At the same time that Arizona parents are being given more choices in where to send their kids to school, their choices about what happens once their kids get there are dwindling. 

As if Arizona parents didn’t already have their hands full in helping their children navigate the waters of adolescent sexuality, gender activists are increasingly using the public schools to lead students down a path their parents may know nothing about. And the Biden-Harris administration is making it worse.

Like many others, the Tucson Unified School District’s gender policy defines “gender identity” as “an individual’s internal sense of gender.” This “internal sense” might be anything from a fleeting feeling, prompted by a suggestion on social media, to a clinically significant diagnosis of gender dysphoria requiring medical treatment. 

>>> Public School Gender Policies That Exclude Parents Are Unconstitutional

These policies, however, prohibit efforts to tell the difference. They require that a student’s assertion of gender identity, which can change at any time, be taken at face value.

Not only that, but schools implement a range of policies that cater to this assertion. The Kayenta Unified School District policy, for example, requires that students be addressed by “a name and pronoun that corresponds to the student’s gender identity.” Similarly, the Mesa Unified School District policy provides that students, regardless of age, may participate in physical education and sports; use restrooms, locker rooms, and shower facilities; and participate in “any other circumstances where students are separated by gender,” including “overnight field trips…in accordance with their gender identity.”

It’s important to emphasize that these policies have nothing to do with a school’s curriculum or administration. Everyone agrees that schools have primary authority in those areas. Instead, these policies simply impose schools’ gender ideology, setting students down a path that can dramatically affect the rest of their lives. 

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.” But gender activists in Arizona public schools, however, not only believe they have authority in this area, they deliberately work to keep parents in the dark.

The Ganado Unified School District policy, for example, prohibits school staff from disclosing any information regarding a student’s current gender identity, or the steps a school is taking to cater to it, to anyone. The student alone determines his or her gender identity and is in complete control over “when, with whom, and how much to share” even with parents.

Mesa schools require not only parental permission, but a “written order” from the appropriate healthcare professional for administration even of over-the-counter medications such as Tylenol. 

The upshot is that Johnny needs his parents’ permission to go to the zoo, but his parents need his permission to know that he’s undressing in the girls’ locker room. 

While it’s bad enough that Arizona public schools are taking these steps on their own, the Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Education recently issued a sweeping rule that will push more public school districts in this direction. This massive rule reworks Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funds. 

Bureaucrats are using such “rulemaking” to change this important federal law in ways that the Constitution allows only Congress to do. The rule 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. This massive federal mandate carries the implied threat that billions of dollars in federal funds could be at stake if schools don’t knuckle under and enforce them.

By pushing parents aside and imposing the government’s preferred gender ideology, these policies violate parents’ constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their own 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 policies in local schools, state laws that allow those policies, and federal rules that promote this agenda at their expense.