It hasn’t even been a year since Glenn Youngkin’s come-from-behind victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election. The once solidly blue state went red largely on the issue of parental rights in education. It should have been seen as a warning to the radical left that wants to destroy the family institution: you will lose if you try.
It’s an instinct to want to protect our children, and it transcends partisan loyalties. Rabid leftists who believe in expanding the state’s role in rearing children may not agree, but they are (as of right now) still in the minority.
One would think these monsters who think parents protecting their kids are domestic terrorists would have learned their lesson after Youngkin’s victory, especially in Virginia, but one leftist school board in the state has now made it a policy to suspend students in fourth grade and higher if they use the “wrong pronouns” in reference to transgender classmates.
Despite outrage from parents, the Fairfax County School Board voted 8-4 to approve new guidelines for disciplining students who use slurs based on a classmate’s “gender identity,” “gender expression,” or “sexual orientation,” including “malicious misgendering” and “malicious deadnaming.”
And there was a huge backlash from parents at the latest school board meeting. One father told the Washington Free Beacon that he and two other parents planned to withdraw their kids from the school district if the “misgendering” rules passed.
Another parent, who has two gay children, even said the new rules were too extreme.
“I am both a loving mother and an ally to the Pride community,” Barbara Eckman said. “The fact that I do not support overwhelming, overreaching activist policies that violate First Amendment rights has nothing to do with how I feel about the gay and transgender community. … I have liberal and conservative friends, and when I discuss your proposed policies—the co-ed family life education and transgender unit in fourth grade, the potential suspensions for misgendering and deadnaming for kids as early as fourth grade—they’re all astonished. So this leads me to one question: Who are you really representing?”
Related: Getting Arrested for Using the Wrong Pronouns? It’s Coming to America
Certainly not the parents in the school district. Despite overwhelming opposition to the new guidelines, the school board approved them. It is widely expected that there will be challenges to sitting school board members over this issue.
“We are fed up with political agendas in our common sense classrooms, which according to public statement from the FCPS most gender identity measures were passed in 2020,” one parent said. “The parents of this county are awake, aware, and ready to vote for change. This is just the beginning.”
Sixty percent of those polled say letting kids pick their pronouns is an “excessive measure that does more to confuse kids about their sex,” and 40% believe it prevents discrimination.
This is not the first school district seeking to punish kids for “misgendering.” Last month, a school district in Wisconsin filed sexual harassment complaints under Title IX against three 8th-grade students because they referred to a classmate by the wrong pronoun. While this is a frightening development, it is somewhat comforting to know that a majority of voters believe that children should be referred to by their biologically (and grammatically) correct pronouns.