BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (LifeSiteNews) – The Louisiana Legislature gave final approval to a bill requiring educators to use children’s actual legal names unless condoned by parents in a move to protect parental rights over the direction of their children’s upbringing.
HB 121, the Given Name Act, forbids public schools from asking employees or students from any inquiry about “pronouns that is inconsistent with (their) sex” or about any “name other than (their) legal name, or a derivative thereof.” It protects employees’ right to refuse to address students by incorrect names or pronouns and entitles parents to corrective action against an educator who does so if the parents choose to pursue it, potentially including a “private cause of action for injunctive relief, monetary damages, reasonable attorney fees and costs, and any other appropriate relief.”
The bill passed the state House 60-31 and the state Senate 27-9, and now awaits a signature from Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, who has already voiced his support.
Before final Senate approval, it was amended to define a student’s legal name as “a person’s name as may be evidenced on his original birth certificate issued at or near the time of birth” to prevent a birth certificate altered years after the fact from being used to force a teacher to call a student by an opposite-sex name or pronouns.
The Daily Signal noted that Landry’s signature would make Louisiana the eighth state with a Given Name law on the books, based on model legislation offered by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Across the country, teachers and students alike have been subjected to penalties for “misgendering,” i.e., neglecting or refusing to refer to others by opposite-sex pronouns, despite a significant body of evidence indicates that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
The danger of keeping parents in the dark about such developments 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 in 2019 after trying to live as a man for three years.
On top of normalizing and forcing compliance with transgender dogma, prominently displaying or announcing one’s “preferred gender pronouns” is also a popular piece of etiquette in LGBT activist circles and among Democrat politicians; one of the Biden administration’s very first acts upon taking office was to add a pronoun field to the White House website’s contact page.