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How do you ensure that a piece of information is simultaneously public and secret? I have no idea, but I hope that someone can explain a reliable strategy because this story makes no sense in its absence.
EDIT: link to the policy in question.
TL;DR: The government of Saskatchewan just enacted a new policy that affects "preferred names" and pronouns for younger students (along with some other changes, which I'll skip over). It requires that teachers obtain parental consent before using new names/pronouns for students under 16 years old. The criticism is focused on two claims: First, being "out" is important. Second, it can be unsafe if a parent learns that their child is transgender.
The first claim has already been argued to death, and there's nothing new in this story.
The second claim is just bizarre in this context. What do they expect would happen in the absence of the new policy? Everybody starts using the child's new names/pronouns in everything from casual conversations to official reports...and the parents don't notice for >2 years?
If I knew that a child had information that could be dangerous if it got into the wrong hands, I wouldn't encourage them to spread it far and wide. In fact, I'd direct them to a professional that would help them to develop a strategy that minimized the damage from its release, or else cope with maintaining the burden of secrecy.
But maybe I'm missing something, so I'll repeat my question: how do you ensure that a piece of information is simultaneously public and secret?
My impression is that the idea of being "out" to some groups of people and not others is pretty common in the LGBT community. For example, you might be "out" to your friends (or some subset of friends) that you are trans but not "out" at work (maybe because you're afraid of some kind of discrimination). The way this works in practice is that people who know you are trans use your preferred name and pronouns only if you all are in mutual company that's aware you're trans. If you're with people who don't know that you're trans, the people who do know are supposed to treat you as if you weren't.
Applied to this situation I'm thinking the idea is that teachers and other students would use a trans students preferred name and pronouns in interpersonal interactions (which are largely invisible to parents) but not in official reports and communications. The students in question are "out" to their teachers and peers, but not their parents.
I'll also add that I don't think has to be a specifically trans thing (though obviously it is in the OP). I can imagine some student named "Robert" who prefers to go by "Bob" for whatever reason. Said student prefers to be addressed as Bob but is aware their parents hate the nickname "Bob" so they'd prefer teachers and reports use their given name so as to avoid parental ire.
Yes; the whole problem is that the teachers will punish the peers of that student based on how seriously they take being "out". This is the "I'm forced to tell a lie" problem non-progressives have with trans folks except (from the peers' point of view) they're literally forced to tell the lie (children don't have the experience to simply disregard teachers' punishments, and parents' jobs generally get more difficult when they start telling their own children to use their own judgment when dealing with authority figures, so reinforcing a child's tendency to obey teachers is completely defensible).
Just avoiding interacting with the problem or moving away from it is simply not possible in kid jail; it's even policy that the teacher is forced to punish the peer that won't tell the lie! (regardless of that teacher's personal politics).
By ensuring that students can't invoke that power unilaterally, and have to get their parents to let them do it, it doesn't stop the student from actually being able to be trans (and it's still backed up with force of law- the conservatives are just driving the speed limit here, and progressive parents are still free to grant their child access to the State power their faction currently enjoys).
But it does prevent 2 things: first, it makes sure a 7 year old boy does not need to insist that My Name Is Not Odessa Yarker if he displays some GNC behaviors and a progressive teacher overfits that into "clearly, trans with stupid parents", and second, prevents a student in a conservative household from tasting the trappings of progressive power if their parents also think the only reason their kid wants to do that is to have an excuse to bully others (and since conservatives think, not unfairly, that 'excuse to bully others' and 'out as transgender' are synonyms...)
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