to their bodies. The practices are so horrific that nations around the world, such as England, have ended the disfiguring practices that are falsely labeled as “gender-affirming care” for minors.
“Parents should never be the last to know [about what’s going on in their children’s lives],” said Durant during the subcommittee meeting. “It’s a very strange, strange place to me that we’re in now where parents are being told to step aside, to sit down, that ‘we as educators, as counselors know better [for] your own child’ — and that’s just simply not true.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
After the 14-year-old was found being sexually assaulted in another state, a judge kept her from loving parents because they questioned her transgender identity. Then she was trafficked again.
In August 2021, by concealing a teen’s newly asserted transgender identity from her parents, Virginia’s Appomattox County High School participated in a chain of events that led to that girl falling into the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice.
When the FBI found Sage (last name of the family withheld for privacy) in Maryland, where she was victimized by a sexual predator, a judge refused to return her to her parents on the grounds they were abusing her in not affirming her as male. Housed in the boys’ quarters of a children’s home away from her parents, she told her mother, she was assaulted again. The girl soon fled, then was brutally sex-trafficked again until her rescue in Texas by law enforcement.
Sage’s Law, or the Child Protection Act, is being introduced this week in the Virginia House of Delegates by Delegate Dave LaRock in honor of this young teen from Appomattox County, Virginia. Sage hopes sharing her story will help protect others from the abuse she suffered at the hands of predators, precipitated in part by the very institutions that should have protected her.
School policies and state laws that encourage concealing information from parents’ purport to protect vulnerable minors. In practice, as tragically demonstrated by Sage’s case, such policies open the door to predators by removing children’s greatest protection from their lives.
Sage’s Law aims to shut that door in three ways. It would require schools to notify parents if their child asserts a gender different from his or her sex; it prevents school counselors from withholding or encouraging minors to withhold information about a child’s gender identity; and it clarifies that raising a child according to his or her biological sex, including decisions about a child’s mental and physical health, may not be construed as abuse.
Sage’s story, compiled from months of interviews, reports, and records, has been lived by countless other families torn apart in the name of gender ideology by activist schools, judges, anddoctors. This is a story of the unbearable cost of parent-exclusion policies, but also of a mother’s love and relentless determination to save her child.
Institutions that Should Protect Endanger Instead
Sage is a slight, pretty, 15-year-old girl with elfin features and an edgy style. Recently, reflecting back on her transgender identification, she told her mom: “I don’t know who I was. I’m a totally different person now. I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends.”
That self-reflection is consistent with the research showing that upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty. Children who are “affirmed” as the opposite sex, however, particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization. Sage’s comment also reflects the reality of social contagion, fueled by social media and increasingly recognized internationally as a factor in the exponential rise in the number of children identifying as transgender.
Yet states such as California allow children as young as 12 to make their own health-care decisions, without their parents but under the authority of the state. In January, Virginia delegates Candi Mundon King, Nadarius Clark, Michelle Maldonado, Sam Rasoul, and Marcus Simon filed a similar bill authorizing courts, social workers, and medical professionals to withhold information from parents and consent to medical procedures for “mature” minors.
The consequences for children and families in states such as California that construe not “affirming” as abuse are particularly dire. In October, progressive Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman announced she would reintroduce her 2020 bill to criminalize parents who do not affirm their child’s transgender identity as guilty of abuse, potentially resulting in the loss of custody.
School Policies Endangering Students
Michele adopted Sage, her biological granddaughter, after the death of her son. Like many gender-dysphoric children, Sage has a history of trauma from that early childhood loss. Related health problems became severe at times, requiring therapy and medical treatment. Her daughter’s previous schools notified Michele when concerns arose, she said, enabling her to have Sage’s treatment adjusted. But when her daughter entered Appomattox County High School in early August 2021, Michele says she was cut out of the loop.
Unbeknownst to Michele, her then-14-year-old’s taste at the time for boys’ clothing, which she described to her mother as simply “dressing emo,” was accompanied by her assertion at school that she was a transgender boy. School records, shared by the family, indicate school staff were calling Sage by her chosen male name and pronouns and at her request concealing this from her parents. Sage recalls her school counselor telling her during the first week of school that since she identified as male she could use the boys’ bathroom.
School records also indicate bullying, although they do not capture the severity of what Sage eventually told her mom: boys were following behind her in a group, touching her, threatening her with knife violence and rape, and even shoving her up against the hallway wall. On Aug. 23, according to school notes, reports were received from students and teachers that Sage had used a boys’ bathroom and encountered hostile boys there. The school counselor met with Sage the next day to direct her to use the nurses’ bathroom for safety reasons.
Sage’s statement that “all the boys at this school are rapists” prompted the school to review hallway footage outside the bathroom, showing that several boys had entered while she was inside. On Wednesday, Aug. 25, the counselor and school resource officer called Sage into a meeting, where she became so emotional that the counselor recorded concern Sage might be “a risk to herself due to being so upset when leaving school.”
Only at this point — after meeting alone with her daughter, after two days had passed and knowledge of the incident had reached all the way to the superintendent, according to the school records — did the school finally contact Michele, she said, still without revealing the male identity her daughter was asserting.
Michele recalls finding a school hall pass labeled with a new name that August evening and Sage telling her for the first time that she was identifying as a boy at school. As Michele sat with her on the floor, Sage tried to stop the tears as she told her mother a group of male students had “jacked” her up against the wall of the boys’ bathroom and threatened her with violence, and that she was terrified of what they would do. Michele tried to comfort her, assuring her she could stay home while they figured out how to handle the bullying.
That night, Sage disappeared. She was found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault. That was just the beginning of her family’s ordeal.
Excluding Parents Invites Predators
As Michele’s case illustrates, school policies that exclude parents from critical knowledge of their child’s mental health remove a child’s greatest safeguard from his or her life. While this author could find no such policy posted on the Appomattox High School or school board websites, the school’s actions to “affirm” Sage’s stated gender, name, and pronouns and to permit access to bathrooms of the opposite sex are all consistent with the directives of former Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s 2021 model policies. So is the choice to deceive parents.
In fact, the Northam policies direct that an entire gender transition team and plan be set up for such a child, all in secret from the parents if the child so wishes. This guidance was revoked in 2022 by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, but Virginia Democrats and LGBT groups are fiercely contesting the transparency and parental consent required by the new proposed guidance.
