This past Sunday, Virginia Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin stood in defense of the recently instituted parents’ rights policy for his state.
While speaking on a segment of CNN’s “State of the Union,” Governor Youngkin chose to defend the recently set up regulations affecting transgender students, which focused on the parents’ rights in coming to decisions about the gender identity of their child. Youngkin put heavy emphasis that parents have the authority regarding the upbringing of their kids and this new policy empowers them.
“[P]arents have a fundamental right to be engaged in their children’s lives,” stated 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 this policy is slated to create accommodations for students if their parents decide that identifying them by their trans identity is best for their child.
“What we’re not saying is that there is no accommodation,” stated 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 went on.
Despite all this, Youngkin emphasized that the policy would bar all 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 in this new policy back in September in the wake of a law being pushed through the Virginia legislature back in 2020 which forced schools to create policies consistent with a document created by former Democratic Governor Ralph Northam’s administration labeled Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools. Youngkin’s administration re-wrote the guidelines of the policy, putting far more focus on the rights of the parents and their involvement regarding the gender identity of their child.