Making good on his campaign promises, Virginia’s Gov. Glenn Youngkin has overseen a new state guidance on how schools should handle trans issues, reversing some of the last gov’s extreme policies.
Schools can no longer keep kids’ choices secret from their parents; gone are “rights” to compete in sports as your ID’d (rather than biological) gender — same for bathrooms, locker rooms and other such spaces. Father-daughter dances and the like are no longer verboten.
Naturally, The Washington Post, New York Times etc. frame this as rolling back trans students’ rights — when in fact it’s a rebalancing. It’s a clear win for female students (athletes, in particular), for parents — and for kids who don’t actually suffer permanent gender dysphoria, but are just confused.
Which too often proves to be the case — though the individual in question may not sort it all out until they’ve had irreversible surgery. That’s because there’s an entire industry, and an ideological cheering section, actively pushing that as the best solution. (Social media doesn’t help.)
Schools (and parents) need to treat all these kids with love and kindness, absolutely. And the new guidelines say so. They simply excise the heavy-handed idiocy that the old guidance imposed.
Virginians elected Youngkin to start restoring sanity to their public schools. Good for him for doing his job.