This State Board of Education is Pushing LGBT Guidelines That Raise the Risk for Girls

By Anika Smith Published on March 25, 2016

Michigan news channel WWMT reports that the State Board of Education has proposed voluntary guidelines to “make LGBT students feel more comfortable,” including allowing students to use whichever bathroom “aligns with their sexual identity.”

The student president of the Gay-Straight Alliance at one Michigan school is pressing for the rule, arguing that allowing those who identify as a gender different from their anatomical sex would feel “safer,” and safety is what the guidelines are all about.

Michigan state senator Patrick Colebeck is raising the alarm for parental rights, noting that the LGBT guidelines issued by the State Board of Education “circumvent parental notification in many cases.”

“Teachers are focused on teaching, and not going off and enforcing some social engineering policies pushed by the State Board of Education,” Colebeck said.

A quick perusal of the guidelines shows the State Board’s comprehensive ambition for LGBT education: curriculum, which promises to be “developmentally appropriate” across all ages and subject matters, but especially “English language arts, creative arts and health education, including sex education”; changing student records to reflect their self-determined names and genders; and most disturbingly, the right to hide those students’ decisions from their parents.

“When contacting the parent/guardian of a transgender or GNC student, school staff should use the student’s legal name and the pronoun corresponding to the student’s assigned sex at birth,” the guidelines warn, “unless the student or parent/guardian has specified otherwise.”

One question the guidelines raise: Is someone really “assigned sex at birth?” Is the Michigan State Board of Education really suggesting that the parents or doctor invent the child’s sex at birth by the announcement “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!”? Does the newborn’s chromosomes at conception, or the child’s genitalia that develops in the womb, have no say in the matter?

Consider even the least malicious abuse of these rules. For instance, by upending the gender segregation of sports teams, every boy who makes it on a girls’ team would be taking the place of a girl.

Then there are the more dangerous possibilities: the threat to girls subjected to boys in their restrooms and locker rooms. The irony is that these rules come during intense fear over “campus rape culture” while ignoring the danger to victims of rape and molestation caused by those who are anatomically male invading what were once sanctuaries for women.

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