Yet school counselors, unlike parents, have at best an extremely limited knowledge of a child’s mental, emotional, and physical needs. They also have neither the constitutional authority nor the expertise to determine a child’s best interests.
Children who identify as transgender have well-documented mental health co-morbidities and rates of adverse psychiatric events. Even Dr. Erica Anderson, former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), has raised alarm at the “pitched battle” engendered by professionals who “triangulate” or set children in opposition to their parents.
In Sage’s case, by withholding information about her daughter’s gender identity and related issues, including the severe bullying related to Sage’s transgender exploration, the school destroyed vital opportunities for Michele to discern warning signs in time to assess and respond before tragedy struck.
Predators know transgender kids are vulnerable prey. Sage told Michele months later that some of the transgender websites to which a school counselor referred her linked to “creepy” older men and pornography.
One mother told this author that as soon as her daughter identified online as “female to male,” multiple suspicious “sugar daddy” accounts reached out to her on social media. Roblox, the wildly popular children’s gaming site, has transgender chat rooms with a panic button to “hide your screen from your parents.” Sage, her mother says, was lured to meet sex traffickers by online predators posing as friends.
A Court-Enabled Tragedy
The first call from the FBI came late at night on Sept. 2, her mother recounts: Sage had been found. Michele says investigators told her Sage had been trafficked into Washington, D.C. and then Maryland for nine days of horrific, brutal sexual abuse.
Driving through the night, their backseat full of stuffed animals and cozy blankets, Michele and her husband Roger arrived early the next morning at the Baltimore Courthouse. They were stunned to hear that their child, who had just survived unspeakable trauma, was being held in a juvenile detention cell and that they were being summoned to a hearing late that afternoon before Judge Robert Kershaw. When they entered the courtroom, Sage appeared from the penitentiary remotely, on screen, with only court-appointed attorney Aneesa Khan, an assistant public defender, present in person. “I love you, baby!” Michele cried to her daughter, who responded “I love you too, Nana.” To their shock, Khan spoke up and alleged on Sage’s behalf that she did not wish to return home and had been “both emotionally and physically abused by his parents in connection with [his] expressed male gender identity and desire to live as a trans male.”
Michele had only found out about this claimed male identity the night her daughter disappeared. Yet Michele was willing to use any name or pronoun to bring her home. Sage later told her, Michele says, that Khan “told me to tell the judge my parents hit me, starved me.” Sage also told Michele that Khan “didn’t care how much [Sage] had to lie…but they were going to win this case” to remove Sage from her parents’ custody and place her in a Maryland foster home that would affirm her as male.
Michele is a Virginia Court-Appointed Child Advocate (CASA) with years of experience supporting troubled teens, and she and Roger were quickly cleared of abuse charges. But the allegations were used to take custody of their daughter and bar them from seeing her.
The Cruelty of Ideology
Rather than treat Sage as a victim of horrific sex trafficking and return her to her family, the court dealt with her as a runaway, providing grounds for temporary custody in Maryland. Significantly, under the Interstate Juvenile Compact, even if allegations of abuse are made, juveniles are to be returned to their home state, which is presumed to better be able to assess the child’s needs. Judge Kershaw delayed this return for two months, which led to Sage’s next trafficking episode.
Instead of receiving treatment for her profound physical and emotional trauma, Sage was kept for days in solitary detention as a runaway, then transferred to the Catonsville Children’s Home. Per Judge Kershaw’s order, she was housed according to her “expressed male gender.” Michele says she eventually learned from Sage that she was the only girl in male quarters and that she had been repeatedly assaulted there.
Kershaw held multiple hearings focusing on Sage’s claimed male identity and Khan’s efforts to demonstrate gender identity abuse, including calling two Appomattox school counselors to testify against Sage’s parents. While his final ruling on Nov. 10, 2021, reluctantly conceded lawful custody to the parents, Kershaw opined at length that “more likely than not” Sage had “endured emotional abuse and neglect by his parents,” including “misgendering” and “misnaming.” Astonishingly, Kershaw cited as evidence of parental abuse “running away from Virginia to Maryland,” when in fact Sage was abducted, raped, and trafficked across state lines.
While Sage was in The Children’s Home, Michele says she sent letters and cards multiple times a week and tried countless times to reach her by phone, especially on Sage’s 15th birthday. Months later, Sage commented: “I missed you so much, but I tried not to because you didn’t want me back.” Horrified, her mother asked what she meant. She learned from Sage that Khan had told her that, because she was transgender, Michele didn’t want her anymore — and that not one of her cards or messages had ever reached her daughter.
Sage also eventually told her mother that, while living at the foster home, she skipped classes every day and would “smoke weed and do drugs” with kids she had met. Sage also relayed later that Khan had told her “I don’t give a sh-t if you do drugs, I just want to win this case.” Sage also said Khan had visited the home of one of Sage’s Maryland school friends to enlist her support in contacting Sage, claiming Khan had won the case and resulting in knowledge of Sage’s case spreading around the school.
In a text to a friend at the time, Sage referenced Khan’s intent: “going to the court of appeals, and the supreme court.” It is difficult to avoid Michele’s conclusion that “[t]he only best interest [Sage’s] attorney had was for herself. To put my traumatized child on center stage to push her political or gender agenda!”
Michele begged the court to provide treatment for the trauma Sage had endured and had found placement for her by mid-October, approved by Virginia social services, in Youth for Tomorrow’s program for young victims of sexual exploitation. The judge rejected it because they would treat Sage as a girl.
Not until Nov. 10 did Judge Kershaw approve placement in North Spring, a residential treatment facility that would affirm her claimed male identity. Frightened of being locked in the facility and believing her mother no longer wanted her, Sage texted a friend, “im gonna dip” (leave). On Nov. 12, 2021, Sage says, she cut off her court-required GPS monitor and ran away to meet an online “friend” in Texas she thought was 16.
Once more, the unspeakable happened. Sage fell into the hands of a predator who, police told Michele, raped, starved, drugged, and brutalized her. This time she disappeared for months. For the second time in less than four months, Michele had no way of knowing if her daughter was even alive. But Michele never stopped searching. Finally, a tip she discovered on social media led Texas marshals to her daughter’s rescue in Dallas on Jan. 24, 2022.
