A California mother told Newsmax on Friday that her 11-year-old daughter was allowed to "socially transition" and identify as a boy under a law that allows schools to let children identify as being another gender without notifying their parents.
The mother, Aurora Regino, told Newsmax's "Wake Up America" that the school's action happened last year at a time when her family had been hit "pretty hard" by illness and a death, and after her daughter spoke with a guidance counselor.
"I lost my father unexpectedly, and then six months later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer," Regino said. "My 11-year-old daughter was going through some hard times, and she decided to reach out to a guidance counselor at her elementary school and told her some of the things that were going on within our home, and opened up to her and told her that she felt like a boy."
The counselor "immediately affirmed that new identity that very day she opened up to her, and started a social transition at school without my knowledge," she added.
The school was able to take such action because of a policy, that exists nationwide, that says that when children identify as being transgender, "they don't have to tell their parents that if they want to identify as a different sex than what they're born with."
And as a result, "my daughter went through this social transition, not really understanding what it really meant or what it means being transgender because I was excluded from that conversation," Regino said. "What they did is they introduced her under a new name, a male name, and male pronouns."
Regino said she thought the matter was an isolated incident, or maybe that the school had just handled her daughter's case wrong, but "I opened a huge can of worms and realized that this is a policy that's across the nation."
And as a result, "my daughter went through a really hard time during that, having me not being a part of her life during this transition more than she really needed the guidance of her family and me the most," she said.
Regino also responded to reports that two Democrat lawmakers in Virginia were caught on a hot mic last week calling parental rights "crap," calling the reports "super disheartening to me as a parent."
"We are the people that have the best interest in mind for our children," said Regino. "Parental rights is not crap. It's everything to these children, and we're here to guide them and protect them and love them and help them grow up to be law-abiding citizens and work hard and have, you know, great values and care for others."
And the matter of parental rights shouldn't be a "fight," she said, but a matter of "working together to raise these kids to be the best they could possibly be."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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