Not so long ago, teachers were responsible for educating kids about specific subject matters (math, English, history). Parents were responsible in all other ways for raising those same children. Only if a parent were genuinely abusive was a teacher obligated to interfere in that relationship, and that meant contacting Child Protective Services. Today, though, gender-crazed teachers have concluded that they have greater rights in children than parents do.

Thanks mostly to Libs of TikTok, we’ve spent the last two years seeing teachers boasting about how they hide a child’s gender “transition” from parents, and we’ve seen parents raging on the internet and at school board meetings about how teachers hid from them what was happening to their children—something they sometimes discovered only after a damaged child tried suicide or broke down in some other way.

Those of us who have children whom we’ve raised from infancy love them with a parental passion that routinely sees parents lay down their lives for their children (e.g., here, here, and here). Parental love is a force of nature that also sees parents engage in practically supernatural acts of strength. Parents will work themselves to death and impoverish themselves for their children.

Parental love is a primitive, visceral feeling that is not matched by a “transgender” or “non-binary” teacher’s seven months of limited contact with those same children. Yet today, teachers obsessed with sexual identity fantasies insist that the child who passes through their classroom once a day is “their (zir?) child” and that their rights in that child transcend anything a parent can do or feel.

Image: Screen grabs of Olivia Garrison on her TikTok account, which Fox News was able to capture.

For the New York Times, this newly discovered passionate love teachers have for a child they know only slightly is a real thing. That’s apparent from a recent article entitled “When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know: Educators are facing wrenching new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students socially transition at school.”

The opening anecdote (and all NY Times articles, rather than opening with a clearly stated premise, open with an anecdote that sets the tone), well, it sets the tone:

Jessica Bradshaw found out that her 15-year-old identified as transgender at school after she glimpsed a homework assignment with an unfamiliar name scrawled at the top.

When she asked about the name, the teenager acknowledged that, at his request, teachers and administrators at his high school in Southern California had for six months been letting him use the boy’s bathroom and calling him by male pronouns.

Mrs. Bradshaw was confused: Didn’t the school need her permission, or at least need to tell her?

It did not, a counselor later explained, because the student did not want his parents to know. District and state policies instructed the school to respect his wishes.

Jessica Bradshaw’s daughter is a legal minor. She cannot drive, vote, or buy cigarettes. In most states, she cannot go on her own to get tattoos, piercings, or an abortion. She has a limited understanding of the world and no understanding of how life plays out and how one's beliefs change as people age. But she has the power to silence an entire school system that has no interest in her other than as a money generator, a test taker, and, if they’re lucky, a cool new transgender statistic.

Moreover, these institutions do all this tremendously smug self-righteousness, certain that their limited interactions with a trend-seeking, depressed, or otherwise confused teenager override anything a loving parent can do, know, or say:

Other teachers believe they have a moral responsibility to withhold such information.

“My job, which is a public service, is to protect kids,” said Olivia Garrison, a history teacher in Bakersfield, Calif., who is nonbinary, who has helped students socially transition at school without their parents’ knowledge. “Sometimes, they need protection from their own parents.”

What’s supposed to happen if a parent really is risking a child’s safety is that teachers must report that fact to Child Protective Services. CPS has a spotty track record of actually protecting children but, at least, it contacts the parents and lets them know what’s going on.

In the case of Garrison, the smug LGBTQ employee of Del Oro High School in Kern County, the reality is that the parent is a danger to the values she’s trying to inculcate into the parents’ child. Thanks to the warped leftist world, though, she is able to place herself on a moral high ground because she’s led a confused student to abandon she/he/its biological reality in favor of the current leftist fantasy.

In Garrison’s case, the NY Times reported that an it person named Clementine Morales didn’t feel its parents would appreciate what was happening. It was probably right that its parents would have protested its abandonment of reality. That fact, though, doesn’t give Garrison rights in the sexuality of someone else’s child.

These teachers are cultists and groomers. Parents must act, whether by suing school districts and teachers or by getting rid of school boards and legislatures that countenance this type of interference in the parent-child relationship.