Legal experts are warning Michiganders about the potential impacts of a new and sweeping rule from the Biden administration that will further erode their constitutional right to raise their children.

Thomas Jipping, senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, and Sarah Parshall Perry, senior legal fellow at the Meese Center, recently outlined how gender activists have overruled parents in Michigan schools, and new rules from the U.S. Department of Education designed to expand their ideology nationwide.

The duo pointed to policy at Plymouth-Canton Community Schools as one example of how many Michigan schools define gender identity as a “sense of psychological knowledge of their own gender, which can include being female, male, another gender, or no gender.”

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“Only the individual student, regardless of age, can decide what his or her gender identity is at any particular moment (it can change at any time),” the fellows wrote in a column for MSN. “That current self-perception drives a host of school policies.”

In Saline Area Schools, those policies include requirements for staff to use students’ preferred pronouns, and to provide access to school locker rooms, bathrooms, physical education, sports and other aspects of school life “in a manner consistent with (his or her) gender identity.”

Other policies in places like East Lansing Public Schools also ban staff from discussing whether a student’s “chose name and pronouns” are different than their birth names, even to “third parties including … parents.”

Put another way, school policies empower students to cut their parents out of that life-altering decision, while still requiring parents to sign off on comparatively trivial matters like school field trips or administering over-the-counter medications.

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“It’s hard to overstate the implications of deliberately excluding parents from such important matters,” Jipping and Perry wrote, highlighting a federal judge in Pennsylvania who found “teaching a child how to determine one’s gender identity” is “at the heart of parental decision making in a matter of greatest importance in their relationship with their children.”

Despite that obvious truth, which the scholars contend is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, Biden’s Department of Education is working to rewrite federal Title IX protections to redefine sex to include gender identity, and harassment to include misgendering a student.

“These new policies are backed up with the implied threat that billions in federal funds could be at stake if schools don’t knuckle under and enforce them,” according to Jipping and Perry. “By pushing parents aside and imposing the government’s preferred gender ideology, these policies violate the parents’ constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their children. The Supreme Court had called this ‘perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests’ that it has ever recognized.”

The bottom line, they wrote:

Michigan parents have a lot at stake here. They are not only in the best position to help their children navigate childhood and adolescence, but they have the primary right to do so. With the Biden administration’s backing, public school districts across Michigan are taking that right away from parents and imposing their own gender ideology instead.

It’s time for parents to fight back against policies in local schools, state laws that allow those policies, and federal rules that promote this agenda at their expense.

Earlier this month, 205 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives voted against congressional disapproval of the Title IX changes, including Michigan Reps. Elissa Slotkin, Hillary Scholten, Debbie Dingell, Haley Stevens, Rashida Tlaib, and Shri Thanedar.

All of Michigan’s Republican representatives disapproved, and the measure passed the lower chamber on a vote of 210-205.

While it’s expected to face strong opposition in the Democrat-controlled Senate, polling suggests the public is with Republicans.

A survey of Americans released by Gallup last June found a mere 26% believe transgender athletes should be able to play on teams that match their gender identity, a figure that dropped eight percentage points from 2021.

Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed believe sports teams should be limited by birth gender, up seven percentage points from 2021. The same poll found 55% of Americans – four percentage points more than in 2021 – believe changing genders is “morally wrong.”

“While this should never have become a political issue, there are very few issues that the majority of the general public can agree on, but this is one of them,” Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer and national advocate for maintaining the integrity of women’s sports, told Fox News. “The pendulum has swung too far, and people are beginning to see what’s at stake if it continues.”

“The percentage of Americans who disagree with allowing men to compete in women’s sports will only increase, but unfortunately, more girls will be injured, exploited in the locker room, and lose out on opportunities in the meantime,” she said.