Medical and Mental Health Services Without Parental Consent?

An Update on Our Battle to Protect Parental Rights

“A lot of people think that using the pronouns and affirming a child who says they’re the opposite sex, that that is about kindness,” she said, explaining:

“Everybody’s very confused about this. Because the T has purposefully been attached to LGB, which is a completely separate issue. We know the LGB community was mistreated, and so people don’t want to do that again with trans-identified people, so everybody’s being super careful, and they want to be kind. But it’s a different situation. With LGB people, they’re saying, ‘Just let us be who we are.’ And there’s no medical consequences.

But with transgender-identified people or people who identify as the opposite sex, it’s very much a medical situation and it’s about the harm medicalization causes. Children are cutting off their healthy breasts and testicles and doing things to their bodies that they can’t undo. So that is completely different. Of course parents are concerned when their children identify this way because it carries a heavy medical burden which they will have for the rest of their life. They become sewn to the medical industrial complex. They will have to take drugs. They will probably have to have other surgeries. We don’t even know all the health consequences at this point. It’s an experiment happening right now on children.”

This quote is from a real story that took place in a suburban town in Washington state. Right here, in our own state, children as young as 13 years old can access their own medical and mental health services through the schools without parental consent or knowledge. In fact, insurance companies are able to bill for these services without providing an EOB (Explanation of Benefits) to the parents.

Sadly, this story isn’t rare. Every day we hear stories of children enduring horrific procedures to attempt to change their gender without the consent of their parents, and these so-called “gender-affirming” procedures are on the rise.

According to CNN, (they didn’t link the study in their article, but we linked it here) a study in 2023 “looked at records from 2016 to 2020 from the Nationwide Ambulatory Surgery Sample, the largest all-payer surgery database in the US that tracks people who have had procedures that don’t require an overnight hospital stay, and the National Inpatient Sample, the largest publicly available all-payer database of people who have had to stay in the hospital when they have surgery.” Of the 48,000 surgeries performed in that time period, they noted that 7.7% of these procedures were performed on children ages 12-18. Despite the deliberate downplaying of such a number from the media, that equals 3,696 gender-mutilating surgeries performed on CHILDREN. Surgeries that cannot be reversed and have significant consequences for these kids.

Parents shouldn’t have to be fighting these battles to protect their own child’s body from the surgeries approved of by schools, but the reality is that the battle is here. It is time to engage and protect our kids. This is why we are fighting to protect Initiative 2081, the Parents Bill of Rights.

Parents are the Rightful Stakeholders of Their Children’s Lives.

Initiative Measure 2081 established a parents’ bill of rights and added a new section to chapter 28A.605 RCW. Included in the Initiative are prior notification requirements regarding medical services offered by/through the school, law enforcement intervention, and when a child is removed from the public school campus. It is imperative that parents have access to what their kids are being taught and shown in the classroom, so the measure provided a transparency requirement allowing parents to review textbooks, curriculum and an annual school calendar, as well as providing the opportunity for parents to opt their children out of activities and/or engagements that the parent so chooses. Initiative Measure 2081 protects the rights of parents to be the primary stakeholder in their children’s upbringing, not the State.

This initiative was voted into law by the people of Washington state, but is now under attack by Legal Counsel for Youth and Children (LCYC) who is attempting to undermine what YOU, the voters, enacted. Not only that, but Chris Reykdal, Washington Superintendent of Public Instruction, has already instructed schools to “ignore” this codified law “until additional clarity is provided on the areas where the initiative conflicts with existing state and federal law.” In directing school districts to ignore the law, Mr. Reykdal ignores that the People and the Legislature have already spoken on this matter so there is no confusion as to what IS, in fact, Washington state law.

Do you really want Washington state making decisions for your child about having a life-altering surgery?

Our team is working on our Response which is due November 15, 2024. We will provide an update again soon.

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