Reject Transphobic Bullying
Item 13 on the agenda for last night’s meeting of the Douglas County (Colorado) Board of Education was School Safety, Security and Student Wellness. The district website provided an attachment in connection with this topic, which was a slide deck that school district personnel presented at the meeting. The slides included a link to the district’s Bullying Prevention Website. The website presented (see below) Types of Bullying, the verbal category of which included “homophobic or racist remarks.”
I took this as my jumping off point last night. In my comment, I suggested that the bullet point for verbal bullying include transphobic remarks. Consider for example this statement:
“Gender fluid does not exist, boys cannot be girls, girls cannot be boys.”
Were a student to erase a transgender fellow student with a remark like that, I would want the school district to take corrective steps. Beyond the school district, what steps shall we as a society and an electorate take when one of our elected officials engages in such demeaning behavior?
The author of the statement above is the current representative of House District 39. As I demonstrated in three of my previous posts (here, here, and here), in the course of her strident anti-trans advocacy she repeatedly misrepresents the UK Cass Review. In the same breath in which she spews falsehoods, she falsely accuses others of lying, including me.
The “other parent” to whom I referred in my comment is the current representative of House District 39. This link is cued to the start of my comment. Links further below are cued respectively to the staff presentation on bullying and to a part of the question and answer section in which Director Brad Geiger explored the topic of bullying. Immediately below is the text of my remarks.
Good evening, directors.
I speak tonight in connection with Item 13 on the agenda, and in particular with respect to student wellness. The guidance for this topic on the district website mentions homophobic remarks as a kind of bullying. I suggest adding to that transphobic remarks.
There are some in our county who would object to this suggestion. At the September 24 school board meeting, I and another Douglas County parent referenced one another in our comments. This other parent, in her public advocacy, has made statements that one might fairly characterize as transphobic. In my comment, I noted one such statement and pointed out a related inaccurate statement she has made. She in turn falsely accused me of lying.
Decent and sensible people operating in good faith can legitimately disagree about certain policies associated with transgender students. Parent notification about non-legal names is one and trans participation in women’s sports is another. What ought to be out of bounds is the denial of a person’s very existence as a transgender or gender fluid person.
The other parent falsely invokes the Cass Review in the UK as an authority agreeing with her denial of transgender and gender fluid people. In her forward to the Cass Review report, which urged caution in medical treatment of young people, Dr. Hillary Cass directed the following words to gender questioning young people:
“[M]edication is binary, but the fastest growing group identifying under the trans umbrella is non-binary, and we know even less about the outcomes for this group. Some of you will also become more fluid in your gender identity as you grow older. We do not know the ‘sweet spot’ when someone becomes settled in their sense of self, nor which people are most likely to benefit from medical transition.”
Dr. Cass went on to urge gender questioning youth to participate in research studies of medical treatment in order to help establish the evidence base.
Let’s all strive to be as fair-minded and compassionate as Dr. Cass.
Thank you.
To view the section of the Item 13 presentation on bullying, click here. To view a discussion of category-based bullying that Director Geiger introduced, click here.
