Schooling the Washington Post (and Others) on School Policy

What few in the media understand about secret social transition

Today, the Washington Post reported on controversies around schools secretly socially transitioning kids who identify as transgender, using the child’s chosen name in school and their given, legal name with parents, to keep them in the dark.

The reason for this secrecy is “to avoid outing kids who could be in harm’s way at home or aren’t ready to tell their parents,” they write. A young person who told a teacher six months before coming out to his parents says, “You fear the worst.”

Considering the majority of children today seeking care for gender dysphoria are from affluent, progressive families—those who’d be mostly likely to support trans people—it’s hard to understand what “worst” they fear. Getting beaten? Kicked out? That certainly was a reality sometimes for an older cohort of gay Americans, but today LGB and T Americans enjoy greater acceptance than ever before. Or rather, they did until recently, when moods on trans issues have begun to shift, according to Pew and FiveThirtyEight. And with the Supreme Court’s Bostock Decision, trans people have all the rights of other identity groups.

What they probably have been taught to fear, because of being told that “deadnaming” and “misgendering” are literal violence, is that if their parents are resistant to the idea that they’re trans and need to transition, they are unsupportive and dangerous and should be rejected (a longer post on this coming soon). But usually if parents are skeptical or confused, or resistant to social or medical transition, it’s because, like the child quoted in the story, their kids are part of the almost never-before-seen cohort of adolescents with no history of gender dysphoria, known by those willing to admit it as ROGD kids. Many of those parents have come to realize that past research on gender dysphoric youth doesn’t apply to them, and what research there is so low quality that several countries are now transitioning kids only in exceptional cases.

The Washington Post—which, admittedly, did a better job than most leftie media pieces on this subject—goes on to make the most common mistake when it comes to reporting about this issue, citing statistics that “Transgender students are at a greater risk of suicide and substance use” and “twice as likely to experience depressive symptoms,” though it doesn’t say twice as likely as whom. What they mean is that they are more likely to have suicidal ideation than the population without mental health issues, but their rates of depression and suicidal ideation are similar to young people their age with comorbidities, and many kids identifying as transgender today do have other mental health issues and diagnoses.

Another mistake: They quote someone from a conservative Christian nonprofit in opposition to these policies, but these policies are also unpopular on the left. According to a poll circulated by the American Federation of Teachers, there is broad support for parental rights policies like the one Gov. Ron DeSantis passed in Florida, labeled by opposition groups as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. That bill has enormous flaws, to be sure, including overly vague language and leaving teachers open to lawsuits, but even some Democrat voters support it.

The majority of Republican respondents to the AFT poll want a candidate who believes schools to focus less on gender and race. They believe parents should have a say in what their kids learn, including gender issues, and they don’t believe males should compete in female sports. The policies that support these ideas have come from Republicans, but many Democrats agree with them.

The media should start platforming heterodox Democrats and stop presenting this as a left/right issue, when it’s really about whether you have a scientific versus a semi-religious belief in sex and gender.

Finally, the Washington Post fails to educate readers on the most important point about secret social transition. There is some research to show that parental rejection of LGBT kids leads to worse mental health outcomes. Most of that research was conducted before the explosion of trans-identified kids after 2014 and 2015, the “transgender tipping point,” when Jazz Jennings and Caitlyn Jenner captivated the media and trans kids became a bigger cultural preoccupation, and thus it suggests respecting pronouns, for instance, can be important. But those kids were likely organically gender dysphoric, not influenced by Jazz, Caitlyn, and school lessons that teach them biological sex is a construction they can opt out of, or that gender is a feeling.

The most important thing to know about that research (I know, I’ve said this before, but we have to get the media to understand it) is that it does not advocate for dissolution of the family, nor for teachers or other adults to hide information from parents about their kids or to encourage kids to lead double lives. The founder of the Family Acceptance Project, Caitlin Ryan, told me in an interview for another [not yet published] piece that she always tries to keep families intact, to work on parents and kids meeting in the middle, understanding each other, staying connected. Generally, children don’t feel more supported when their relationship with their parents is severed, especially during adolescence when their job is to explore identity and safely detach enough to become independent.

The school’s job is not to triangulate. They do so in the name of protecting a child’s privacy, but privacy laws are not designed to protect a child’s privacy from their own parents, but rather to allow parents to protect their own kids’ privacy. And, as the WashPost article points out, the school is not protecting a child’s privacy if everyone knows about the new identity but the parents. Instead, it’s treating parents as the enemy.

Lastly (and I know I’ve made this point before, too, but it still bears repeating) the little prospective research we have on kids who fared well after transition (research that may be unreliable anyway) is on kids in supportive families. Encouraging a child to detach and keep secrets from parents doesn’t create a supportive family. Treating the parents as enemies doesn’t create a supportive family.

I have seen a severely gender dysphoric child socially transition, with parental support, and fare better in the short term. It was a hard decision for the family, but they made it together. This child had been extremely gender nonconforming since age 4, and had been comfortable until puberty, and then started to really struggle. That kid is doing better for now, though I know that that child also had almost no models of gender nonconformity, few messages that a child can be of one sex and in almost every way typically like the other. I don’t know what will happen in the longterm. All I know is that the family is working together to navigate a difficult situation. Thank god their school didn’t make it harder.