For the first time since that conversation on the floor of Sage’s bedroom on Aug. 25 the year before, mother and daughter were able to talk. On the plane ride home, Michele listened as Sage began to unburden her heart, grieving over what she learned but overcome with gratitude that her daughter was alive and restored to her.
Affirmation by Intimidation
Upon her return to Virginia, Sage entered North Spring, the lock-down facility negotiated by the court, with Michele driving four hours each way for her weekly allotted visit. Sage was heavily medicated, suffering from constant nightmares, and fearful of both residents and doctors. Sage told her mother that her counselor also pressured Sage to tell Michele she wanted a “gender-affirming” mastectomy.
Yet, during one of Michele’s visits, Sage asked if her mother could secretly take her to buy girls’ clothes, stating she didn’t want to be a boy anymore, but she was scared to tell the doctors. Pressured by North Spring to let them treat her daughter, Michele reached out to Josh Hetzler, an attorney with Richmond-based Founding Freedoms Law Center, who secured her daughter’s return. After nearly a year of horror, she was finally home safely.
The road ahead is a long one of healing both physically and emotionally. There are confusing lapses in concentration and persistent, terrifying nightmares. In a safe, loving home, surrounded by her pets and easing into at-home learning and therapy sessions, the painful recollections emerge unpredictably, as do the panic attacks. Michele doesn’t press, letting Sage open up at her pace, whether to her or to her beloved uncle Cory, who has moved home to support her.
As she begins to process her ordeal, Sage now desires to protect others from the horrors she experienced. Michele’s heroic, unrelenting determination to save her daughter has turned not only to helping her heal but to preserving other families from what hers endured. Advocates have rallied to help fund legal action through The Gavel Project, and to craft policies that will help protect others.
Sage’s Law
Many children never escape the clutches of sex traffickers. Had it not been for her mother’s relentless love and determination, Sage might never have been found. Michele calls it a miracle. In the starkest of contrasts, the actions of ideologues played a part — twice — in her daughter falling into the traffickers’ hands.
Sage’s public school could have been transparent to Michele about her daughter’s struggles. The court could have returned her to Virginia without furthering a quest to make legal history. The children’s home could have protected her from assault and access to drugs. And doctors could have treated trauma, not pressed living as the opposite sex and mutilative surgery on a victim of sexual abuse. All along, it was her mother who truly had Sage’s best interest at heart.
Sage was failed by adults who thought they were helping but were blinded to their own cruelty by their ideology. Michele tells of countless parents who have reached out to her with their own stories of families and bodies destroyed by school counselors, courts, and doctors who may spend minutes with a child, but assert they have the expertise and authority to usurp decisions from parents who have poured a lifetime into their care.
Sage has shown great courage in sharing her story, and it is time for lawmakers to take a stand for her and many other children by passing Sage’s Law. There is only one acceptable response to her story: never again.
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
Michigan voters will decide Tuesday whether children in that state can obtain puberty blockers at Planned Parenthood facilities without parental consent. Proposal 3 would also give Michigan children a constitutional right to be castrated or surgically sterilized — again, without the consent of a parent.
Parental rights have become a fiercely contested battleground. Historically, your right to determine what’s in the best interest of your child has gone without question. It’s the oldest, most fundamental liberty we know, enshrined in legal doctrine since 1690.
But too often today, ideology determines whether your parental rights will actually stand in court. If a parent opposes her child’s desire to pretend to be the opposite sex, courts increasingly treat that parent’s rights as expendable.The sexual confusion of children overshadows parents’ rights to remain in their children’s lives as a potent force.
In a courtroom down the hall, however, the rights of neglectful or drug-abusing parents are treated with kid gloves, under the theme of family preservation. Activist courts stand ready to protect your parental rights, but only when your narrative matches their own.
‘I’m God in this Case’
Less than a year ago, Abigail Shrier shocked readers with her story of a California judge who stripped a father of his parental rights because he showed insufficient support for performing irreversible medical procedures on his sex-confused son. These cases are popping up all around the country. Sexual ideology is becoming the governing factor in a child’s placement, trumping the will and the voice of a parent.In a state whose governor was elected on a parental rights platform, Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman brazenly introduced a bill that would charge a parent who fails to affirm a child’s “sexual orientation or gender identity” with a felony. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed legislation that makes his state a “refuge” for trans-identifying minors who seek irreversible medical procedures. Just make it to the Golden State … and there is nothing your objecting parents can do.
One case in the sleepy university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, provides some insight into how a parent can suddenly get framed as “the bad parent” in a custody battle, merely for questioning a child’s sexual confusion.
Sarah Schultz told me she spent more than a half-million dollars trying to retain joint custody of her 15-year-old daughter who first claimed she was bisexual and then began to question her sex. Schultz pled for a “wait and see” approach and for the right to have an influence in her daughter’s maturing adolescence. Despite Sarah’s ex-husband’s earlier fentanyl overdose, she says, a judge gave primary custody of the daughter to her dad, who permitted both bisexual and heterosexual sleepovers. In the past four years, Schultz has seen her daughter fewer than five times.
Schultz said the appointed guardian ad litem viewed her faith as a threat to her daughter’s emerging sexuality.“I’m God in this case,” Schultz recalled her daughter’s guardian ad litem saying. The court saw her daughter as a girl in an “authentic process to discover her identity,” Schultz explained, while the father was commendable because he was “allowing her sexuality to blossom.”
Courts often use the “safety of the child” as a guise to award custody to a parent who mirrors the left’s narrative. Note the irony here. How can you be a good parent unless you are willing to oppose something harmful your child thinks she wants at the time? A teenager sees hormones and irreversible surgeries as a mirage of liberation. A concerned parent sees what a disfigured body and the inability to have children will mean 10 years from now.
A Pernicious Double Standard
Treatment of parental rights in the world of foster care and adoption, meanwhile, is a vastly different story.
A mother can give birth to a baby who spends two months in the NICU, crying for endless hours as he detoxes from the heroin his mother ingested during pregnancy, and she or her mother can still take the baby home. Parental rights are treated as sacrosanct, even though most of the maltreatment of children actually occurs at the hands of parents or their paramours.
