Transgender Activists Are Pushing to Undermine Parental Rights

In several US states, transgender activists are working hard to undermine parental rights with the help of courts and legislatures.

An opinion piece written by Scott Yenor for the Western Journal says that transgenderism is part of a movement that is hostile to traditional family life as Americans have always known it. For one, the traditional family is based on the principle that parents take care of their children’s needs, with rights and responsibilities to satisfy those needs.

The state can, of course, interfere in cases when there’s abuse or neglect by protecting parents’ freedom to ensure that the children are well provided for. There could be some marked differences when the state deals with children in foster care or those in school. Transgender activists recognize this and have taken the sphere of education as their battleground in more aggressively pushing for their agenda by trying to reform the way schools educate.

The state has greater power over foster parents than over birth parents since it is obliged to oversee how the foster children are being cared for. Transgender activists are quick to exploit this.

This can be seen in new developments in California and Delaware. A bill for one has been proposed in California to extend state regulation of foster parents. As things stand, foster children are already given access to medical and dental care, the basic essentials. That way, foster parents’ costs are being defrayed. Yet under the proposed law, state benefits would extend to include “gender-affirming healthcare and gender-affirming behavioral health care”, should the child involved, the foster parents, the state-appointed child advocate, or a lawyer request for such a treatment.

The “real agenda” of the transgender movement may be revealed in the fact that under the proposal, so-called gender-affirming care may include hormone suppressants and sex-reassignment surgery. Attempts to treat a child consistently with his or her natural sex at birth would not enjoy support. On the contrary, under the law, there would be efforts to “respect” and “affirm” the child’s “non-assigned” gender identity.

The bottom-line for the transgender movement is that regulating foster parents to toe the line and subscribe to their ideology and in the process, happily produce more transgender children like themselves, is far easier than going directly after parental rights.

In Delaware, parental rights are being undermined as well. The Delaware Secretary of Education disseminated antidiscrimination regulations that guide schools in how to give reasonable accommodation to those who identify with a gender different from their “assigned” sex.

Students can, for one, participate in sports teams according to their gender identity instead of their assigned sex at birth. They can also change their names on their diploma as they please. The secretary is also setting up a process in school to “recognize a new gender identity.”

The most shocking is that parents need not be consulted in these cases if the student in question just claims the parents will threaten the child’s “health, safety, or well-being.”

Transgender activists want parents to lose control and supervision over their own children if those children are gender-confused. So pray tell, who’s going to ensure the health, safety, and well-being of minors who in all likelihood are not yet capable of fully making such huge decisions on their own - the transgender activists themselves?

Source: www.westernjournal.com/how-courts-and-legislatures-are-disempowering-parents-to-push-transgender-agenda