"If a government agent has knowledge that a minor under its care or supervision has exhibited symptoms of gender dysphoria, gender nonconformity, or otherwise demonstrates a desire to be treated in a manner incongruent with the minor’s sex..."

"... the government agent or entity with knowledge of that circumstance shall immediately notify, in writing, each of the minor’s parents, guardians, or custodians. The notice shall describe all of the relevant circumstances with reasonable specificity."

That's a proposed law in North Carolina (S.B. 514). It's quoted and mocked in "I am trying to report gender infractions in my kindergarten but don’t know what counts!" by Alexandra Petri (in WaPo).

What does it mean for a school kid to "desire to be treated in a manner incongruent with the minor’s sex." The school shouldn't be treating their children differently based on their sex in the first place. The child's desire should be meaningless. There should be only one kind of treatment. Unless you're talking about the bathrooms....

Petri writes: 

Who is the person in this state who understands gender well enough to feel that this was something worth enshrining in law and not just arbitrary and hurtful and a sledgehammer looking for a nail?... 

ADDED: Here's the whole text of the bill. The quoted subsection — truly puzzling taken out of context — fits under the heading "Protection of parental rights." The idea is that parents have a right to make decisions about their child's mental health care and about any gender treatments that might be offered to a child with gender dysphoria. 

A reader named Robert emails:

Take just the first notice-required circumstance: observed gender dysphoria.

Can anyone make the case that a school should NOT notify the parents? This is a mental 'condition' (I'm avoiding "illness" or "disorder" as labels) that appears to have a high correlation to suicidal ideation, so it would appear obvious to me that a school would be obliged, statute or no statute, to make the parents aware of that.

'Gender nonconfomity' or gender incongruent behavior may or may not have roots in gender dysphoria, but it would also very likely be linked with being bullied, social rejection and other childhood travails. Shouldn't the parents be aware of that, too?

What the law is attempting to address, I believe, is the perception that some teachers might be aligning themselves with their gender-troubled students as 'us-against-them,' meaning we enlightened trans-supporters versus parents with more traditional attitudes. Whatever you think about the whole transgender thing, there is no place for a school keeping secrets from parents, about their kids. They are the parents' kids, after all.

And Ozymandias emails: 

Except that the bill is written in the standard form of mandatory-reporting-of-child abuse/neglect statutes, one might almost mistake SB 514 for legislation designed to identify “nonconforming” children for purposes of referral to sex/gender transition clinics—an impression supported, if only superficially, by the detail that the bill’s requirements are initially imposed upon “a government agent . . . having knowledge” who is then referenced using the non-gender-conforming, anti-patriarchal, third-person impersonal possessive pronoun “its.”

Who says the NC legislature isn’t semi-woke?

AND: Jeff writes:

The folks who are telling us "gender is just a social construct" and is 100% NOT connected with biology exhibit remarkable confidence about just what it means to be of a particular gender, don't they? If gender is purely subjective, how can being what us oldies would call "feminine" be incongruent with a male gender identity? Gender has nothing to do with sex!