Every single child—including and especially those struggling with sexual confusion—should be protected from harm and harassment. There is no question of that. And Virginia has a good anti-bullying law. But this new, proposed policy goes way beyond prevention and crosses the line into the mandatory promotion of politicized, sexualized ideology.

Scientific studies and medical experts make clear the majority of children outgrow gender confusion by the time they reach puberty—it’s, at best, irresponsible to push the involuntary promotion of gender confusion in a public education setting—and, at worst, actually damaging to kids who are still developing.

It encourages schools to implement across-the-board promotion of the concept that gender is “viewed as a gender spectrum” and can be “something in between or outside the male/female binary.” It declares that sex is arbitrarily “assigned” to babies at birth, rather than an intrinsic part of their biological design. This policy is "anti-science."

Accordingly, it is a scientifically-false statement that people are just arbitrarily “assigned” a gender when they’re born—sort of like affixing a branding label to them at the store. The policy totally divorces gender instruction from any reality whatsoever in basic DNA science and biology. It’s also important to note that the proposed policy makes clear that the Virginia Department of Education wants this radical thinking reflected in every operational part of the school—even advocating for schools to incorporate “educational content that is transgender affirming into the general education curriculum, such as history, literature and science.”

The policy encourages schools to outright deceive parents: It says schools should “respect” students if they don’t want their parents to know about their new transgender identity. The suggested plan for implementing this “respect”— and the policy specifically spells this out—is that, in cases where parents are not embracing or facilitating their child adopting a new gender identity (like using a new name, pronoun, etc.), then teachers can use the child’s new identity at school, but in the presence of the parent use the original legal name and so forth.

According to this policy, schools must allow boys identifying as girls, for instance, to use the girls’ bathrooms or change in female locker rooms—and this can all be done without ever notifying parents. Sadly, no one ever talks about the harm done to very young girls, for example, who feel powerless to expect physical privacy in the presence of biological males—not to mention young men who don’t want to change in front of biological girls.

The proposed policy is both dangerous and lacking any basis in science and logic. But, this is what we get when the progressive ideologues are charged with managing education and teaching our children.

This policy is an abomination.