Idaho Governor Brad Little signed House Bill 538 on Monday. This means that Idaho school districts will soon have to remove any requirements that teachers use the preferred pronouns of transgender students.
The legislation enacts protections for public employees, including teachers, who are unwilling to use someone’s preferred name and pronouns. Idaho Statehouse Republicans overwhelmingly supported it.
Teachers will no longer be allowed to refer to a student by a name or pronoun that doesn’t match their birth sex unless the teacher has parental consent. Teachers have the right to sue their school district if they are disciplined for refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred name or pronoun.
The governor’s spokeswoman said that he “supports policies that advance free speech and parental rights.” She said the bill does both.
“While Gov. Little expects state employees to treat each other and members of the community with dignity and respect, he does not support government compelling speech at risk of penalty or excluding parents from significant decisions impacting a child’s health and wellbeing.”
The law takes effect on July 1. This affects non-binary people, not just transgender students and public employees.
A Christian lobbying group, the Idaho Family Policy Center, praised Governor Little for signing the bill. They said it protects teachers from “adverse employment action” when they use “biologically correct pronouns.”
Even in school districts with no written compelled pronoun policy, educators feel pressure from administrators, parents and students to use preferred pronouns,” Blaine Conzatti, president of the group, said in a news release, “and these teachers rightly fear what might happen if they continue disregarding such demands.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho is not praising the governor. It lobbied against the bill. The ACLU said it would allow teachers to “persistently and intentionally” misgender certain students. That is the opposite of the truth, though. The law allows sanity to return in classrooms and prevents children from forming new identities without their parent’s knowledge. The ACLU also said the law may violate anti-discrimination laws.
There is little doubt that lawsuits will be filed. That’s what the ACLU does.
The Idaho Senate approved another bill, House Bill 421, that would change the legal definition of ‘sex’ to “an individual’s biological sex, either male or female.” The law considers the word gender as a synonym of the definition of sex. It creates legal definitions of the words boy, father, female, girl, male, and mother.
We live in a garbage culture. Imagine a state legislature passing a law that defines those words. That is how far off the rails society has fallen. Many parents don’t know what kids do at school but others do and indulge their children. Get the child some professional help. There is a mental health crisis in this country and the transgender agenda is a part of it. It’s become something popular. I don’t buy for a minute that so many schoolchildren are out as transgender. It’s like a fad. Yes, I think that a minuscule number of people are transgender but it’s so prominent now that it can’t be true.
It’s about time public officials stood up and said enough is enough. It looks like we’re going to have to get politicians involved to stop the madness.
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