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.

The judge wrote that “if implemented, [the policies] will have a disparate impact on transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary youth.”

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 asking 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.”

Originally published by The Washington Stand

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