“Family preservation” is the holy grail courts and welfare agencies pursue, often at the expense of the actual safety of children. As Naomi Schaefer Riley explains in her book, “No Way To Treat A Child,” “child welfare workers and family-court judges … believe that foster care, to the extent that it should be used at all, is an endless holding pattern for a child while parents get their affairs in order.” Sadly, many never do.
In an effort to preserve parental rights, children languish in care for years. The common complaint in foster care is “the clock.” Though a child is legally eligible for adoption after roughly two years in care, drug-abusing parents can play out the clock, attend a few recovery meetings, fulfill a requirement or two on the reunification plan — and the clock starts over. Many children age out of the possibility of adoption because the court favors parental rights over children’s attachment needs.
The Use and Abuse of Parental Rights
Given the current capricious approach of many courts, the question to ask is: Just how safe are your parental rights? If the issues at hand are related to your child’s confusion about his sex, then your parental rights can be bargained away in court far too easily. But if the court frames those rights as a matter of “family preservation,” they are nearly carved in stone.
The contrast between how parental rights are viewed, depending on the left-wing bias of courts and state agencies, should disturb everyone. The right of conscientious parents to shape their child’s life is among the most cherished of all human freedoms. That right is increasingly threatened, as the militancy of transgender ideology invades the private realm of parent and child.
How safe are your parental rights then? Only as safe as the left wants them to be.
Paula Rinehart, LCSW, is a therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of the book “Sex and the Soul of a Woman.” She writes about family and culture.
Casey Scott, a middle school art teacher, described the incident as simply a discussion that happened in class in which students volunteered details about their sexuality and gender identity. Initial reporting indicated she decided to take the opportunity to provide details about her own sexuality and then asked her students to draw pictures.
In another state, teachers in San Francisco held a Zoom meeting in which the question came up as to how to handle a parent who asks teachers to use her child’s given name and biologically correct pronouns. One teacher answered by conveying an experience in which a parent stated to them, “I know you were using a different name than my child’s given name at birth and the pronouns we gave them, and I’m respectfully asking that you use the name and the pronouns that we gave them.”
The teacher proudly described their defiance saying in return, “So, in my classroom, I will refer to your child by whatever name and pronouns that they’ve told me they feel most comfortable with.”
When I was outed in high school in 1998, I attempted to talk to a sympathetic teacher, who firmly explained this was simply not something she could discuss with me. I even decided to force the issue by bringing it up in class and she, again, firmly instructed me to stop, recognizing that the classroom was not an open forum for me to express my personal issues.
Yet another example, shared by Libs of Tiktok, displays a teacher excitedly announcing the teacher came out to peers, supervisors, and students, showing the teacher dressed up as a woman with a full beard.
Keeping Parents in the Dark
Many teachers now seem to feel an obligation and certainly a sense of entitlement to use their classroom as a group therapy session, viewing students as peers they can share secrets with. Unfortunately, this has grown into its own culture in which teachers position themselves as the sole source of safety for vulnerable students, who are assumed to have no one else to turn to. Many in this generation of teachers see themselves as an underground railroad of sorts to ensure students can freely express their “true selves” without the judgment or restrictions of their parents.
This has been demonstrated by the growing discovery of “Transition Closets,” where schools offer students the opportunity to change into opposite-sex clothing once out of the watchful eye of their parents. The entire system seems to be designed to hide children from their parents and teach them to rely on teachers or other administrators for protection and validation.
The motivation behind all of this can be seen in my own generation’s experience with coming out in the late ’90s and how we felt isolated, abandoned, and stigmatized, often by the adults who were supposed to be teaching us about life. We grew up to become teachers ourselves or professors educating a new generation of teachers, and we wanted to make sure students never experienced that again.
The problem that manifests is the teachers behave as activists rather than educators, seeing their defiance of school policy, parental requests, and even the law as a righteous battle for the greater good. Either arrogantly entitled or defiant, activist teachers seem to believe they have free reign in the classroom.
Casey Scott, for example, argued she was not made aware of any restrictions on topics of discussion with the students, saying, “Not once did anyone from my administration ever explain to me any topic that I was not to allow or discuss … as a first-year art teacher in a reinstated class with zero art teaching experience it is reasonable to expect … a mentor to help oversee and give me guidance but, none was offered?”
But why would she think it would possibly be appropriate to discuss complex ideas of sexuality and gender identity with students aged 13 and under? The pictures drawn by the students were of pride flags, which Scott took a picture of for the news. These photos show a lesbian pride flag, an asexual pride flag, a genderfluid flag, and a rainbow flag, among upwards of 10 crumpled pieces of paper. She herself boasted of going into details of what being pansexual meant for her as an educational exercise.
In the San Francisco school Zoom discussion, a teacher argued, “in my school district, LGBTQ+ students have a bill of rights — and the fourth one is that they have the right to be referred to by their gender pronouns and a name that fits their gender identity.” She went on to brag that when a parent complained about the policy, the school responded saying, “No, sorry. Like, our district-wide rule is that the student determines that, not you.”
When Activism Overruns Curriculum
Teachers and many school administrators have lost sight of their fundamental purpose and their obligation to parents. There was no reason for a teacher to explain that she is pansexual and what that means for her. There is no reason for a teacher to “come out” as though he is a teenager, in order to gain approval and validation from students.
Students are being taught to explicitly lie to their parents, with full school administrative support. Non-LGBT students also feel the impact of this, as they are made to feel excluded from these special activities.
Think for a moment of the situation in which the teacher allegedly encouraged her students to draw pride flags. There are hundreds of flag variations representing the full extent of gender and sexuality, except for 95 percent of the population who are heterosexual and accept their physical sex as fact. Imagine being a middle school student with a teacher who announces she is queer and begins encouraging queer classmates to draw pictures of how special and celebrated they are. Imagine the pressure they must feel to find something, anything, to fit in and be a part of the activity.
Sadly, LGBT organizations support the efforts of these teacher activists and the overwhelming message that all students should explore their potential sexuality and gender identity. GLAAD, for example, explicitly encourages teachers to change their language, ask their students for pronouns, provide LGBT resource materials and openly defend student identities.
