Voters in Orange County, California, ousted two culture warriors, making clear their dissatisfaction with the attacks on curriculum, books, teachers, and students.
Howard Blume reports in The Los Angeles Times:
Voters in the city of Orange appear to have ousted two conservative school board members who had spearheaded policies widely opposed by advocates for LGBTQ+ youth in a recall election viewed as a local bellwether for the culture wars in education.
The fiercely contested recall election in the Orange Unified School District intensified with the board majority’s approval in the fall of a parent-notification policy requiring educators to inform parents when a student requests “to be identified as a gender other than that student’s biological sex or the gender listed on the birth certificate or any other official records.”
A legal battle over the issue is playing out as California Atty. General Rob Bonta pursues a court challenge of such policies enacted by a handful of conservative-leaning school boards. His lawsuit asserts that the rules put transgender and gender-nonconforming students in “danger of imminent, irreparable harm” by potentially forcibly “outing” them at home before they’re ready…
The recall came to be an early litmus test on the resonance with voters of issues that have roiled school boards throughout the nation: the teaching of racism and Black history, the rights of LGBTQ+ youth versus the rights of their parents, restrictions on LGBTQ+ symbols and related curriculum, and the removal of library books with sexual content — especially LGBTQ+ content — from school libraries.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As a leftist I have a very different perspective on the law regarding schools keeping secrets on gender transition from parents. I find this law to be from a colonialist mindset that we, as educators, know your child better than you do. As a child of Oklahoma, too many of my friends’ parents were stolen from their families in an attempt to culturally mold the children into white American traditions, languages, and religious practices and to eradicate First Nations’ cultural beliefs and languages from them.
The first time I was told to withhold a secret about a student was last year. This young woman wanted to go by a new name and pronouns at school. She also had a diagnosed anxiety disorder and had a 504 plan. She had self-harming tendencies. She was a lesbian who had a girlfriend. The parents knew about the self-harming and the anxiety and had taken measures to help her with her anxiety and mental health issues. However, the moment that she decided that her gender was male, her parents were assumed to be unloving and uncaring, and we, her teachers, were told to lie to the parents if we communicated with them. This is not how educators develop trusting relationships with families. We know that families love their kids and support them in the best ways that they can and that they will be there for their children years in the future and in ways that we are not a part of. We are not their cultural mentors or their saviors. Our way of thinking is often not the culture and the understanding of the family, and we have to be careful to not impose our beliefs onto our students in a misguided attempt to “save” them from their families. In the case of this student, and many of the students I have today who claim non-binary and opposite gender identities, there is much more going on psychologically that the families must be part of and attune to. As a parent of such a young man, he also suffered from gender dysphoria and body dissociation due to social anxiety and a long time spent on-line during the Covid year. The more people affirmed his new identity and pronouns at school, the more his mental health deteriorated. After much work, therapy, and family outings, hands-on learning and job experiences, my son learned to accept himself as he is, to love himself, and gained much confidence. He now happily identifies as his own sex again and has experienced love, work, friendships, independence, and academic ups and downs. This would not have been possible had the school determined that we were unfit parents. Indeed, we as educators know that students thrive when we are all working in partnership.
In the gender conversations of the day, England, as well as a few other Northern European countries have outlawed secret keeping from family members and now strive to center the child’s well being through real life connection, family therapy, and psychological work. At some point this California law will be overturned, as gender affirmation at school without a qualified therapist and family involvement is actually a potentially harmful psychological intervention that we as educators are not equipped to carry out.
For more on this matter, this past March 12th, was Detransition Awareness Day. On this day, England announced its decision to ban puberty blockers except in a very few cases that must receive approval and rigorous study. Over the course of the last three years I have spent countless hours reading studies and papers on gender transition, particularly on youth, in order to understand why all of my quirky students and the children of so many of my friends (including my own) are seeking cosmetic medical treatments to change the course of their natural healthy development through puberty. It does not make logical sense that we would allow these experimental treatments on so many young people who are struggling with self-acceptance. I imagine that I too would seek this particular way out of my body were I young today, as I did seek escape in my teenage years and early twenties in the ways that were available to me. Indeed, the huge increase in adolescents that experience gender dysphoria and body dissociative disorders seems to be in tandem with all sorts of mental distress that we see in our youth today, stemming from social media and the introduction of “smart” phones in the hands of children and the deep lack of connection that people experience in our modern cultures.
I am hopeful that the scientific evidence coming out of Northern European countries will begin to take hold in the US and other Western countries in which young people, many of whom are gay, gender non-conforming, neurodivergent, survivors of abuse, or those who suffer from mental health issues, will be able to get the type of mental health support they need, connection with others, and be allowed to grow into their bodies and minds with no endocrine disruption, cross sex hormones, and invasive surgeries. There is a fast growing group of detransitioners in the West, who realize that they medically transitioned to appear as the opposite sex as a means of psychological escape and now complain of harms to their health and medical difficulties. Many of these detransitioners realize that they are gay and that homophobia, internalized or societal, influenced their decision to transition. Some of them realize that they hated themselves, hated what it meant to be a “man” or a “woman” in a culture filled with pornography or regressive gender roles. Some were horrifically abused or sexually assaulted or both. Some speak to the enormous influence of on-line communities that celebrated their transitions, but disavowed them when they had doubts about transition. All of them speak to how easy it was to get drugs and surgeries, yet no one asked them basic questions about their mental health first. Their stories need to be heard and I hope that more of us will listen.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2024/03/no-more-puberty-blockers-for-children-says-nhs-england
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Excellent response. Thank you for sharing your experience, research, and sane response to this “gender” nonsense in schools (and elsewhere.) Western society has gone down the wrong (wpath) path, and doctors, psychologists, and government have floated along. It’s time to stop harming kids and vulnerable people who have been gaslit and confused by online infatuation and porn. Educators, of all people, are supposed to safeguard kids, spending 7 hours a day with them. Education, too, should do no harm.
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You nailed it. This is the biggest scandal since lobotomies, and schools are helping to enable it. Check out the The WPATH Files. An exhaustively researched report about the medical malpractice perpetrated on gender-distressed children and vulnerable adults. Internal files — emails, member forums, videos — leaked by a whistleblower from the so-called standards body for transgender medicine.
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Count me on the side of this: *”Rather than engaging in civil and thorough policy discussions about issues that profoundly affect our students, families and district, it has been a year of dramatic gestures and political theater. … It has been disappointing and frustrating to see our OUSD parents and teachers be demonized, ridiculed and, ultimately, ignored. I look forward to improving transparency, civility and fiscal responsibility.”*
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