State Ed Hears About Troubling ‘Transgender’ Guidance

On June 20, 2023, New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms (NYCF) published an analysis of a 42-page guidance document from the New York State Education Department (NYSED) relating to “transgender” issues. The NYSED Guidance Document (the “Guidance Document”) was entitled “Creating a Safe, Supportive, and Affirming School Environment for Transgender and Gender Expansive Students: 2023 Legal Update and Best Practices.” According to the Guidance Document, its purpose was to help public school administrators “create a culture in which TGE, nonbinary, and intersex students feel safe, supported, and included.” However, NYCF believes that the true purpose of the Guidance Document is to normalize “transgenderism” and direct New York schools to bend over backwards to accommodate it, regardless of the harms it inflicts upon students and their families. In response, NYCF created an online petition that allowed Christian New Yorkers and other concerned citizens to contact NYSED and express strong disagreement with the Guidance Document. (A printable version of the petition is available here.)

On August 25, 2023, NYCF submitted an open letter to NYSED Commissioner Betty Rosa concerning the Guidance Document. In our letter, we advised the Commissioner that the Guidance Document was fundamentally flawed due to its embrace of the notion that a person’s gender identity is separate and apart from his or her biological sex. We also laid out our specific objections to many of the Guidance Document’s provisions and added the following comments: “New York’s parents do not send their children to school to be subjected to privacy invasion by opposite-sex students, Orwellian Newspeak, or “transgender”-infused curricula at the behest of overzealous left-wing bureaucrats. Parents send their children to school to learn, and NYSED has no authority to shove parents aside or keep them in the dark about their children’s lives. Furthermore, New York schools should be safe places for all students—not just students with gender dysphoria.”

At the end of the letter, we called upon NYSED to retract the Guidance Document and advised the Commissioner that we intended to empower parents around the state to speak out against it as well. A copy of our open letter is available here.