(LifeSiteNews) – Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin fired back Tuesday at a school district that is refusing to use the state’s conservative model policies on gender issues, stressing that the choice was not up to the district.
Under Youngkin, the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) has promulgated a model policy that requires students to be addressed by their legal names and actual sex, as well as to use biological sex to determine which bathrooms, lockers, or athletic teams they are allowed to access. Left-wing hostility to the policy in Roanoke County Public Schools recently caught the attention of the Biden administration Justice Department.
Fox News reported that Prince William County Public Schools (PWCS) indicated earlier this month that it will not adopt the policy and instead address “sensitive situations’ on a “case-by-case basis in the best interest of the child, while prioritizing safety,” through the lens of “celebrat[ing] our diversity as a strength” and recognizing “gender identity” as a protected status for nondiscrimination purposes.
“The law is very clear that I issue model policies and local school districts have to adopt policies consistent with the model policies,” Youngkin responded to Fox’s Martha MacCallum. The “common sense” policy, he explained, is “very straightforwardly saying that first, parents are in charge of their children’s lives. The kids don’t belong to the state. They belong to parents and to families, and they have the ultimate say in decisions that that child is going to make with a parent, not with a bureaucrat.”
“These are parents who are frustrated with the fact that the dignity and the safety and the privacy of all children and families is not being ensured by the old policies that pushed parents out of their children’s lives,” the governor continued. “And this is exactly what we saw in Loudoun County, where, in fact, it became a true groundswell. I mean, ground zero of the parents’ movement. And now we’re seeing it in Fairfax County and others. This is a parent moment, not a political moment. And they will, in fact, comply with the law and stop thinking that they know more than parents.”
Youngkin was alluding to a situation in which Loudoun County Public Schools was accused of covering up the rape of a female student by a “transgender” classmate in a girls’ restroom due to its damaging implications for the LGBT movement and allowing students access to whatever facilities conform to their “gender identity” rather than their actual sex. Former superintendent Scott Ziegler faces multiple criminal charges for his handling of the situation and is slated to go on trial next year.
Virginia law requires public school districts to abide by VDOE model policies, although the lack of clear enforcement mechanisms has led some districts to flout them. The Virginia Legislature is currently divided between a Democrat-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House of Delegates, limiting state conservatives’ ability to enact more enforceable standards on schools.
Evidence shows that “affirming” minors’ gender confusion carries serious long-term harms. Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject. The danger of keeping parents in the dark about such situations is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.
Meanwhile, forced inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is commonly promoted as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, the fundamental physical differences between the sexes, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.
There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.
In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men [do] not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen [biological men] afforded by the [International Olympic Committee] guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”
As for forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex, critics argue that it violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status, as demonstrated in Loudoun County.