Texas public schools could face fines if teachers use preferred pronouns for students, or “assist” with “social transitioning” their gender, if a new bill in the legislature passes.
The bill would force school districts to ban teachers from helping students to change their pronouns, clothing or hairstyles to deviate from their biological sex, according to a draft of the proposed legislation.
Republican state Rep. Nathan Schatzline, who is spearheading the bill, said during a Texas House Public Education Committee hearing Tuesday that the measure would prevent children from going down a path that he believes leads to “irreversible harm.”
“We must make it unmistakably clear: Schools are not places for secret agendas or social experiments on our kids,” Schatzline said.
“This bill simply bans the most harmful aspects of teaching gender identity to children, the social transitioning of our most vulnerable.”
Schatzline said he believes that “gender-affirming care” only affirms “confusion” and “not truth.”
“In some cases, teachers have been encouraged to withhold information from moms and dads. This is not compassion, it’s deception and it’s anti-parental rights and it’s perpetuation of mental illness,” he said.
A north Texas couple testified to the committee that they learned over email that their adopted teenage daughter’s teachers were calling her “Apollo,” according to The Dallas Morning News. They said their daughter has special needs and isn’t transitioning or knows what it means to do so.
They argued she merely liked to be called “Apollo” at school, but that the school should have told them.
“Look, this is just simply giving the facts to a child,” Schatzline said. “If a child goes home and a parent wants to say that they are not the biological sex that they were born into, that’s the parent’s right to do so.”
“We do not believe that teachers or counselors should be forced into doing that at the same time inside the classroom,” he added.
Critics say if the bill is made law, it will further isolate kids who identify as LGBTQ.
One activist claimed the language in the bill could even punish teachers for calling kids by nicknames. Mandy Giles, the founder of Parents of Trans Youth, told lawmakers that her legal name is Amanda — and many of them have a preferred nickname they ask people to use.
“You’d probably be pretty offended if someone just said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that,’” she said, according to the Dallas Morning News.
“Or worse, ‘I’d like to, but if I did, my employer would lose a huge amount of money and I’d probably be fired.’”
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