School counselors should not be working outside their scope of practice - submit your comments to the ASCA

Comments due by April 11, 2022

The ASCA is inviting public input during their review of the updated ASCA Ethical Standards for School Counselors. Parents, please make your voices heard. Let the ASCA know what the scientific evidence on the transgender issue actually says, and that they are giving unsound advice to their counselors on the complicated matter of gender ideology.

Please leave your comments before the deadline of April 11, 2022, by filling out this form.

I’ve put together the below comments—please feel free to make use of these on the comment form, or use one of the other PITT fact sheets or letters.

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Most parents who are dealing with a teen who is experiencing Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) or identifies as transgender know that school counselors often do more harm than good, despite seeming to have the best of intentions.

Rather than contacting parents to refer the child to a physician or mental health professional, in many, if not most, cases, counselors immediately affirm the child's transgender identity and agree to treat the child as the opposite sex, encouraging them to use opposite sex bathrooms and locker rooms. They may call the child by a different name, sometimes even going so far as to change the child's name in school records or provide the child with opposite-sex clothing without parent knowledge or consent. In some case they enable the trans identity even further, for example by buying dangerous breast binders for girls without including caregivers in the decision. Children may be allowed or even encouraged by school counselors to use opposite-sex bathrooms and locker rooms

Why do counselors take these steps? In some cases, they are bound by district policy to affirm any child who believes they are transgender. In other cases, however, they are acting solely out of belief that affirming the child as transgender is the right or kind thing to do. Or, they may believe they are following implicit rules of engagement by affirming, due to school training they’ve received from organizations such as the American School Counselors Association (ASCA), which teaches them this is the best or only way to handle the situation.

However they wound up “affirming” a student, they are not following best practice when it comes to teen development, as evidence now abounds that the immediate affirmation approach, which is not based on research, often causes more problems than it solves, for students, counselors, the school and the district as a whole.

Whether counselors are affirming kids because of school policy, ASCA training, a desire to be kind, or because they consider themselves activist allies, serious problems arise when counselors affirm kids as transgender:

• It invites legal troubles for the counselor, administration, school and district. School counselors are not trained or qualified to diagnose or treat gender dysphoria. Therefore, they are practicing beyond their scope when they affirm a child as transgender. Further, collaborating with the students against parents results in toxic triangulation that endangers the parent-child relationship (very inadvisable) and results in psychological strain and potentially the development of identity disorders that may have a lifelong negative impact on the student.

  A number of lawsuits have popped up in the last year or so, with parents pursuing legal action against schools after their child was allowed or encouraged to present as a different sex at school, without their parents' knowledge. Parents have a legal right to be informed when their child is experiencing mental health or medical issues at school.

  Additionally, schools that supply girls with chest binders are risking legal action, as these high-compression devices are physically damaging; they are known to cause broken ribs, bone deformity, collapsed or punctured lungs, breathing difficulty, chronic back pain, and other serious medical issues. Do counselors want to risk being held responsible for a student who suffers a broken rib or punctured lung as a result of using a chest binder that the counselor helped the student obtain?

• It puts impressionable kids on a track to medicalization. Social transition (for example allowing a child to go by a new name, use opposite-sex pronouns and dress in opposite-sex clothing) may seem harmless, especially compared to transgender medical interventions such as pubertal blockade, opposite-sex hormones and bilateral double mastectomy, but social transition is not a neutral intervention. Evidence shows that children who are socially transitioned are more likely to pursue and receive irreversible transgender medical treatments than those who do not socially transition. It only makes sense that if a young boy is told he is a girl, called a girl's name and referred to as "she" by her teachers and friends, this serves to strengthen the boy's belief that he is a girl. This is not "harmless," especially considering that most children who are not encouraged to believe they are the opposite sex will outgrow these feelings along with or after puberty.

• It increases their risk of sexual assault. Allowing male and female students to share bathrooms and locker rooms puts students in harm's way. Failure to safeguard students by mixing boys and girls in bathrooms and locker rooms endangers both boys and girls. In Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, a female student was raped in a school bathroom by a male student who identified as female.

Gender identity and ideology is a complex problem for today’s schools, with a strong component of social contagion and politicalization that makes it even more of a mine field. Counselors should tread lightly in this area and forgo any actions that result in triangulation or the cementing of a transient teen identity that can lead to medicalization. When it comes to transgender, school counselors are not qualified, and they should not intervene with actions that, however neutral and well-meaning they seem to the counselor, have powerful psychosocial side effects. Counselors should defer to parents and their qualified healthcare teams to undertake any interventions the family feels are in the best interests of their children, and should inform themselves on the realities of social transition in school, through resources that are readily available through Genspect.

The ASCA should not advise counselors to act in a way that puts themselves or their students in harm’s way or in legal jeopardy - but this is exactly what uninformed, politically charged transgender activism will do.