By Maria Keffler

Northern Virginia, we have a problem: our nation’s public schools have been targeted by aggressive and organized social-engineering activism, and its policies are rolling out like a big red—or rainbow—carpet right over the bodies of our children. What are our schools teaching our kids today?

• That it is impossible to distinguish a person’s sex from his or her biology or physiology.
• That sex is neither chromosomal nor physical, but is randomly “assigned at birth.” (By whom, one wonders.)
• That objective facts, such as genetic code and physical attributes, are less valid than a nine-year-old’s interpretation of his or her feelings.
• That parents’ authority and girls’ rights are irrelevant.
• That it is hateful, bigoted, and discriminatory to question anything the LGBTQ+ industry says.

The misogyny and autocracy inherent in this ideology should cause rational-minded citizens to stomp on the school bus brakes immediately.

If only we were driving the bus. But we are not. School boards have handed the wheel over to the LGBTQ+ industry.

In June 2018 one of the co-chairs of the local chapter of GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network) told the Washington Post that Northern Virginia and California are serving as laboratories for LGBTQ+ policy efforts.

Laboratories?

They’re experimenting on our children in our schools, right under our noses, and they’re not even trying to pretend otherwise. Local and national organizations like Nova Pride, FCPS Pride, Equality Virginia, Alexandria-Arlington Gay Lesbian Alliance, Rainbow Families DC, GLSEN, Gender Spectrum, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (which is in fact only concerned about LGBTQ+ humans’ rights), and Planned Parenthood all have comprehensive and radical educational goals, strategies, and plug-and-play curricula for activist teachers, counselors, and administrators to funnel into our schools.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing, under the reckless and arrogant gaze of unilateral school boards who demonstrate shameless disregard for parents’ values or opinions. The Fairfax County Public Schools’ board members did exactly that in June 2018 when they voted 10-0 to remove “biological gender” from their policy and replace it with “sex assigned at birth,” among other gender-bending policies, despite having received emails numbering 941-192 against such action.

That these elected school board members will flout constituents’ convictions and positions should sound every alarm bell in the county even if one agrees with their latest cause célèbre, because it is a bold and clear middle-finger-up to every parent and citizen in Fairfax County from the rooftop of the Gatehouse Administration Center.

What else are FCPS school board members saying?

Ryan McElveen praises himself for having “led [FCPS] with progressive ideals” and for being “the sponsor for our protections for LGBTQ students.” But those protections obliterate protections for non-LGBTQ students, denying them things like personal privacy in locker rooms, restrooms, and hotel rooms, and the commitment to girls that they will not have to compete against boys in sports and for sports scholarships.

Dalia Palchik asserts that “this research aligns with our studies in biological anthropology and in looking at gender through that lens.” (1:59:00) Ms Palchik, the study of biology explicitly reveals that there are two sex gametes: sperm and ova (eggs). There is no third gamete and no continuum between the gametes: men generate sperm and women generate ova, which is the distinction that indicates which of us are men and which are women. Anthropology, the study of human societies and cultures, describes how societies and cultures live(d) and how they are similar and different from each other. But nowhere in any journal, text, or history of biology, or anthropology, or biological anthropology will one find a group of people in which a third sort of gamete-producing human has existed.

Megan McLaughlin claims that “in the end I believe that when I was elected to this school board the residents of Braddock district wanted me to focus on how do we find best practice…” (2:54:00~) But the Fairfax School Board has not found best practice when it comes to the health of children. Even the World Professional Association on Transgender Health acknowledges that 80-95% of children who exhibit gender dysphoria will align with their birth sex if allowed to pass through puberty naturally, which means not being affirmed socially or medically in a transgender identity. By aligning FCPS policies with pop-culture transgender affirmation theories, the school board has undermined the health and wellbeing of the children entrusted to their care.

Blue Virginia, an unprofessional and baldly biased blog collective that one hesitates to affirm as journalism—contributors typically don’t even publish their full or legal names—posted a piece by “lowkell” which sums up exactly why Fairfax County must vote in school board candidates who care more about science, evidence-based practices, and children’s futures than they care about holding onto their own sense of power:

“The *last* thing we want to see this November is Republicans somehow managing to get one or more of their right-wing nominees onto the School Board, just when it seemed possible that Democrats might end up with unanimous control.”

Unanimous party control of any government body is exactly what America does not need, as it does not make for a healthy, responsive governing system anywhere in our Republic. The current Fairfax County school board does not hold the corner on wisdom, common sense, or forward-thinking, as they have amply demonstrated by their reckless and unconscionable policy decisions over the last several years. To allow a mindless, party-line alliance to continue to control the school board as it has done is to tell our children that:

• What your parents taught you about your body was a lie.
• When facts are not culturally popular, they can be rewritten.
• Reality consists of nothing more than one’s fantastical ideas.
• Girls’ and women’s concerns and protections are unworthy of note.
• The LGBTQ+ industry will now be the primary driver of all government and school policy.

Only two members of the current Fairfax County Public Schools board should be retained at the next election, and it is because they had the courage of conviction and the strength of character to refuse what a lost and confused culture is trying to force upon its children. Elizabeth Schultz and Tom Wilson fought to maintain the public school as a place where all children are safe and all families are respected. Mr. Wilson instructed the FCPS school board: “We need to listen, we need to acknowledge, and we need to do what we can to reflect the opinions of our community.” (2:43:20)

Yes you do, Mr. Wilson. And at the next election voters will bring you and Ms. Schultz more colleagues who agree.

Maria Keffler is a former middle and high school teacher with a master’s degree in educational psychology.