Portland schools turned one mom into a culture-war enemy

Although transgenderism has been on the retreat since its peak in 2023, it is still quite alive in blue states like Oregon. Last month, a Portland mother, Allison Roberts, filed a lawsuit against Portland Public Schools after receiving a trespass order because of her protests against gender ideology in her children’s elementary school.

According to reports, Roberts took issue with an assignment given to her 11-year-old that asked students to identify and discuss their gender identity with classmates and teachers, as well as the school’s decision to repaint its traditional rainbow Pride flag into an “Intersex-Inclusive Progress” variant. Roberts alleges that parents received no advance notice of the assignment or opportunity to opt their children out.

Schools exist to educate children, not to claim authority over their understanding of sex, identity, and morality.

When she tried to meet with the school’s principal, she got an unsatisfactory response. She then wrote an open letter opposing the school’s policies and passed it out to other parents outside the school. A clash with another parent followed, and eventually the district issued a one-year trespass order barring Roberts from school property.

It goes without saying that the school principal handled the matter badly. In my experience teaching in public schools, parents with concerns like Roberts’ are heard and usually accommodated. The principal could have asked the teacher to stop giving the assignment or simply allowed Roberts’ children to complete an alternative. Respectfully listening to her complaints about the flags would probably have de-escalated the situation.

Instead, the school treated Roberts like some deranged religious kook, dismissed her concerns, invoked the law, and idiotically made itself the center of a culture war.

On the bright side, the story presents an opportunity to reject transgenderism in schools by confronting the main arguments used to defend it.

The first and most obvious claim is that parents like Roberts are trying to impose their religion on others by rejecting transgender indoctrination. This has it completely backward: Portland Public Schools are imposing their religion by requiring children to discuss gender identity and surrounding them with symbols endorsing a particular understanding of sex and gender. This is the endorsement of a particular set of beliefs and values — what many people would recognize as functioning much like a religion.

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Of course, the usual follow-up is that leftist ideologies are not exclusive religions bound to dogmas and theories but inclusive agendas based on science and democratic values.

Again, Roberts’ case shows the problem with that framing. Some transgender activists describe disagreement with their ideology as a form of genocide. Claims that biological sex can be overridden by subjective gender identity remain fiercely contested, yet dissenters are routinely treated as though they reject established scientific fact. The result is an ideology that frequently marginalizes Christians and others who understand sex as fixed and binary.

Nevertheless, transgender advocates maintain that it is critical to welcome and affirm transgender children. Transgender young people report depression and anxiety at substantially higher rates than their peers, and advocates argue that acceptance is therefore essential.

This is where the argument becomes harder, not easier.

For those who have personally interacted with young people suffering from gender dysphoria, it is one thing to consider transgenderism in the abstract; it is another to watch a young person take cross-sex hormones and permanently alter a healthy body in pursuit of an identity that may itself change.

Young women can develop facial hair, lowered voices, and other permanent changes from testosterone. Young men who take estrogen undergo their own profound physical changes. Whatever one thinks about such treatments for adults, there is nothing trivial about medicalizing confused or distressed children.

And none of this belongs in a K-12 curriculum presented as though there were no serious moral, medical, or scientific dispute.

There have also been several highly publicized mass shootings committed by transgender perpetrators. Those cases do not demonstrate that transgender people as a class are dangerous, and pretending otherwise would be bad reasoning. They do, however, make especially foolish the insistence that every concern about gender ideology must arise from irrational hatred.

As Roberts’ experience shows, merely requesting the removal of such materials and imagery at a public school may not be enough. Restoring sanity requires removing transgender propaganda from classrooms and replacing ideological instruction with a moral framework that actually helps children flourish.

In practice, this would mean looking in part to my home state of Texas. Besides restricting certain LGBTQ teaching materials and accommodations for transgender identities, Texas lawmakers have banned students from using cell phones and other personal communication devices during the school day.

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The phone ban gets children off screens and forces them to interact with the people around them. They cannot as easily retreat into online worlds where anxieties and pathologies can be cultivated in isolation. They have to engage with reality.

Texas lawmakers have also required public school classrooms to post the Ten Commandments. The law has faced constitutional challenges, although the Fifth Circuit in April vacated an earlier preliminary injunction against it. Other litigation continues.

Unlike transgender flags, which signal allegiance to a contested secular ideology, the Ten Commandments clearly articulate a moral code centered on reverence, honesty, respect for others, and self-control. These are useful guidelines for any classroom.

Despite their roots in Judeo-Christian Scripture, many of the principles contained in the Ten Commandments can be understood and practiced by anyone. They provide a moral framework ordered toward human flourishing and are far more useful to children than slogans about gender identity.

At least Texas is moving in the opposite direction from Portland.

Allison Roberts should not have been treated as a threat merely for objecting to what her child was being taught. Her lawsuit will determine whether Portland Public Schools crossed a legal line. The larger argument belongs to every parent: Schools exist to educate children, not to claim authority over their understanding of sex, identity, and morality.

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