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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?
You should listen to stories from educators who deal with these issues in reality.
Yes absolutely kids ask teachers to use different names/pronouns in class and the parents never find out.
Yes absolutely kids ask if they can use the gender-neutral single-stall bathroom next to the teacher's lounge, or change in bathroom stall instead of in front of the other kids, and parents never find out.
You can't 'ensure' that the parents never find out, but you can maximize your odds.
And even if they find out eventually, buying 6 months or a year or three years of time can be very important for a kid trying to build a secondary support network.
I should! Do you have any links handy? Preferably about the exact scenario I outlined (Attempting to keep it public+secret was positive over the long term, regardless of whether or not it succeeded), but I'd take anything short of a human-interest fluff piece. The ones I've seen have been mostly split between "I was scared for nothing, I should've come out to my parents sooner" and "I was not ready for what happened. I should've had a better plan before coming out in public."
Coming back to the policy rather than abstract questions, do you think that 15-year-olds are mature enough to decide to cut ties with their home (even if the plan would culminate at 18ish)? Granted, they might be correct. In that case, the appropriate response is a call to CPS and/or the police to deal with the serious situation.
To go to the ad absurdum, if a 15 year old were being raped and beaten by their parents every night, I think most could correctly identify that this is a bad situation they should leave.
And at the other end, many 15 year olds incorrectly believe that not being allowed to go to a party with drugs and alcohol is a major injustice and that they should run away form home over it.
Like every other human in every other situation in the world, some 15 year olds are smart or are in obvious cases and will make the correct call, and some 15 year olds will be stupid or in ambiguous cases and make the wrong call.
This is an inconvenient fact about the human condition, and is why blanket statements of the type you're trying to inquire about here basically never work, and we have to actually look at the specific situation and apply our best judgement instead.
However, that's not what we're talking about here.
Deciding not to tell your parents that you're trans - or gay, or atheist, or dating outside your race, or any of a million other things that might upset them - is not breaking ties with them. It is in fact the opposite, trying to maintain the family bond in the face of awkward information that you fear might strain or break it.
Should kids keep secrets like that from their parents? Ideally they're in a good situation where they don't have to, but for those who think they're in a bad situation I wouldn't want the government to override their judgement and force them to disclose. Especially since the consequences of keeping the secret are very minor - they remain a stable family unit, nothing changes - while the worst potential consequences of disclosure are very bad (why are so many trans teens prostitutes? Because they were kicked out of their homes and forced to live on the streets!).
Which also gets to your CPS point - if they don't disclose and therefore aren't being abused over it, there's nothing to report to CPS and everything is fine. I don't think 'there is a potential situation under which this loving family would instead abuse their child, we should try to ring that circumstance about so that they will abuse them, so that CPS can take them away' is in any way a sane approach to take to such situations?
And, importantly, the current situation is not just on the recognizance of the student, the school can decide to tell the parents if they want to. Right now the parents don't learn about it only if both the student and the school think they'd be in danger. I trust that combination of judgement a fairly high amount, again especially given the asymmetric dangers involved here.
I was vehemently agreeing with this comment, until the unfortunate conclusion:
This idealized view of educational personnel doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's mired in the present conflict and lacks perspective: institutions have a long history of abusing the trust of children and do not deserve this level of confidence or deference.
It's tawdry to quote myself, but I don't think I can put it better than I did before:
I had a lot of great teachers, people that encouraged and supported me, but I also had egomaniacs and narcissists who took great pleasure in driving a wedge between kids and their parents (with no long-term concern for the children). I saw more than a handful of teachers happy to sexually exploit their students*. And I saw a substantial minority of lazy, time-serving clock-punchers.
* And a few relationships that I wouldn't call exploitative, but imagine most would.
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