AUSTIN (Nexstar) The Texas House Education Committee heard a bill to prohibit public and charter school teachers from assisting in the social gender transition of a student. House Bill 1655 would require all school districts to implement their own policies prohibiting teachers from assisting. If those policies are violated, the state would remove funding for the entire school district.

“That means not changing names or pronouns, not hiding information from parents and no perpetuating mental illness,” the bill’s author State Rep. Nate Schatzline, R-Fort Worth, said. “We must make it unmistakably clear, schools are not places for secret agendas or social experiments on our kids.”

Schatzline argued the issue comes down to parental rights in the classroom.

“Taxpayer dollars should never be used to sever the sacred bond between parent and child,” he said. His Democratic colleagues felt his parental rights argument fell flat, because parents don’t have the right to tell the teachers to help the transition.

“If the parent disagrees with your ideology, then the parent’s opinion is no longer primary,” State Rep. John Bryant, D-Dallas, said. “So let’s don’t talk a whole bunch about how important and sacred it is to listen to the parents if you’re not going to listen to the parents.”

“Well, I do not believe that we should tell lies to children or perpetuate lies in the classroom,” Schatzline responded. “If we’re telling lies to children, then at what point does it end… If a child goes home and a parent wants to say that they are not the biological sex that they were born into, that’s a parent’s right to do so.”

HB 1655 was left pending in committee.