(LifeSiteNews) — A New Jersey judge last week temporarily blocked three school districts in the state from enforcing rules requiring teachers to notify parents if their children are identifying as the opposite sex at school.
Monmouth County Judge David Bauman issued the preliminary injunction on Friday, declaring that the “state has demonstrated a reasonable probability of success on its claim that the Amended Policies, if implemented, will have a disparate impact on transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary youth,” the New York Post reported.
Bauman’s ruling came after New Jersey’s Democratic Attorney General Matthew Platkin sued three public school districts — Middletown Township, Marlboro Township and Manalapan-Englishtown — for implementing rules requiring parental notification if a child wanted to change his or her name, preferred pronouns, and bathroom choice while at school due to an alleged alternative “gender identity.”
An attorney for the Marlboro Board of Education said the board is “disappointed” by the ruling, which blocks enforcement of the rules until a larger civil case pertaining to the matter is resolved.
Attorney Marc Zitomer told Fox News Digital that waiting for the resolution of the issue from the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights “could take years.”
“In the meantime, the school district is now severely constrained in its ability to notify parents about important issues involving their minor children, which is contrary to well settled law,” he said. “We are exploring our avenues for appeal.”
Bruce W. Padula, an attorney for the Manalapan-Englishtown and Middletown school districts, shared Zitomer’s sentiments but pointed out that the ruling still supports the district’s stance that keeping parents notified about their child’s “gender identity” is not “discrimination.”
“We strongly disagree with the Court’s ruling and believe there are several grounds for appeal,” Padula told Fox. “Significantly, however, the Court decided to maintain the status quo and did not rule on the merits of the policy. Simply, it is not discrimination to tell parents if their child decides to change the gender in their student records. The law supports our position.”
According to a recent poll, the majority of New Jersey residents support requiring schools to inform parents if their children are expressing alternate “gender identities” when outside the home.
InsiderNJ reported that 77% of New Jersey adults and 85% of New Jersey parents of minor children believe that parental notification ought to be mandatory. Fifty-five percent of adults and 59% of parents of minors say schools should notify even if they are not legally required to do so.
Despite this, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy claimed that the school district’s parental notification policies — which are similar to many enacted nationwide as parents call for greater transparency and involvement in their children’s education, particularly with regard to sexual issues — were violative of students’ “constitutional and civil rights” and products of the so-called “culture war.”
As LifeSiteNews has extensively reported, the problem isn’t only that students might independently identify as LGBT while at school but that young children across the country have been actively being encouraged in their classrooms to adopt “transgender,” “gender-fluid,” or “non-binary” identities. Transgender identification among children has risen sharply in recent years, and the rates of surgical mutilation for minors have risen astronomically.
Moreover, school districts across the nation have been found to keep children’s divergent “gender identity” a secret from parents, including by calling the child by a different name and using alternate pronouns while at school. Roughly 6,000 schools across the nation reportedly conceal children’s alleged “transgender” identification from parents.
RELATED: Parents push back after school suggests district will continue hiding kids’ ‘transgender’ identity
The phenomenon has triggered backlash from parents and conservative lawmakers, who have worked at the grassroots and legislative levels to craft legislation to require schools to notify families of a child’s gender confusion, pull sexually explicit and pro-LGBT curricula and materials from classrooms and school libraries, protect girls’ sports and spaces, and ban sexualized performances targeting children.