Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is Michael Torres. He is the deputy editor of Real Clear Pennsylvania,

where he writes about education policy, politics, and other matters. We've published his

writing on Pennsylvania and City Journal, and his work has been featured in National Review and Newsweek.

Today, though, we're going to discuss his essay in our new issue, we thought she was a great teacher,

which appears in the latest edition of City Journal and describes the harms of public schools'

transgender secrecy policies, and it's a very disturbing story that Michael

tells. So thanks very much for coming on. Thank you, Brian, for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

School districts across the country, not everywhere, but many places are adopting secrecy policies,

I guess you would just call them, which requires staff members to conceal students'

gender anxieties and transitions from their parents.

In your essay, you tell the story of a 10-year-old girl, who you named Tia in Washington State,

whose parents were horrified to discover that her teacher had, without their

consent, encouraged her to identify as a boy. They wound up fleeing the country, a family.

So I wonder if you could just give us a, you know, a brief summary of what the story, you know,

tells us. So the story came to me from a local resident who emailed after seeing

previous writing I had published at City Journal, who told me that there was something happening

in Olympia that he thought I should know about. After speaking with other folks in the community,

I finally got in contact with some parents who have children in the school that

Tia attended. And they started telling me the story of what happened with the young girl. And what

happened was early in 2022, the spring of 2022, Tia socially transitioned at school with her

teacher. Her teacher was the one who encouraged it,

...