The Fairfax County Public School Board, which last month rejected Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin's proposed policy changes for transgender students in schools, will vote soon on a proposed curriculum that includes doing away with sex-separate education, replacing the terms "boy" and "girl" with "assigned female or male at birth" and teaching gender ideology in elementary grades.
The program, titled "Family Life Education Instructional Materials" created by the Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee (FLECAC), requires "teaching sensitive content in gender-separated classes."
Under Youngkin's policy changes, students must participate in certain school programming and use school facilities like bathrooms or locker rooms based on their biological sex, with modifications offered only to the extent required under federal law.
Minors must also be identified by their name and pronouns in their official records unless a parent approves of a different one.
The guidelines also say school divisions must ensure no student is discriminated against or harassed based on his or her sex and should "attempt to accommodate students with distinctive needs, including any student with a persistent and sincere belief that his or her gender differs from his or her sex."
Fairfax County Public School Board chairman Jeffrey McKay last month said Youngkin's changes, "and the discrimination inherent to them — will have a chilling effect on our continued ability to attract the world's most innovative companies to Fairfax County. To put it bluntly, discrimination is bad for business."
These types of policy changes can cause harm, the school board said in a letter to Youngkin's office in late October.
"A young LGBTQ person attempts suicide every 45 seconds in the United States," the board said. "A peer-reviewed study in 2021 found that transgender and nonbinary youth who reported gender identity acceptance from at least one adult in their lives were 33% less likely to report a suicide attempt in the past year."
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