I watched in amazement as Jim Minnery and a small group of parents complained at a recent school board meeting that the Anchorage School District was responsible for telling them when their children were asking to be accepted at school as living a particular chosen gender.
How is it possible that these parents are unaware of how their children look when they are leaving their homes for school or how these children are having their hair cut or buying clothes or wearing jewelry or whatever other accouterments that signal their child’s preferred gender association? Surely they are not blind to their own children’s living choices.
These parents are not protesting the ASD’s policies, they are protesting their own children’s decisions and asking the school district to enforce what they cannot or do not want to accept about their children. These are the same parents who complain that the government is interfering in the lives of their families, but they are actually asking the school district and its employees to do what they apparently are not able to do: understand and effectively deal with their own children and the decisions their children are making about their lives, however repellent that may be to their own supposedly loving and supportive parents.
The school district cannot and should not be made to interfere in these matters: The district’s job is to accept and support the children who attend school and help them learn and grow to become functioning adults. Families cannot transfer blame to the school district for the private, independent decisions of their children.
— Randall Burns
Anchorage
Have something on your mind? Send to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Letters under 200 words have the best chance of being published. Writers should disclose any personal or professional connections with the subjects of their letters. Letters are edited for accuracy, clarity and length.