If you’re the parent of a child in a Pennsylvania school facing disciplinary problems, the law says you must be notified. The same goes if your child is caught with drugs or alcohol. But if your child is questioning his or her gender, you won’t hear a word. In fact, many school districts have adopted policies deliberately designed to keep you in the dark.

There’s little dispute that, in general, schools should take the lead on matters such as curriculum or school administration. Sex and gender identity, however, are in a different category altogether. A federal judge in Pennsylvania put it this way: “[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.”

All kids play dress-up or make-believe. So did we, once upon a time. But we did not insist that schools cater to our imaginations and structure policies around them. Yet when it comes to gender identity, for some reason, things are much different today. The Abington School District’s gender policy defines gender identity as “a person’s sense of what gender(s), if any, with which they identify.” And this belief, a child’s self-identification can change at any time.

School gender policies require that a child’s current internal “sense” at any given moment dictates school policy on a host of matters. The Derry Township School District’s policy, for example, requires school personnel to address students “by the name and pronouns that correspond to their gender identity.”

The School District of Philadelphia policy requires that schools eliminate “all gender-based activities, rules, policies and practices” that do not have “a clear and sound pedagogical purpose.” Even then, students may ignore that purpose and participate in any activities or follow “any such rule, policy, or practice consistent with their gender identity.”

Under the School District of Pittsburgh policy, students must have access to “all restrooms, locker rooms, changing facilities, or overnight facilities…that correspond to their gender identity.” The same is required for physical education classes and intramural sports.

But what’s more, these policies deliberately conceal information from parents about their own children.

The Colonial School District policy is typical, prohibiting school personnel from disclosing any gender-related information “to others, including the student’s parents/guardians…unless the student has authorized such disclosure.” These parental exclusion policies are in jarring contrast to how the same schools handle far less significant matters.

Philadelphia public schools, for example, require written parental permission for any student to go on a field trip or to receive any medication, including over-the-counter products. Pittsburgh public schools do too, but exclude non-prescription throat lozenges from needing parental consent.

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.

Pennsylvania public schools are not alone. Nearly 1,100 school districts across the country, with 11.5 million students attending 19,600 schools, have already joined the gender revolution. And it’s about to get worse. A sweeping new rule by the Biden administration’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.

This rule reworks Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in any educational program that directly or indirectly receives federal funds (which is the vast majority of schools in the country). The rule redefines “sex” to include “gender identity or expression” – 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. This massive federal mandate carries the implied threat of revocation of billions in federal funds if schools don’t knuckle under and enforce it.

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.

It’s time for parents to fight back against these policies in local schools, oppose state laws that allow those policies, and speak out against federal rules that promote this agenda at their own 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. You can read their paper “Public School Gender Policies That Exclude Parents Are Unconstitutional” at https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/LM355.pdf.

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