When Florida passed its Parental Rights in Education Act, the Democratic establishment and left-of-center media environment immediately labelled it the “Don’t Say Gay” law. The reason for this was obvious: left-of-center Americans were more likely to oppose a law that they saw as threatening the advances in gay rights, but less likely to oppose it if they understood it to restrict gender-identity instruction. This is another example of the “T” piggybacking off the “LGB.” As I’ve written, the framing here was both disingenuous and cynical, considering that most children with cross-gender identification will, if not “affirmed,” grow out of it by puberty, and of these, most will realize that their cross-gender feelings were early indications of same-sex attraction.

In short, Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike should not hesitate to regulate gender-identity instruction for elementary, middle, and junior high school children. And they can dismiss complaints about “book banning” as hyperbole and hypocrisy. Few people who level such charges would support, for instance, putting in school libraries books like Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage or Matt Walsh’s Johnny the Walrus—each of which is critical of gender-identity ideology in its own way. More broadly, the act of selecting certain materials but not others is essential to all education, and books or lessons about “gender” are no exception. There is a reason, after all, why history teachers don’t show pictures of the Nazi concentration camps to second-graders, why secular liberals oppose teaching the Bible as anything but a historical text, and why some movies are rated “R.” It is ludicrous and disingenuous for progressives to suggest that excluding from school libraries books, such as Gender Queer, that contain graphic depictions of oral sex is an unprecedented form of state censorship.