Kansas AG says schools can’t hide trans kids’ gender identities from parents
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach says schools can’t conceal trans kids’ gender identities from parents, which can include given names and pronouns used at school.
Kansas’ attorney general said school policies allowing staff to “conceal” a student’s transgender or nonbinary identity violate parental rights, even though Kansas does not have a law mandating that schools disclose a student’s gender identity to their parents.
“A child changing his or her gender identity has major long-term medical and psychological ramifications,” Attorney General Kris Kobach said in a statement Thursday. “Parents should know, and have an opportunity to be involved in, such an important aspect of their well-being.”
Kobach’s statement follows a letter he said he sent early last year to six Kansas school districts to inform them that their policies allowing school staff to conceal a student’s transgender or gender-nonconforming status from parents violated parental rights.
Two of the districts, the Belle Plaine School District and Maize Unified School District, told Kobach at the time that they did not intend to conceal students’ gender identities from parents, according to Kobach’s statement. However, four other school districts — the Kansas City Kansas Unified School District, Olathe Unified School District, Shawnee Mission Unified School District and Topeka Unified School District — ”dug in their heels and essentially asserted that school administrators know better than parents,” Kobach stated.
Kobach said some of the districts denied that their policies allowed staff to conceal a student’s transgender status from parents. The Olathe school district, located just outside Kansas City, requested a meeting with Kobach, “but despite repeated attempts by the Attorney General’s staff, no such meeting has been scheduled,” Kobach said.
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