Radical gender ideology is taking over public schools and harming children

In late March 2022, the Heritage Foundation hosted an event titled, “How radical gender ideology is taking over public schools and harming kids.”

One of the speakers was Abigail Martinez, a mother of four from California. She shared, for the first time, the utterly heart-breaking story of the suicide of her daughter Yaeli.

According to Abigail, Yaeli was a happy “girlie girl” through her early childhood. She loved singing and dancing and wearing princess dresses. But in her teenage years, she began to exhibit signs of depression. Abigail informed the school and sought their help something she now regrets.

Yaeli allegedly became convinced, thanks in part to school psychologists, that she was a boy and wanted to be called Andrew, which her mother allowed. But the change did not give her daughter the happiness she sought. After an attempted suicide, Yaeli (now Andrew) ran away.

School officials told social services that Andrew would be ‘better off out of the house’ and she was placed in foster care at 16-years-old.

Abigail said “When I went to court, I asked the judge to please let my daughter have a psych evaluation.” The school social worker insisted that she needed to be affirmed as transgender, and so, the judge denied Abigail’s request.

In September of 2019, Yaeli committed suicide by kneeling in front of an oncoming train. It was her mother, Abigail, who was left to bury the literal pieces of her daughter and live every day with the loss. Not the school social worker, not the principal, not the judge, not her teachers. Tragically Abigail’s story is extreme but not unique.

Also speaking at Heritage was mother, January Littlejohn, who shared the story of her daughter’s confrontation with gender ideology.

January and her husband Jeffrey, filed a suit in the U.S. District Court in October 2021 seeking “vindication of their fundamental rights to direct the upbringing of their children” after their daughter’s school failed to notify them that their 13-year-old daughter had entered a school-sanctioned gender transition plan without their consent. A situation that the newly introduced “Parental Rights in Education” bill prevents.

But how could education authorities and teachers possibly think it’s their role to teach this kind of content to children? The answer is they think that isn’t just their duty, but their right.

The scaremongering tactics of LGBTQ++ activist groups is not a spontaneous backlash against States introducing parental rights in education bills.

It is a rerun of government and LGBTQ++ sponsored “critical race theory” debates that embroiled education authorities and school boards across the US in 2021.

In the course of many debates parents were told they had no right to oversight over their children’s curriculum and weren’t entitled to a say on anything.

During a debate between two favoured candidates for the governorship of Virginia, one said: “I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.” In response the second candidate said: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The views of candidate one clearly resonated with Virginia parents, since they elected him Governor and only a month later parents in Virginia reasserted their rights to have a say about what their own children were being taught in classrooms. (Summary of an article written by Bethany Mandel)