When it comes to matters of sex and gender identity, the parents of students in Michigan public schools might think their opinion comes first. They would be wrong. The gender activists are in charge, with parents not only denied a role in decisions about such important matters, but increasingly kept in the dark altogether.

And it’s about to get worse. A new and sweeping rule by the U.S. Department of Education will push schools even harder to impose the government’s gender ideology on students. Parents can either get on board or be left behind.

The Plymouth-Canton Community Schools’ gender policy, like so many others, defines gender identity as a person’s “sense or psychological knowledge of their own gender, which can include being female, male, another gender, or no gender.” Only the individual student, regardless of age, can decide what his or her gender identity is at any particular moment (it can change at any time). That current self-perception drives a host of school policies.

The Saline Area Schools’ policy, for example, requires staff to use the individual student’s preferred name and pronouns; allow access to bathrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities and participation in physical education classes and sports “in a manner consistent with (his or her) gender identity.”

This is, of course, not the only way to look at matters such as gender identity, but the schools have decided, even though this has nothing to do with curriculum or school administration, that it’s their way or the highway.

To this end, these policies prohibit informing parents of such radical changes in their children’s lives – at least without the children’s consent. The East Lansing Public Schools’ policy prohibits staff from disclosing information indicating that a student’s “chosen name and pronouns” are different from his or her “birth name or sex assigned at birth” to “third parties including…parents.”

It is hard to overstate the implications of deliberately excluding parents from such important matters. Here’s how a federal judge in Pennsylvania put it when parents challenged one of these public-school gender policies: “(T)eaching a child how to determine one’s gender identity” strikes “at the heart of parental decision making in a matter of greatest importance in their relationship with their children.”

These parental exclusion policies are in jarring contrast to these same school districts’ policies on far less significant matters. The East Lansing policy, for example, requires that parents be notified before their child participates in surveys on certain topics, written parental consent for medication of any kind, and a written parental permission form “signed by the student’s parent/guardian before being allowed to attend a field trip.”

The Ann Arbor Public Schools have the same policy, requiring a “signed permission slip…prior to student participation in any field trip, including walking field trips.” It also requires “written parent permission” to administer any medication, including over-the-counter and even herbal products.

Michigan is not alone. More than 18,000 public schools across the country, attended by nearly 11 million students, have adopted such gender policies.

The Biden administration’s Department of Education is adding momentum with a new rule reworking Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funds. It redefines “sex” to include “gender identity” – something Congress certainly did not intend when enacting the law in 1972 – and redefines “harassment” so that staff and teachers could face disciplinary action if they “misgender” a student.

These new policies are backed up with the implied threat that billions in federal funds could be at stake if schools don’t knuckle under and enforce them.

The upshot is that Johnny needs his parents’ permission to visit the zoo, but his parents need Johnny’s permission before even being informed that he’s undressing in the girls’ locker room.

By pushing parents aside and imposing the government’s preferred gender ideology, these policies violate the parents’ constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children. The Supreme Court had called this “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests” that it has ever recognized.

Michigan parents have a lot at stake here. They are not only in the best position to help their children navigate childhood and adolescence, but they have the primary right to do so. With the Biden administration’s backing, public school districts across Michigan are taking that right away from parents and imposing their own gender ideology instead.

It’s time for parents to fight back against policies in local schools, state laws that allow those policies, and federal rules that promote this agenda at their expense.

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Thomas Jipping and Sarah Parshall Perry are Senior Legal Fellows in The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Their paper “Public School Gender Policies That Exclude Parents Are Unconstitutional” is at https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/LM355.pdf.

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