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The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Leaked training shows teachers being directed to allow gender & name changes without parent consent, transitioning?" and posted in the "Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)" forum. Let me be clear and say that this thread was an extremely successful trolling exercise. How schools deal with transgender issues has been a hot topic in most of our schools forums (and even a few non-school forums), but the Fairfax County Public Schools forum has been absolutely obsessed with the topic. Much of that has to do with the school system's refusal to strictly comply with new model policies released by Governor Glenn Youngkin's administration. This thread starts out with the original poster linking to a Fox News report about "leaked" FCPS training documents regarding names that students wish to use at school. One document displayed shows three scenarios in which students might choose to use names other than their legal names. In each of the cases, the document indicates that parental permission is not required in order for teachers to use chosen names instead of legal names. The original poster described these documents as "recently leaked" and complains that they do not adhere to the state guidelines. While nobody seems to have noticed until the 10th page of the thread, the X (formerally tweet) that the original poster embedded is from August 2022, just over a year ago. I have no way of knowing whether the original poster intentionally misrepresented this news or was simply unaware of the date of her own sources. But, either way, the training material preceded the new state guidelines and is certainly not "recent". Regardless of the age of the material, heated debate ensued. Several posters agree with the training document and don't believe parental permission should be required for something as mundane as which name is used in school. Both parents and teachers alike argue that teachers are far too busy and have more important things about which to worry than what name a child wants to be called. Other posters fear that schools' adoption of chosen names of a different gender affirms a student's gender transition which they believe should not be done without parental involvement. I think from now on whenever I have to discuss a thread of this nature I am going to remind readers of the Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board decision. The US Supreme Court let stand a decision that sided with Gavin Grimm, a transgender Virginia high school student, and required that he be allowed to use bathrooms and locker rooms matching his gender. While several posters in this thread criticized FCPS for not adhering to the state model policies, they seem to ignore the fact that Youngkin's guidelines are not consistent with current legal precedence. The only mention of the Grimm case I saw in the thread was a single link that offered no explanation concerning to what it was linking. But, I think this case needs to be part of all of these discussions.