Name bill good to protect kids, reduce confusion

To date inexplicably hesitant to strengthen protections of children, this session the Louisiana Legislature need not whiff on a bill that not only does that, but that also calms fears of school employees and related personnel.

HB 81 by Republican state Rep. Raymond Crews would have school personnel address students by the names on their birth certificates, unless parental permission grants use of another, as well as use the pronoun associated with the student’s sex unless similar permission is granted. Even the pronoun consideration may be overridden if the alternate choice runs counter to the speaker’s religious or moral convictions.

This should come with welcome relief for school personnel. Emboldened by leftist politicians and media, the increasingly aggressive, even violent, eliminationist rhetoric and action emanating from transgender activist groups and followers puts at risk those who might commit spoken thoughtcrimes in the eyes of these special interests and draw their wrath. Only last year, a Kansas teacher was reprimanded and suspended for addressing a student by the student’s legal and enrolled name and forced her to conceal the student’s social transition from the student’s parents. Fortunately, she sought legal recourse and won a $95,000 judgment against school authorities. A law like HB 81 would remove worry from school personnel that they could face retribution for simply trying to communicate with students using the least ambiguous information about their names and the pronouns that apply.

However, the real value of the bill comes in preventing secretive manipulation of children at vulnerable times in their lives. Unscrupulous activists in schools increasingly attempt to encourage children, taking advantage of the typical ups-and-downs of growing up, to declare themselves having an identity that differs from their physical sex. That by itself could cause needless confusion and suffering when typically without any but the most minor interventions the vast majority of youngsters resolve their difficulties by adulthood by self-identifying as their physical sex.

Unfortunately, research demonstrates that even a decision to begin seeing yourself as different from your sex makes one much more likely to suffer future psychological trauma and, worst of all, more likely to embark upon physical interventions that have permanent and potentially damaging consequences, especially so given the overwhelming tendency to align identity with actual sex when not altering the latter physically by adulthood. Such a momentous inflection point deserves parental knowledge and involvement with it, which the bill encourages.

It does so by prohibiting unscrupulous school personnel from validating the insecurities of youngsters by calling them by certain names and pronouns and then shielding parents from this. Allowing this often can manufacture tremendous rifts between and grief among parents and their children, all as part of an ideology that demands that parents’ input be subverted if it doesn’t comport to unimpeachable conversion of children pushed to think that individuals for legal purposes define their own sexes regardless of their physiologies. (Excellent examples of activists creating conflict between parents and children are detailed in case studies presented in the documentary Dead Name.)

The bill could use a bit of refinement. Middle names and related diminutives of proper names students often prefer, which shouldn’t require consent. Even with this some nicknames still won’t be covered, but at least the bureaucracy involved would be reduced notably. The religious/moral exception on pronouns also should be revisited, as classroom fanatics against the bill if it becomes law as a form of self-therapeutical protest may begin to use pronouns in a crazed fashion and then claim it’s their moral precepts driving that.

Yet on the whole the bill makes great strides in protecting children. As it becomes more difficult to protect school children physically from outsider radical adherents to transgender ideology (note that coming soon is the so-called “Trans Day of Vengeance” on the heels of yet another transgender identifier committing a mass shooting and of children in this case, whose rates of such events if extrapolated to the entire American public would mean around 225 a year), the least Louisiana legislators can do is make them secure from nefarious individuals around them in schools.

And having social leftist Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards standing in the way is no excuse not to pass it. Kentucky has a similar Gov. Nyet in place for now and yet its Legislature this week passed a more comprehensive protective bill that includes a measure like this over his veto. Surely Louisiana legislates as well as Kentucky.