The answer to all of this is more transparency for parents and for those parents to be active in their children’s schools. There is no justification for keeping school projects, discussions, or curricula from parents. Parental rights, especially in education, must continue to be a top priority for Republican leaders. The more examples like this that are discovered, the more active we all must become in ensuring children are learning appropriately in school rather than being indoctrinated by left-wing ideologies.
Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of the “Reasonably Gay: Essays and Arguments” series and is a social writer focusing on truth in media, conservative ideas and goals, and true equality under the law. You can follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.
News broke Wednesday the Florida Senate had passed a bill to dismantle Walt Disney World’s half-century-old “independent special district” status, an arrangement whereby Disney has been allowed, since 1968, essentially to govern itself. Gov. Ron DeSantis says Disney’s self-governing status should be subject to review, to ensure that it is still “appropriately serving the public interest.”
Good. Disney is reaping its just reward for inserting itself into the political debate about Florida’s parental rights bill, which Disney lost in spectacular fashion. Republican governors and lawmakers across the country should be taking notes. This is how you deal with big corporations that try to throw around their weight and force woke policies on voters and families. You punish them, not just because they deserve it, but also, as Voltaire famously put it, pour encourager les autres.
Disney was no doubt betting that DeSantis and Florida Republicans would do what Republicans have almost always done in the face of woke corporate pressure: simply back down. That’s what South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem did last year when at the behest of the NCAA she vetoed a bill that would have protected girls’ sports from trans ideologues.
Same with Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who vetoed a measure banning genital mutilation and hormone treatments for minors (he was subsequently overridden by the state legislature). Same goes for then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who in 2015 infamously caved to corporate pressure and gutted his state’s religious freedom law.
Indeed, at any other time and place, with almost any other Republican governor and legislature, Disney would almost certainly not have faced any consequences for wading into the debate over the parental rights bill. After all, since when do Republicans actually wield power against the enemies of their voters and defend ordinary families from powerful woke corporations? Almost never.
By breaking that mold, DeSantis has set a clear example that other GOP governors and state lawmakers should follow. If a corporation like Disney wants to insert itself in a political battle that has nothing to do with its business — in this case, a fight over whether to prohibit classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to children in kindergarten through the third grade — then it should be prepared to pay a heavy cost. Simply put, corporations that do what Disney did, publicly lobbying against the rights of parents to have a say in whether their young children are exposed to sexually explicit subject matter, have marked themselves out as enemies of a free people and should be treated as such. If Disney wants to make war on families in Florida, then the proper role of a democratically elected government is to go after Disney with every power at its disposal. Maybe that means they lose tax breaks that were once justified for purely economic reasons. Same for the special status Walt Disney World has enjoyed all these years, governing a 40-square-mile area in central Florida as it sees fit.
This isn’t about the economic arguments, not anymore. Whatever merit there was to the notion that Disney “serves the public interest” before the fight over parental rights has completely vanished. Now that Disney has taken a stand against families and parents, there can be no doubt: Disney does not serve the public interest in Florida, and Floridians owe it nothing.
Conservatives should understand this, but not all of them do. Over at National Review, Charles Cooke has decided to stand athwart history, as it were, and yell: “Independent special district status is complicated!” His complaint with DeSantis is that there was no need to punish Disney over its opposition to the parental rights bill because the bill passed. Disney lost, DeSantis and Republicans won. Moreover, he adds, until a month ago, “Walt Disney World’s legal status was not even a blip on the GOP’s radar. No Republicans were calling for it to be revisited, nor did they have any reason to.”
Did they not? What changed in the last month that might have prompted them to revisit the issue? Could it be that Disney came out publicly as a very real threat to Florida parents who don’t want their second-graders instructed about sexual orientation and gender identity? Could it be that the fight over the parental rights bill revealed Disney as something other than an entertainment brand and Walt Disney World as something other than a beloved family theme park? Could it be, in fact, that this entire affair has exposed Disney as a malign force in Florida’s civic life?
That Cooke can’t grasp this, and instead attacks DeSantis by tediously explicating the particulars of Florida’s independent special districts, shows the naiveté of conservatives in general and Republican politicians in particular on woke corporations pushing extremist agendas. Cooke argues there are lots of independent special districts in Florida, and that Walt Disney World “is unique not in its type but only in its particulars.” Orlando International Airport and the Daytona International Speedway, he notes, have a similar independent status. Why single out Disney?
To ask is to answer. Did the Orlando International Airport or the Daytona International Speedway wage a public campaign against the parental rights bill, and while doing so commit to pushing a “queer” agenda on children? No, they didn’t. Disney did. That makes all the difference.
If the airport and the speedway had behaved the way Disney did then yes, Florida lawmakers should have absolutely punished them. (Thanks to the impending revocation of Walt Disney World’s special status, it’s unlikely the airport or speedway or any other entity in Florida with a similar status will decide to follow in Disney’s footsteps, which is part of the point.)
Cooke further laments that singling out Disney is a mistake because, “Walt Disney World is deeply rooted in Florida’s soil, as a result of agreements the Florida legislature made with it in good faith. To poison that soil over a temporary spat would be absurd.”
But here again Cooke — and really, it’s not about Cooke, it’s about the accommodationist strain on the right that he and NR represent — misunderstands the nature of the fight. This is not a “temporary spat,” as Disney itself has made clear. It’s an ideological and cultural war that corporations like Disney will never stop waging.
For many years now, only one side in this war has been crying “no quarter” before every battle. The other side has pretended not to believe it and surrendered time and again, with predictable results. Finally, DeSantis and Florida Republicans have taken the enemy at their word and responded in kind. Republicans everywhere should go and do likewise.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
A parent can look at the label on a juice box to decide what ingredients to allow into her child’s body. He should also be able to decide what ingredients a teacher puts into his child’s mind, but that isn’t the case in a growing number of public schools.
When Covid-19 brought the classroom into the kitchen, parents’ eyes were opened to some unsettling revelations, including that their children are being indoctrinated into critical race theory, and that some schools are secretly treating girls as boys and vice-versa.
Food labeling helps parents make informed decisions about what their children eat. In the same way, transparency helps parents make informed decisions about what their children learn. Yet some schools are resisting calls for transparency. Corporate media and teachers’ unions have inaccurately disparaged parents, but these critics are wrong. Here are three reasons why.
