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(LifeSiteNews) — We’ve known for some time that it has become common practice in public schools across North America to keep information about how children choose to “identify” from their parents. Children are told they can choose their gender and that their gender may have nothing to do with their body. This education is pervasive and systemic, and with social media it a key driver of the sky-rocketing rates of children identifying as transgender.  

As a result, there have been many situations in which children (often autistic or struggling with mental illness) have decided to identify as the opposite gender and choose a new name—and this information is deliberately hidden from the parents of the child by school staff, who assist the child in “presenting” as the gender they have chosen and refer to them by their new name. Many schools actually have policies explicitly forbidding staff from telling parents what is happening with their children. In the LGBT movement, parents are seen as an active threat to their own children. 

A particularly egregious example of the trend of school staff getting in between parents and their children has just been reported by The Daily Caller. On February 21, 2022, school counselors at the Clear Creek Independent School District in Texas received an hour-and-a-half presentation on gender ideology from Laura Kanter of the LGBT lobby group the Montrose Center. The presentation was billed as professional development. According to America First Legal, Kanter explicitly told the school counselors that if students asked for gender transition, that information should be conveyed to an LGBT advocacy group—not the parents. 

On May 32, America First Legal sent a letter to Dr. Eric Williams, superintendent of the Clear Creek Independent School District, noting Kanter’s advice that children seeking sex changes should be referred to the Montrose Center and that parents should not be notified. The letter noted that: 

Two weeks after the presentation, the School District’s Director of Counseling and Student Services, Dava West, sent an email to counselors and staff to “clarify district expectations as it relates to working with gay, lesbian, and transgender students.” Director West’s email directed staff to refer to state statute, board policies, and the state-required Texas Model for Comprehensive School Counseling Programs when working with students who identify as members of the LGBTQ community. Ms. West’s March 11 email explicitly stated that these programs should “guide their work, rather than the practices and graphics shared by the Montrose Center” during the February 21st presentation. To date, Clear Creek Independent School District has refused to provide the PowerPoint presentation slides used by the Montrose Center during the February 21st presentation. The Montrose Center has rejected the School District’s Texas Public Information Act Request claiming that the presentation is proprietary intellectual property. 

America First Legal noted that “parents have a right to inspect all instructional material, including material provided to teachers, used in connection with any analysis or evaluation of sexual behavior or attitudes” and cited legal backing to undergird their demand for the release of this material. America First Legal told The Daily Caller that up until now, both the Montrose Center and the school district have refused to share Kanter’s PowerPoint with them. The district claims it does not possess a copy, and the Montrose Center bizarrely claims that because it is their intellectual property, they cannot share it. 

The genuine reason they refuse to release the PowerPoint is obvious: the PR damage from a PowerPoint laying out, in explicit terms, the advice of LGBT activists to school counselors about hiding the desires for sex changes in children from their parents is guaranteed to provoke backlash, as it should. These activists want parents cut out of the loop because they know that most parents will object to rushing their children on the path to sex change surgery, and their “affirmation” ideology dictates otherwise. As Ian Prior of American First Legal Foundation told The Daily Caller: “It is absolutely terrifying that a school district would bring in an outside vendor who would then instruct counselors that gender confused kids should go to that vendor and shut parents out. Only by continually challenging these schools on legal grounds will we be able to roll back these radical ideologies that are a clear attempt to put the government in between children and their parents.” 

 

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.

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