Parent-activists in Franklin, New Hampshire received a huge victory when their school’s radically unscientific and dangerous “Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Students Procedure” was sent back to be rewritten.

According to MassResistance, some of the policy’s more shocking features included:

• Forcing students and staff to accept and utilize pseudo-scientific terms, such as gender identity, gender non-binary, cisgender, transgender, gender fluid, and gender transition.
• Allowing a student to dress as they please and be referred to by the name and pronouns of their choosing.
• Including a “privacy” provision where a student’s gender identity and accommodations could be kept completely hidden from their parents.
• Allowing a “transgender” student to use either the boys’ or girls’ restrooms or locker rooms, whichever he or she desires, depending on the student’s chosen “gender identity.”
• Requiring students and staff members to undergo “training” to accept all of this insanity as completely normal.

Franklin school officials and board members were perfectly happy with all of that. Parents, upon learning of it, not so much!

The board introduced the policy back in October, with a second reading on November 18. Although the policy was introduced all but in secret, parents in attendance at the second reading were infuriated to learn that their children would be compelled to share bathrooms and locker rooms with students of the opposite gender.

Citing a New Hampshire law passed by the state’s Republican (in name only, apparently) governor Chris Sununu, the board apparently anticipated little pushback in passing the policy.

SB 263, titled “An act relative to anti-discrimination protection for students in public schools,” includes a vaguely written clause requiring schools to develop some type of policy, but leaves the nuts and bolts of it largely up to individual districts:

Each school district and chartered public school shall develop a policy that guides the development and implementation of a coordinated plan to prevent, assess the presence of, intervene in, and respond to incidents of discrimination on the basis of age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, marital status, familial status, disability, religion, national origin, or any other classes protected under [New Hampshire law].

While the bill itself is clearly another push by the left to add more protected classes to their deck of “oppressed” cards to play, Franklin school officials took it to a whole other level.

According to Mass Resistance, they are “clearly using this as an excuse to push their own bizarre agenda by submitting a set of radical ‘transgender’ rules to impose on everyone. They ignored the actual wording of the law — and the larger list of anti-discrimination classes. And almost no one would have noticed that the school officials were doing that.”

Thankfully, some members of the Franklin community were wide awake to the agenda being pushed through their school. In late November, Karen Testerman, a member of the Franklin City Council and a long time pro-family activist reached out to Mass Resistance, and they got right to work.

“We organized people and educated them on what was happening and how to deal with it. We worked with the people in Franklin to begin an aggressive social media campaign along with phone calls to Board members, and hard-hitting testimony at the Board meetings,” a report from Mass Resistance reads. “We made sure that people knew very clearly how this proposed policy doesn’t even follow the law, but is just a sham being pushed by pro-LGBT officials.”

Finally, early in December, the board conceded to parents’ demands and held a public hearing to hear comments from the community on the new policy. Among the dozens of folks who piled into the room to give their statements, Testerman gave a powerful testimony to the dangers of this policy, including:

• If a student is able to authorize his or her record without parental consent, this is in violation of FERPA which gives parents ultimate authority.
• Gender dysphoria is a mental health problem that needs professional help. Are the Franklin High School counsellors certified practitioners?
• According to the recent National Assessment and Educational Progress Reports, 64% of Franklin High School eleventh graders cannot read at grade level, and 85% of them cannot do math at grade level.  On a standard A–F grading scale, you [Board members] are failing at your primary mission.
• You [Board members] often express your concern over the 50-plus percent of your students who are on free and reduced lunches, the challenge of opioid addiction, and the tragedy of the suicides amongst our youth. And yet, you are discussing implementing a policy that encourages the use of drugs (including opposite-sex hormones and puberty blockers), mutilation of their physical bodies, and results in a very high suicide rate.

Mass Resistance continues:

Others reminded the Board — also in very strong terms — that this is all unscientific nonsense that will result in hideous destruction to children. People are either male or female — and that is permanent. It’s a clinical disorder for anyone to believe it’s possible to change their sex. So-called sex reassignment involves amputation of healthy body parts and other ghastly procedures that cause permanent harm and disfigurement. One study has shown that over 40% of transgenders have attempted suicide. These children need psychiatric help, not pandering to their afflictions.

Only a handful of people came out to speak in support of the policy, including the school’s principal, which itself is quite telling.

Ultimately, the Board Chairman announced that the policy would be sent back to the “policy committee” to be rewritten. To ensure that the rewritten policy doesn’t bear any significant similarity to the rejected one, Mass Resistance is organizing even more people to hold school officials’ feet to the fire.

As for how the policy should read, Mass Resistance states, “A true, common-sense anti-discrimination policy, going along with what the text of the law instructs, would ‘guide the development and implementation of a coordinated plan’ that would protect all students and their parents from having to subvert their values and religious beliefs to unscientific quackery and radical ideology.”

However, the Franklin community can’t put their feet up and relax just yet. The fact that the principal, superintendent, and school board all saw no issue with this policy is a critical indicator of just how radicalized public schools have become.

There is no reason why each and every school district in the nation can’t see similar success in defeating these “inclusive” policies. It’s simply a matter of enough parents and community members caring enough to participate in the schools their tax dollars are paying for!

Have you taken a look at your child’s school and any questionable policies they may have or are looking to introduce? If not, it’s time to get to work!

This article was first published on the Activist Mommy website, and is republished with permission. You may not use, copy, distribute, publish, syndicate, sub-license and transmit the whole or any part of such material in any manner and in any format and/or media without the permission of the original publishers.