1. Children belong to their parents, not to the ‘community’ or the state.
Former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry infamously called on her viewers to “break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents,’. . . and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” Her pitch was strikingly similar to that of Terry McAuliffe, former Virginia governor and chair of the Democratic National Committee, who said parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach.
This view of parental rights is at odds with parents’ fundamental right to direct the education and upbringing of their children. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, stating, “The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
As Professor Melissa Moschella writes, parental rights stem from the uniquely intimate relationship between parents and children. Children belong to their families, which are headed by their parents. Therefore, parents have the most direct obligation and authority to care for children until they are mature enough to direct their own lives. Until then, parents mediate a child’s relationship to the larger political community.
The failure to recognize that the family is distinct and relatively independent from the political community, and that parental rights are pre-political and natural rights, is not just wrong, but dangerous. Moschella notes Hannah Arendt’s observation that eliminating the intermediary structures between the individual and the state — namely the family and the church — is the essence of totalitarianism.
2. More schools are crossing the boundary line between education and indoctrination.
If schools just taught the “three Rs” (reading, writing, and arithmetic), parents would not suspect schools were undermining their values, beliefs, and authority. But, as parents in Albemarle County, Virginia, recently learned, some schools are indoctrinating students with so-called “anti-racism” ideology.
Instead of condemning all racism, “anti-racism” replaces one form of racism with another. Following “anti-racist” logic, Albemarle County schools used race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity to label students as “dominate” or “subordinate.”
Parents from five families of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds challenged the policy. The school undermined what these parents believe and teach their children — that all people are created equal and should be treated as such. The school even threatened to punish students for not supporting the policy.
Yet, as Judge James C. Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit wrote in Oliver v. Arnold, “Schools should educate—not indoctrinate. Teachers can teach. And teachers can test. But teachers cannot require students to endorse a particular political viewpoint.”
Parental rights don’t end at the schoolhouse gate. Parents must be able to protect their children from policies that place burdens and privileges on them according to their immutable characteristics.
3. Backed by the Biden administration, schools are even engaging in unauthorized treatment of students’ mental health.
The U.S. Department of Education has promoted “gender support plans.” An official fact sheet instructs schools to maintain “confidentiality” for students who identify as transgender at school by not using the student’s birth name or “sex assigned at birth if the student wishes to keep this information private.” But there is no mention of notifying, much less involving, parents in such a consequential decision to adopt a new name and pronouns that correspond to the opposite sex.
The agency tells schools to support a student’s gender transition by using “a checklist of issues to discuss with the student or their family” (emphasis added). Without an explicit requirement that schools inform and obtain parental consent to treat the child as a member of the opposite sex, it is reasonable to assume that notification to parents is optional. The schools may also perceive parental notification as a matter that depends on whether the child views their parents as “affirming” of gender transition.
Schools’ use of “gender support plans,” like those recommended by the Biden administration, have shocked parents around the country. After learning that schools sought to hide their children’s emotional distress from them, they challenged these policies in Wisconsin, Florida, and California courts.
Alliance Defending Freedom recently informed Virginia’s Harrisonburg City School District that its policy of using different names and pronouns amounts to “a psychosocial treatment that will increase the odds of long-term persistence,” according to Dr. Kenneth Zucker, an expert in treating gender dysphoria in children. Up to 90 percent of children with gender dysphoria eventually become comfortable with their bodies if they aren’t encouraged to live as the opposite sex. Schools should not endanger students by hiding information from parents about their mental health or engage in unauthorized treatment of gender dysphoria.
Lockdowns allowed many parents to see the ingredients inside their children’s education. That prompted them to support laws that provide more transparency into curriculum and policies. Parents should be able to decide on the education that best suits their child and their family’s beliefs.
Too many schools are hiding crucial information. They must be held accountable through policies that require transparency, so parents won’t receive more nasty surprises.
Emilie Kao is senior counsel and vice president of advocacy strategy with Alliance Defending Freedom.
Madison, Wis. — Parents are “not entitled” to know their kids’ gender identity, according to a recent training session in Wisconsin’s Eau Claire Area School District.
Empower Wisconsin obtained a copy of a training slide from a late February staff development session. The 2021-22 Equity session on Safe Spaces reminds teachers that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned.”
“Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student,” the professional development facilitator guide states. Teachers were encouraged to “Talk amongst yourselves!”
The lesson — that teachers know better than parents about what is best for their kids — is not sitting well with some community members.
“We are appalled that ECASD would display such blatant disregard for the parents and guardians of our community’s children. We are equally dismayed that current school district leadership would pressure teachers into breaking a social contract that we all know and understand—that parents and guardians hold primary responsibility and decision making for the welfare and care of their children,” said parents and school board candidates Nicole Everson, Corey Cronrath, and Melissa Winter in a joint statement.
The district’s training session is also legally suspect. A district court in 2020 issued a partial injunction against Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy allowing children of any age to transition to a different gender identity at school — without parental consent. The full case is now before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed the lawsuit on behalf of a group of parents challenging the gender identity policy “that violates the rights of parents to make important healthcare decisions on their children’s behalf.” The policy includes the following provisions:
Children of any age can transition to a different gender identity at school, by changing their name and pronouns, without parental notice or consent.
District employees are prohibited from notifying parents, without the child’s consent, that their child has or wants to change gender identity at school, or that their child may be dealing with gender dysphoria.
District employees are even instructed to deceive parents by using the child’s legal name and pronouns with family, while using the different name and pronouns adopted by the child in the school setting.
It’s not clear whether the Eau Claire Area School District has a similar policy.
The school board candidates are demanding district administrators issue an apology to teachers for “placing them at odds with families and also to parents and guardians for breaking the trust and partnership that is critical for thriving students and a stellar school district.”
An apology doesn’t appear to be forthcoming. ECASD Superintendent Michael Johnson issued a statement to Empower Wisconsin asserting the district is upholding its responsibility to maintain an educational environment that is “equitable, safe and inclusive for all students.”
“Our staff often find themselves in positions of trust with our students. The staff development presentation shared extensive data and information to assist our staff members in our ongoing efforts to create a safe and supportive learning environment for all students,” Johnson said in the statement. “The ECASD prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.”
The superintendent said the staff training focused on data showing students who identify as non-heterosexual have a higher incidence rate of mental health issues than heterosexual students. But critics say a school’s commitment to “equity and inclusiveness” does not give license to educators to hide important information from parents and guardians.
