Disempowering Parents

Shouldn't they be told?

By David Haldane

Sept. 16, 2024

Maybe I’d have felt differently before becoming a parent. As a kid myself, perhaps I would have welcomed the opportunity to do something behind my parents’ backs, as children everywhere are wont to do.

Now that I have kids of my own, though, my attitude has changed. Which is why I was dismayed to learn that my birthplace, California, recently became the first US state legally prohibiting teachers and school administrators from disclosing critical information to the parents of their students.

Specifically, they may no longer inform parents when kids use different names or pronouns, act or dress like something other than their biological sex, or even attempt to use that gender’s restroom. In other words, any tendencies towards transgenderism displayed by California students are now strictly guarded secrets between them and their teachers.

“This law helps keep children safe…” a spokesman for California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement reported by the New York Times.

I have another term for it: government authoritarianism dangerously piercing the sanctity of family life. Or, to put it differently, disempowering parents by handing their roles instead to misguided educators with ideological agendas.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against adults identifying as anything they want. In fact, I have transgender friends who I call by their preferred pronouns out of politeness and respect. That doesn’t mean, however, that I consider a man to be a woman just because he says he is. My gender definitions are fairly simple, based on several millennia of basic biology: people with penises are men, and those with vaginas are women. And whether I call someone “he,” “she,” or “they,” is not their choice, but mine.

Which reminds me of a recent case here in the Philippines involving a male transgender “influencer” who, incensed that a Cebu waiter called him “sir,” allegedly forced that server to stand at “parade rest” for nearly two hours while lecturing him on “gender sensitivity.” The waiter later resigned, citing psychological stress and humiliation, and filed several legal complaints, prompting the Commission on Human Rights to launch an investigation.

All that happened just months after the New York Times featured a headline declaring that “Drag Goes Mainstream in the Philippines, a Bastion of Christianity.” Which certainly wasn’t news to me, having covered a provincial transgender beauty pageant back in 2019 after which I described Philippine culture as “imbued with a natural sense of acceptance and friendliness towards, not only strangers, but the strange.”

Getting back to California, though, that new law got passed in response to a “parents’ rights” movement strongly opposed by Gov. Newsom and the state’s first Fil Am attorney general, Rob Bonta, in which several school districts enacted rules requiring teachers to inform parents of their children’s transgender behavior. Some of those districts and counties have since filed legal challenges to Newsom and Bonta’s restrictive law.

“The governor can raise his children the way he wants,” Huntington Beach Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark told the Los Angeles Times. “I will raise my children the way I want…He needs to stick his nose out of our business.”

Which, of course, raises a tough question: just how should parents deal with children exhibiting early transgender tendencies? I think I speak for most parents when I say, well, it depends. Specifically on how serious those tendencies are, and what knowledgeable professional psychologists and medical doctors familiar with the situation recommend.

One thing I would never inflict on my child, though, is so-called “gender affirming” care—be it chemical or surgical—prior to his or her reaching an age at which he or she can maturely make that decision for him- or herself.

Bottom line: as a parent, it is my right—nay, my duty—to know and be involved in what’s going on with my child. Not allowing that is a particularly odious and despicable sort of government despotism.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Joshua Tree, California, and Northern Mindanao, Philippines. His latest book, A Tooth in My Popsicle, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.