This past Sunday evening, Virginia Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin stood in defense of the recently set up parent’s rights policy for his state.
While speaking on a segment of “State of the Union” from CNN, Youngkin stepped up to defend the new regulations regarding transgender students, which puts focus on the parents’ rights in regard to the making of decisions concerning the gender identity of their kids. Youngkin put heavy emphasis on the parents having authority over their kid’s upbringing and stated that this new policy empowers them.
“[P]arents have a fundamental right to be engaged in their children’s lives,” expressed Youngkin. “And, oh, by the way, children have a right to have parents engaged in their life. And we needed to fix a wrong…children don’t belong to the state. They belong to families. And so, in these most important decisions, step one has to be to engage parents, not to the exclusion of a trusted teacher or an adviser, but to make sure that parents are involved in their children’s lives.”
The governor also stated that his new policy would also set in place accommodations for all students if the parents decide with the child that identifying them by their differnt trans identity is what is best for the well-being of the child.
“What we’re not saying is that there is no accommodation,” expressed Youngkin. “What we’re saying is, parents have to be engaged in that decision. And if a child and their parent, along with administrators and teachers, choose to have accommodations for that child, they will be granted.”
“If parents actually want their child to be able to change a pronoun or their name or use a bathroom, if parents choose that, then, legally, that’s what the schools will do,” he stated.
However, Youngkin put heavy emphasis on the idea that the policy would also ban biological males from taking part in girls’ sports.
“I do believe that it’s unfair for girls to have biological boys play sports with biological girls. There are sports with segregated — with segregated sexes for those sports. And those — those sports should be honored that way… Again, there’s a commonsense approach here to this. And I do think we have to respect girls as well here.”
"This is not controversial."
Republican @GovernorVA Glenn Youngkin defends a new Virginia school policy requiring students to use bathrooms or join sports teams based on biological sex and not gender identity. @CNNSotu #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/TOYOd00bcp
— CNN (@CNN) October 9, 2022
Youngkin brought to light the new policy back in September in the wake of the Virginia Legislature passing a law in 2020 mandating public schools go along with various policies consistent with a guideline coming from former Democratic Governor Ralph Northam’s administration that was titled Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools. The administration under Youngkin entirely overhauled the guidelines set up by the document, putting much more extreme emphasis on the rights and involvement of the parents, especially regarding the gender identity of the child.