Cronrath, Everson, and Winter are among seven candidates, including two incumbents, running for three open seats on the school board next month. The three jumped into the race because they were concerned about the eroding of parental rights in the district. They say Eau Claire schools’ “blatant disregard for parental rights and responsibilities” has been creeping into the district’s classrooms. The latest training session sends three very dangerous messages to parents and the wider community, the candidates assert.
1. Schools are in control of children, not parents and families—When you entrust your child into the walls of ECASD, you no longer have the right as a parent to be informed of major developments in your child’s school life. In fact, you must ‘earn it.’
2. Current Leadership is willing to pit teachers against parents—Open communication between the classroom and home has always been critical to healthy school communities and student development. ECASD is putting teachers in a difficult and dishonest position by instructing them to actively withhold information from parents.
3. What goes on in the walls of ECASD is privileged information—By indicating that information about your child is ‘knowledge that must be earned,’ ECASD is setting a dangerous precedent. If identity questions for your child can be hidden from you, is diet, curriculum, healthcare, inappropriate relationships, mental health concerns, etc. also no longer the business of parents? Just what are parents and guardians allowed to know and when?
The Republican-led state legislature passed a Parental Bill of Rights that would prohibit school policies that infringe on a parent’s or guardian’s role as the primary caregiver of their child. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat and the former state superintendent, is likely to veto the bill.
Eau Claire Area School District has a history of overreach. Last fall, school officials worked with the local health czar in removing a 14-year-old girl from school after someone in her class tested positive for Covid-19. The girl and her mom resisted, accusing authorities of abusing their powers. The county health director then sought a court order to have the girl forcibly removed from school.
Scott Smith, whose daughter was raped by a male wearing a skirt in a girls’ bathroom at her high school in Loudoun County, Virginia, appears on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” Oct. 12, 2021. | Screenshot: Fox News
When the Quisha Kings and Scott Smiths in a nation are considered by the regime in power to be the enemy, it says more about the danger of the regime than those the rulers consider as threats.
Quisha King is a Florida mother and a leader of Moms for Liberty, a group seeking to inform and inspire mothers and fathers to assert their parental rights in the face of a ravenous government and its allies, lackeys, parasites, and sycophants.
The regime now consists of the elite establishments of Big Entertainment, Big Information, Big Academia, Big Government, Big Corporations. The leviathan is bloated with the muscle of all those entities and seems to grow steadily in its capacities of repression. Together, they become the consensus establishment, the regime that determines what is permissible and what is not so a compliant culture can cash in its liberty and acquiesce to the demands of the regime.
Within that cluster is the National School Boards Association (NSBA).
Moms for Liberty, among other things, resists the mandated teaching of critical race theory (CRT), forced mask-wearing and other incursions against parental rights in the public schools their children attend. NSBA sent a letter to President Biden suggesting that, in accord with the Patriot Act, such people and their ilk should be handled like domestic terrorists because they demand their school boards be accountable to parents.
Scott Smith’s daughter was assaulted in a school bathroom by a transgender boy, and was also labeled a “domestic terrorist” because he rushed into a school board meeting and demanded that the board take responsibility for what had happened to his daughter.
As Smith was being pulled down to the floor and arrested his wife cried out, “My child was raped at school, and this is what happens!”
Apparently, all citizens so concerned about the direction of public education in America that they challenge the authority of their school boards, suddenly become, in the eyes of the leviathan government and elitist establishments, enemies of the state—itself increasingly the enemy of the freedoms established in the constitutional system.
The Biden White House sent the NSBA letter to the Department of Justice. Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed the FBI to get involved, exacerbating, and strengthening the resolve of the parents whose response shook the political barometers at the White House.
The outcome was an apology from NSBA, regretting their letter, and acknowledging that “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”[1]
Quisha King believed that if NSBA’s apology was genuine, instead of “calling us domestic terrorists, they would have investigated and questioned these school boards to see if there was any validity to any of what the parents are actually saying.”
There is something chilling here: NSBA’s suggestion that people like King are domestic terrorists who need to be reeled in under the Patriots Act calls to mind other regimes that have regarded the people of their nation as the enemy of the state.
For example, the Soviet Union under Stalin.
In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev (who would later prove himself as a totalitarian), then new leader of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, shocked his fellow Marxists with a speech that revealed the monstrous nature of Stalinism. In doing so he exposed characteristics of any regime that sees its own people as the enemy.
“Stalin originated the concept ‘enemy of the people,’” said Khrushchev. Actually, the wording could have been, “the people are the enemy.” That term, Khrushchev continued in the Communist Party Congress speech, “made possible the usage of the most cruel repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent, against those who had bad reputations…”
Khrushchev went on to say that “this concept, enemy of the people, actually eliminated the possibility of any kind of ideological fight.” Thus, the bottom line is that anyone labeled an enemy of the people or of the state were judged as guilty and pushed out of the public square where they might have defended their views.
Today’s regime in the United States has also pushed those considered as public enemies out of the public square, and, as much as possible, cut off their voice. Consider, for example censorship by Big Tech sites of groups deemed not worthy of public exposure because of their religious, political, or social views.
Silencing the enemies of the regimes is also the aim of the Cancel culture and Wokeism. Men and women who violate the value system and worldview specified by the high priests of Wokeism are ridiculed and banished. The regime cluster even turns on its own, like JK Rowling, who once helped build the Woke culture. She was cancelled for giving public support to Maya Forstater who said, “men cannot change into women.”
In an eyeblink, Rowling became the enemy in the eyes of the cultural regime.
However, when the regime considers the people as the enemy, then it is the regime that is itself the enemy of the people. That means action must be taken.
Throughout the history of civilization, the “public square” has been the locus of revolutionary resistance. So, the public square has to be the place of resistance in this current battle. Presently, however, that “square” has come under the censorship of authoritarian regimes. Under this repression the church and the home must be the primary places of resistance… forming worldview that will awaken a slumbering mass who at times seem not to want to be disturbed.
Churches must wake up to what is happening and recover the prophetic voice. Discipleship ministries must teach the biblical revelation concerning nations and cultures, and dare address the spiritual foundations of the nation. Parents must make their homes centers of worldview teaching and formation for their children.
