The House of Representatives passed H.R. 2616 on May 20 by a vote of 217-198, because apparently Congress has decided there are no pressing national issues left besides policing the names middle schoolers use on school forms. Inflation? Housing? Healthcare? Climate disasters? Democracy itself? Those can wait. Republicans remain laser-focused on manufacturing panic about transgender children, and now they want federal law to force schools into becoming surveillance arms for parents who may or may not be safe for those children to trust.

The bill’s title—the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act”—is the kind of propagandistic naming convention that would embarrass lawmakers in functioning democracies. Nothing about this legislation protects kids. It threatens them.

Under the bill, schools receiving federal funding would have to obtain parental consent before changing a transgender student’s name or pronouns on school forms or allowing accommodations tied to gender identity. In practice, this means teachers and administrators could be forced to out trans students to families against the student’s will. That is not theoretical. That is the point.

And let’s stop pretending otherwise.

The sponsors of these bills always hide behind the same dishonest framing: parents deserve to know everything about their children. But children are not government property. Schools already navigate sensitive situations involving abuse, neglect, sexuality, pregnancy, mental health, and physical safety with care because educators understand something many politicians apparently do not: not every home is safe. Not every parent reacts with compassion. Some react with cruelty, expulsion, violence, or conversion therapy.

This bill hands those families a federally approved weapon.

Then there is the censorship provision prohibiting schools from using federal funds to teach or advance “concepts related to gender ideology,” a phrase pulled directly from a Trump executive order so broad and ideologically loaded it could apply to anything from acknowledging that transgender people exist to discussing gender discrimination in history or literature. These people love screaming about free speech until someone mentions a trans teenager.

Republicans voting for this legislation is sadly unsurprising at this point. Transphobia has become one of the central organizing principles of the modern GOP. The party has spent years turning a tiny, marginalized population into a permanent moral panic because it polls well with their base and fills airtime on cable news.

What is more disappointing—and yes, infuriating—are the eight Democrats who crossed the aisle to support it.

Henry Cuellar. Don Davis. Cleo Fields. Laura Gillen. Vicente Gonzalez. Marcy Kaptur. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Eugene Vindman.

Eight Democrats voted in favor of legislation that forcibly outs transgender youth and codifies federal anti-trans policy language. Eight Democrats looked at escalating attacks on trans Americans—attacks that have already spread from sports bans to healthcare bans to book bans to bathroom bans to outright erasure from public life—and decided this was acceptable political positioning.

For what? To win over voters who already think Democrats are secretly running gender clinics in elementary school cafeterias? To appear moderate in focus groups? To avoid becoming the next Fox News target of the week?

History is littered with politicians who convinced themselves sacrificing a marginalized group was a savvy strategic compromise. History does not remember those people kindly.

And the cruelest part of all this is that the lawmakers pushing these bills will never experience the consequences themselves. They will never be the terrified 13-year-old calculating whether telling the truth at school could make home unsafe. They will never sit in a principal’s office wondering if a trusted teacher is now legally obligated to betray them. They will never understand the psychological damage of growing up in a country where powerful adults treat your existence as inherently suspicious.

But transgender kids will. Every single day.