Assigned: Parents’ Rights
Parents’ rights have become an obsession in the anti-trans right wing media landscape. Here, we looked deeper at what these so-called parents' rights advocates want, where they came from, who’s funding them, and why they’re dangerous for trans kids and all kids.
by Evan Urquhart
Far right activists think they’ve found an answer to those with the effrontery to use science and data to improve the health of America’s children. That answer? Parents’ rights. A movement to empower conservative parents to overrule educational or medical experts on issues from vaccines to diversity in schools, gutting public health measures against the will of the American mainstream.
What’s really alarming about this parents' rights movement is that it seeks to decouple parental rights from ideas about a child’s best interests, arguing instead that whether or not vaccines are safe and effective, a parent’s right to have complete control in decision making should allow them to override their child’s best interest. Similarly, with transgender youth medicine, parents’ rights groups don’t rest their arguments on a discussion of what treatments really are in the best interests of children with gender dysphoria. (They can’t, because the evidence on the opposite side is quite compelling, which is why the American Medical Association and numerous other major medical organizations all support the evidence-based affirmative model.) Instead, they argue that conservative parents’ values are of such overriding importance that they don’t merely get to decide what treatments are best for their own children (a foundational right of parents that is only overridden in extraordinary cases), but that public schools can’t even take measures to welcome and help peers to understand other children who are transgender, because conservative children cannot be allowed to hear such people exist.
Parents' rights are also called parental rights by conservative advocacy groups, but the latter term may bring confusion, because it’s also used in legal contexts including divorce and child welfare cases. It seems wise, therefore, to stick to “parents' rights” to denote conservative activism here. The “rights” in question aren't the long-recognized parental rights that parents have long had, such as visitation, custody, legal representation in child welfare settings, etc, but a new set of confusing and contradictory rights that conservatives would like parents to have. And there’s reason to believe we’re not seeing this stuff because a groundswell of parents are rising to reject the expert medical opinions that can help keep their children safe, but because the Koch brothers and other big conservative donors are throwing money at this.
The thrust of these new rights would be to allow conservative parents to override educational and public health best practices, regardless of any evidence of negative child welfare impacts. From not protecting their children from deadly childhood diseases to preventing conservatives’ children from learning that trans people exist, to opposing critical race theory in schools (despite it never being taught in schools), conservatives believe the rights of the parent should be paramount, and they don’t care if the evidence shows that children are being hurt.
Traditionally, what we would think of as parental rights have been an absolutely vital part of child welfare, and as such they stemmed from ideas about acting according to the best interests of children. Children need families who will love and care for them. In the vast majority of cases, a parent’s concern, along with their close knowledge of their child’s unique situation, puts parents in a better position than anyone on earth to make the best judgements possible for any given child. Of course, there are parents who perpetrate abuse, and many more who are mediocre. Even the very best parents will sometimes make mistakes and misjudgements over a child’s life, because of the fallibility of human beings. However, there’s very rarely any reason to think an outsider to the family could do better than a mom or dad. Rights such as visitation post-divorce, and even the child welfare goal of family reunification after serious abuse or neglect, are all based on this need of a child for their parent(s), and on the record of poor outcomes for children who are taken from parents and given to others. (That record is an ugly one, ripe with racism and attempts at genocide.)
So parental rights, as distinct from the sort of stuff demanded by the parents' rights movement, are good because they rest on a notion of doing what’s best for children. In cases where children come into contact with adults who have specialized knowledge, such as in education and healthcare systems, there are often limited exceptions to the rule of thumb that parents know best.
So just how big a deal are parents’ rights among anti-trans folks? In one of Assigned’s early stories, we poked fun at right-wing political news site the Washington Times for seeming to take stenography from a small local activist group in rural Wyoming. Then we found a parents' rights story on the FOX News website. We found one from Rhode Island, in the mainstream Providence Journal. A letter to the editor in Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch, a conservative leading daily newspaper in Columbus Ohio. A report on MSNBC that parents' rights were high on the agenda for Florida Governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. A FOX News piece about a parents' rights group that filed a complaint over a school play’s casting decisions in a Massachusetts high school. All of the stories linked were posted earlier this month, and these links aren’t exhaustive. There are even more stories posted in the past week we’ve left off for the sake of readability.
above: results of a Google News search at about 7am EST on 10/13/2022
Searches conducted at any time during the writing of this piece produced similar results, with multiple parents’ rights oriented anti-trans stories publishing every single day.
Where did this insanity come from? It turns out that the core interest on the right in expanding the definition of parental rights is far from new. As far back as 2015, DAME Magazine (a left-leaning politics and culture website whose primary audience is women), wrote about parents' rights groups in the context of anti-vaccination efforts. We can see that the scaffolding for the increasingly obsessive coverage in right wing media has clearly been built up over time. What’s somewhat newer is the move from roots in the homeschooling and fathers’ rights movements, first into anti-vax and COVID denial contexts, as written about in DAME, and on to today, where advocacy to give conservative parents a veto over how public schools address and respond to transgender students and students of color in their midst sits in uneasy tension with efforts to strip affirming parents of the right to direct their trans children’s medical care.
Also not new, but very troubling, is the dark money funding these parents' rights groups. According to an investigation last January by Truthout (a left-leaning nonprofit news organization which focuses on issues related to social justice), wealthy Republican donors, people whose ultimate goal is to dismantle the system of public education in America, have seeded “local” groups across the country to make it look as though a grassroots uprising by conservative parents is at hand, a practice often referred to as “astroturf.” Donors to astroturf-style groups such as “Parents Defending Education” or the “Independent Women’s Forum” include the Koch brothers and former Trump official Betsy DeVos, according to Truthout.
What’s ultimately at stake here is the ability of the US to have a functioning public school system. Unfortunately for trans people, what’s also at stake is the ability for transgender children to simply exist at school. Extreme parents' rights organizations consider the very presence of trans people (or any LGBTQ+ people) to be forbidden knowledge that must be kept from conservative children at all costs.
Conveniently, the groups never explore the tension between the right of the parent of a transgender schoolchild to affirm their child, with the hoped-for right of conservative parents to prevent their children from knowing that trans children exist. Traditionally, this tension would be resolved by looking at the best interests for all children, which means that affirming a trans child would be seen as a positive, based on the evidence, and keeping trans children secret would have no known detrimental effects. Don’t imagine the tension between parents with different values which lies at the heart of this is a bug, however. If the goal is to dismantle public schools, that’s a feature, it seems.
As often happens, trans youth are being used as pawns in a conservative movement with aims that would hurt all children, but will likely end up hurting trans and other LGBTQ+ children first, most often, and most severely.