Like others around the country, the Rockford, Michigan, Public School District requires parental permission for many things that affect their children’s safety, education, and personal wellbeing. But during the 2021-22 school year, acting on nothing more than a seventh-grade girl’s email to a school counselor and without notifying her parents, East Rockford Middle School personnel began treating her as a boy and allowing her access to all boys-only school facilities. They actively concealed the situation from the girl’s parents, and even altered school records that the parents might see.

Such policies are not only problematic on their own terms but a violation of the parents’ right to direct the upbringing and education of their own children.

East Rockford is no exception, unfortunately. The database maintained by the organization Parents Defending Education currently lists 1,059 school districts in 38 states, including more than 18,000 schools attended by nearly 11 million students, with such policies.

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Many policies use “sex” and “gender” interchangeably for the biological fact that an individual is male or female. For example, the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, policy explains that “gender identity” is a person’s “sense or psychological knowledge of their own gender….Individuals determine their own gender identity and gender identity may change over time.” And “transgender” is used to refer to “people whose gender identity is different” from their biological sex.

The centerpiece of these policies is a student’s gender-related communication, which these policies typically refer to in concrete terms as an “assertion” of “gender identity.” School personnel are required to take that communication at face value, treat it as conclusive, and immediately begin treating the student in accord with that communication. The Ann Arbor, Michigan, policy is typical: “The school shall accept the gender identity that each student asserts.”

Dictionaries define an assertion as a “a confident and forceful statement of fact or belief,” “a statement that you strongly believe is true,” or “a declaration that’s made emphatically.” Gender identity is a subjective self-perception, entirely unique to the individual. By definition, then, a student’s perception, let alone an attempt to communicate anything about it, defies any one-size-fits-all formula. And remember, “gender identity may change over time.”

This can place school personnel in something of a bind. Under the Escondido, California, policy, for example, a student’s “assertion of their gender identity,” by itself, means that school personnel must “begin to treat the student immediately, consistently with that gender identity.” Not only may a student’s communication fall far short of a bold or emphatic statement, but school personnel may have no basis for recognizing, interpreting, or understanding what a student’s communication may actually be.

Their only option is to treat any gender-related communication as an “assertion” of gender identity—whether it is or not. Questions or reactions are the same as bold declarations. It makes no difference whether a student’s perception is vague or clear, fleeting or persistent, recent or longstanding. These policies require taking whatever the student may try to communicate as conclusive and to treat that student accordingly.

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Beyond such problems, these policies violate the right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children, which has been recognized in the common law, statutes, and under the U.S. Constitution for centuries. These policies, which typically apply to students of any age, prohibit disclosure of any “gender information” to anyone outside the school without the student’s consent. The Escondido policy even lists parents among those who have no legitimate need to know such information.

No one, however, knows more than parents about a child’s life, medical history and needs, personality, relationships, and other factors that relate to his or her wellbeing. Excluding parental input or knowledge, therefore, leaves schools free to impose upon students their own theory or ideology regarding gender-related matters. Research shows that, in more than 90 percent of cases, early expressions of gender confusion resolve themselves once minors go through puberty. That is, without interference from school policies like these.

Even more frightening is research indicating that social transitioning—referring to individuals by different names and pronouns, granting access to single-sex facilities of their choice, and the like—can lead to medical transitioning. The use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and surgery to change an individual’s appearance, is permanent. All of this can flow from a minor’s random question or observation while parents, if they gain any knowledge about it at all, left to watch this trainwreck for their family.