Without this, we face a Stalinized future with the elite consensus establishment imposing its will upon us and our posterity.
[1] Florida mother says she does not accept NSBA’s apology for letter that likened parents to domestic terrorists | Fox News
A mother in Chicago claims that a judge stripped her of parental rights because she was not vaccinated against COVID-19.
“In what all parties agree is a very unusual and perhaps unprecedented step, a judge at Chicago’s Daley Center has stripped Rebecca Firlit of custody because she refuses to get a vaccination shot,”WFLD-TV reported.
Firlit says that she has not seen her 11-year-old son since Aug. 10, which is when she appeared in court via Zoom for a child support hearing along with her ex-husband. During the hearing, Cook County Judge James Shapiro allegedly asked Firlit if she had been vaccinated for COVID-19. She reportedly replied that she had not been vaccinated because she suffered bad reactions to other vaccines in the past.
Shapiro, a Democrat, then reportedly ordered Firlit be stripped of her parenting time until she gets vaccinated.
Since the ruling, Firlit said she hasn’t seen her son in person for over two weeks. She has purportedly only been able to speak to her son on the phone and on video calls.about:blank
“I miss my son more than anything,” Firlit told WFLD. “It’s been very difficult.”
“I think that it’s wrong. I think that it’s dividing families,” Firlit added. “And I think it’s not in my son’s best interest to be away from his mother.”
“It had nothing to do with what we were talking about. He was placing his views on me. And taking my son away from me,” Firlit said.
Annette Fernholz, Firlit’s attorney, said the judge overstepped his authority and noted that the boy’s father never brought up the concern about his ex-wife’s vaccination status during the hearing.
“In this case you have a judge, without any matter before him regarding the parenting time with the child deciding, ‘Oh, you’re not vaccinated. You don’t get to see your child until you are vaccinated.’ That kind of exceeds his jurisdiction,” Fernholz told the outlet.
“You have to understand the father did not even bring this issue before the court,” Fernholz added. “So it’s the judge on his own and making this decision that you can’t see your child until you’re vaccinated.”
Jeffrey Leving, the attorney for the boy’s father, reportedly admitted he was surprised by the judge’s decision, but supports the ruling.
“There are children who have died because of COVID. I think every child should be safe,” Leving told WFLD. “And I agree that the mother should be vaccinated.”
Firlit, who has been divorced for seven years, is appealing the court order. There is no timetable on when the appellate court will make its decision.
A spokesperson for Judge Shapiro told WFLD that they could not provide a comment at this time because of the ongoing nature of the case.
A federal judge is allowing a lawsuit against transgender facilities in a school district to proceed, but warned the student-plaintiffs that, if the government allows boys who claim to be female to use the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, then the girls have no right to “visual bodily privacy.”
Judge Jorge Alonso of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division is allowing a lawsuit to proceed against the school district that adopted the Obama-era transgender policy permitting boys claiming to be female to use the girls’ bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms.
However, the judge informed the girls, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), that, “[s]o far, the right not to be seen unclothed by the opposite sex is not on the Supreme Court’s list.”
The crux of this suit is that defendants seek to affirm the claimed genders of students by allowing male students who claim female gender to use privacy facilities (i.e., bathrooms and locker rooms) designated for use by the female sex and female students who claim male gender to use privacy facilities designated for the male sex … District 211 adopted the policy solely to affirm the claimed genders of those students claiming a gender different from their sex at birth.
Alonso continued, saying the school district has adopted the policy of allowing all transgender students to use the restrooms, locker rooms, and showers of their choice, while it insists all other students “must use the restrooms and locker rooms designated for their sex.”
“Before adopting the policy, District 211 did not investigate the reliability of the science underlying gender-affirmation treatments,” the judge wrote. “Nor did it make any effort to understand the impacts such a policy would have on students exposed to opposite-sex, same-gendered students in locker rooms and restrooms.”
The judge acknowledged the school district’s enforcement of the transgender policy has caused the students “embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, fear, apprehension, stress, degradation and loss of dignity.”
The students “are at continual risk of encountering (and sometimes do encounter), without their consent, members of the opposite sex while disrobing, showering, urinating, defecating and while changing tampons and feminine napkins,” he added.
Christiana Holcomb, ADF legal counsel, said, “a compassionate approach to protecting students’ privacy” is needed.
“We welcome the court’s decision to allow key claims to move forward,” she added in a statement. “The district officially authorizes opposite-sex use of school privacy facilities, and that violates Title IX. Letting boys into girls’ showers, restrooms, and locker rooms is sexual harassment. Students should be confident that their school will protect their privacy and dignity. So far, this school district has failed to do so.”
Alonso did not allow all the claims of the plaintiffs to move forward. He threw out the students’ argument made in the case that they have the right to “bodily privacy,” saying that right refers to physically being touched by others, “not visual bodily privacy.”
Additionally, the judge dismissed the students’ claim that parents’ right to direct their children’s education applies in this case. Alonso said that right refers only to parents’ choice of type of education or schooling.
As Breitbart News reported in 2016, the district opened its schools’ bathrooms to boys claiming to be female without informing parents. Later, it allowed a boy claiming to be transgender into the girls’ locker room after the Obama administration’s Department of Education threatened the district’s federal funding in the amount of $6 million. Initially, the school district arranged for a private dressing area in the girls’ locker room for the boy, but federal officials complained the arrangement stigmatized the student. Consequently, the district allowed the boy to use the girls’ locker room openly as if he were a biological girl.
The Trump administration has rescinded the Obama administration’s policy and restored Title IX to the understanding that “sex” means biological sex – male or female – rather than perceptions or beliefs about one’s gender.
Since Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, former President Barack Obama admitted his unpopular transgender policy helped to defeat Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.
As the College Fixreported, Tom Petersen, director of community relations for the school district, said, “The District will continue to defend our practices that affirm and support the identity of all our students.”
In a “backgrounder” on the case, ADF wrote, “If our government is powerful enough to command innocent school children to disrobe in the presence of opposite-sex classmates, then there will be little it will not be powerful enough to do.”
“The restroom policy and locker room agreement thus threaten our very liberty to live our lives in accordance with the most basic expectations of common decency, dignity, and privacy in our bodies,” the law firm added.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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