A “gender support plan” isn’t merely a secret held between child and teacher, which might be bad enough…A Gender Support Plan, or any similar scheme, effects a schoolwide conspiracy to create a secret name and gender identity specifically withheld from parents…

Teachers and activists who support this policy typically make two arguments in its favor. The first is that the very fact that a teen would want to keep her new gender identity a secret from parents is proof that home is an “unsafe” place for her…The second is that this gender declaration is a deeply held and personal decision of the child’s. The school, in this scenario, is merely a polite bystander—at most, a kindly chaperone…

The first is absurd; the second, dishonest. Why would a teen agree to keep a secret from her parents, if not for the presence of abuse? Well…one can think of a few things a teen might want to keep secret from mom: an eating disorder…her dabbling in drugs; a decision to send or post nudes; or have sex with a much older boy. Teens tend to keep from mom and dad a wide variety of healthy and unhealthy teenage experimentations…

Very often, parents lack the time and, frankly, the dark imagination necessary to uncover what their children are being taught. When parents object to a teacher or principal, they are frequently met with, at best, polite confusion…

A peculiar power imbalance has arisen between public school teachers and the parents for whom the necessity of work renders them too dependent on these schools to question them.  Parents discover radical materials pushed on their children by accident, like passersby happening on a crime scene. They are treated as…trespassers…made to understand they have no right to be there…

In a time when so many public school teachers are properly described as activists, that arrangement strips children of their families’ protection…

…the moment a middle-schooler whom they’ve encouraged to transition graduates to high school, they more or less wash their hands of him… They may remember a few fondly—but…it won’t be the seventh-grade music teacher who contends for years with the damage…

Is there no law that bars public schools from concealing a “coming out” to parents?  Actually, there really isn’t—not a good enough federal law, anway.

The Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) grants parents various rights with respect to their children’s education records. But as former Department of Education lawyer, Candice Jackson, explained to me, schools easily skirt this law.

[I]f a record isn’t kept in a centralized location then it doesn’t need to be considered an ‘education record’ legally. So that’s just one example of how schools have noted, ‘Yes, FERPA could be a problem for keeping stuff from parents, so let’s make sure that documentation and forms that are filled out around gender aren’t kept in the central location where the school keeps records.’…

This is where the most critical cultural battle will be fought…with America’s activist teachers. Will we allow the activists among them unaccountable access to the next generation of America’s children?

If conservatives and liberals hope to save this country, this is where they will place their energies: campaigning for federal legislation to grant parents full access to all curricula. And no, granting parents’ review over sex-education materials alone wouldn’t solve this problem, since the SOGI (Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity) curriculum, for instance, is often inserted into other areas of the curriculum or disguised as “anti-bullying” education. We need legislation that grants parents a right to opt out of any instruction regarding gender and sexuality and stops schools from changing a child’s name, gender marker, or pronouns without the approval of a parent or legal guardian…

Those insisting that teachers must “protect” seventh graders from their parents—they are rarely parents themselves. What they demand is continued unmonitored access to your children. It’s…time we stopped giving it to them.

Does this alarm you? Share your thoughts and a prayer in the comments below.

(Excerpt from The Truth Fairy. Article by Abigail Shrier. Photo Credit: Getty Images).