The Chicago Public School system implemented guidelines requiring transgender students and employees to be addressed by their preferred name and pronoun. If noncompliance is intentional, students and staff will be punished for violating school policies on non-discrimination, Title IX, sexual harassment, and the student code of conduct. Doesn’t Chicago have better things to worry about?

Under the guidelines, there is no requirement for a formal gender change or court order to be obtained in order to force compliance. Compliance includes learning a new vocabulary in order to address a person by a preferred pronoun: he or she becomes “ze” or third person may also be used, like “they.”

All of this is bad enough, but it appears that CPS employees are not allowed to tell parents that their child switched genders when at school. Well that ought to reinforce family values!

The Michigan State Board of Education is considering similar guidelines. Not long ago the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s diversity office issued a similar statement educating the community on the vocabulary for alt-gender individuals. They were ridiculed. However, as of this week, the Obama administration has laid the groundwork for this to become the standard in all public education.

Transgender people are estimated to make up roughly .3 per cent of the population. However they want to live their life is up to them, but their freedom to do so stops at my own right to live my life. Tolerance and acceptance (which inevitably leads to advocacy) have different meanings which liberals do not seem to appreciate. You have every right to expect tolerance, but no right to expect acceptance.

When it comes to children, adults need to remove the blinders of this child-centered culture. In so far as these assaults against tolerance are happening in elementary education, assumptions that children will identify in accordance with their biological attributes should remain the norm. Children are in no state of maturity to make decisions with ramifications for their mental and physical well-being that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

Adults in favor of these policies are doing our children no favors when they encourage this kind of “self-expression.” Instead, encourage academic achievement, physical accomplishment, and any other measureable objective by which children can explore their talents and special gifts. Remove this obsession with self so that we may grow as a community with common bonds – not one that is constantly being divided up into special interest groups, with individual grievances that need to be compensated through government entitlement programs and the rewriting of Constitutional protections.