The Virginia Department of Education’s proposed “Model Policies for Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia Public Schools” harms parental rights and child’s safety.  First of all, it harms parental rights because it paves the way for schools to deceive parents.  They do this by suggesting plans where children who are wrestling with gender confusion can be aided in leading a “double life” unknown to the parents, if it is determined that the parents would not fully embrace or facilitate their child adopting a brand-new gender identity.  This even goes so far as to suggest that a different gender and name can be used at school but their given gender or name be used in the presence of the parents. This means the withholding of information that could make a lifesaving decision for that child. This doesn’t sound wise or safe!

Secondly, these new policies would negatively impact student emotional and physical safety. The new proposed policies include the opportunity that boys who identify as girls to be allowed to use female restrooms and locker rooms.  This can all be done without ever notifying the parents! This is wrong! But, interestingly, no one is talking about the harm done to very young girls who feel powerless to expect physical privacy in the presence of biological males.  This is not to mention young men who don’t want to change in front of biological girls.

These actions here mean that “gender” itself is ultimately a matter of identification, not biological sex. The state here wishes to use its coercive power not simply to stop mistreatment of people but to rescript the most basic human intuitions about humanity as male and female. How do we dispute the most basic facts of science and life: that there are two sexes? This is governmental coercion of publicly disputed trends in modern culture or the war in our culture taking place right now.

We all, of course, do not want some to be harmed who is dealing with gender confusion or gender dysphoria. Even without these guidelines, students should have protections from discrimination, bullying, or harassment. All schools must ensure that all students, including LGBT students, are able to learn and thrive in a safe environment.  No student of any distinguishing characteristic is deserving of mockery, bullying, or intimidation. Christians believe that Jesus’ words in Luke 6:31 are relevant and apply in these circumstances: “And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.” It is a sad testament to our society’s decline in civility that serious discussion cannot proceed without questioning motives.

One troubling thing includes the possibility that schools are encouraged to deceive parents about the struggles of their own child!  For example, school administrators are told to allow a student to be called a different name or use different bathroom facilities at school, while not informing their parents, if it is perceived that parents would not accept any possible revelations from the child might consider themselves another gender.  Children, then, become pawns of the state for the state to teach a cultural lesson, not a scientific one.

This, ultimately, won’t work. There are good reasons to put boys and girls in different bathrooms and locker rooms and sometimes sports teams, reasons that don’t impugn the dignity of people but uphold it. Sex-differentiated bathrooms and sports teams and dormitories for men and women aren’t the equivalent of, say, a terrorist Jim Crow state unnaturally forcing people apart based on a fiction, useful to the powerful, that skin color is about superiority and inferiority. Every human being knows that there are important, and necessary, differences between men and women. Without such recognition, women are harmed, and men are coarsened.

Every human being knows that there are important, and necessary, differences between men and women. Without such recognition, women are harmed, and men are coarsened.

Moreover, the move here toward severing self-identity from biological reality will hardly stop at “gender.” If anything, there’s much more of a case to be made that one can feel to be a different age than one’s doctor’s exam or birth certificate would show. That’s relatively indifferent if all that this means is “You’re only as old as you feel” or “I’m a Millennial trapped in a Gen-X body.” It’s something else entirely if chronological self-identity is mandated for military service or the drinking age or the age of consent. People and neighborhoods and nations and cultures cannot live this way.

God created us as human, and within humanity as male and female. Man needs woman, and woman needs man. My maleness and your femaleness aren’t about us at all. They fit us within a much larger stream—of a species by nature and by community.

The Sexual Revolution, chaotically, wants to tell us that gender means nothing and that gender means everything. Neither is true. We should recognize that misleading caricatures of masculinity and femininity were always harmful, but now are potentially deadly. The little girl in your neighborhood who doesn’t like princess movies or dolls, and who would rather spend a Saturday in the deer stand, increasingly now is told by the culture around her that maybe she’s not a woman at all. The truth is that the male/female sex difference is objectively real. Biological science is built off of this reality.