Imagine your middle-school son coming home after school one day and telling you he got in trouble with school officials because he didn’t use the right pronouns when speaking to another student. What would your reaction be to what your son told you? Maybe something like, “Really? Are you sure that’s all that happened? Did you do something to the other student?”
Your son assures you he didn’t; so, you ask what school official talked with him, thinking maybe you better call the school to see what really happened. Surely, your son didn’t understand or wasn’t telling the whole story. You tuck the information way making a mental note to call the school tomorrow.
The next morning you send your son off to school, not mentioning that you’ll be calling the official he’d been in trouble with the day before. What you hear in that call shocks you, as the building principal tells you your son and two other boys were bullying and intimidating another student by referring to him or her using pronouns that agreed with that student’s biological sex rather than using the student’s so-called “preferred” pronouns of “they” and “them.” “Shocked” gives way to “stunned” when you hear the principal say the matter has been referred to the superintendent an ...
