To the Editor:
The loudest at the November 1 public forum on Policy ACAAA in our district seemed to be folks who don’t know or love a single LGBTQ+ person. With predictable scripts in hand, they were ready to speak as experts, as if they hadn’t googled “transgender” for the first and only time the night before.
An out-of-district doctor who voluntarily divested from the American Medical Association posed as an authority on human sexuality; your mechanic was unprepared to speak but gave a decisive overview of the world history of gender and the fall of Rome due to homosexuals. He confidently started the acronym, and would have finished: “L..G.. B…” but forgot the rest.
Your neighbor spoke at length about how “dysphorFia” (she meant dysphoria) was part of every psychological diagnosis she’d ever heard of, and Joe down the road abstractly threatened legal action. Joe’s weird brother Al also spoke and described in disturbing detail all of the nightmare scenarios he imagined playing out with phones, locker rooms, virginal teen girls, and the internet. Thankfully his time ran out before he could paint the full picture. None of this is hyperbole.
My friends, I hate to tell you but it’s already happening, all of Al’s darkest fantasies. Your kid’s peers are cruel and have already posted locker room pictures of your daughter with mean captions on social media in secret groups. Your son is afraid to be seen with the weird theater kids but they’re the only ones who talk to him, and he’s been beaten up after school by the varsity team behind the bleachers. And those are the straight kids!
Numbers and first-hand experience show that LGBTQ+ youth experience all that and much more at home. The rates of bullying, suicide, homelessness, and abuse among LGBTQ+ youth are double and triple that of their straight and cisgender peers. The naysayers of this policy seem to understand that numbers don’t lie when it comes to LGBTQ+ youth wanting to die, but I assure you they don’t understand the real suffering queer youth endure behind the numbers.
Despite the wailing at the forum, a simple reading of the policy shows that it’s not drafted to strip rights from parents. It explicitly encourages parental/guardian involvement in every case, at every step, and only allows for the school to maintain privacy for a student who would be beaten, assaulted, or thrown into the street if their parent knew they used a different name at school than at home. This group of naysayers brought their bare ignorance and vicious hate against their own children and the targeted youth of our community while demanding to maintain their parental right to deliver the final blow.
This policy is not about whether queer and trans people are real, sane, or lying to peek at the cheerleaders out of uniform. Queer and trans people are real and they’re already students in our schools. They’re already your neighbors, politicians, janitors, and the person who microwaves your food at Applebee’s.
Before that, they were kids in our public schools. They have always existed and will never go away. Whether or not this policy is adopted, we will continue to exist, and our youth will only continue to be without support because of the politicization of who we are. I am just like you.
Staff in our schools, state-mandated reporters of child abuse, noted the life-threatening gap in support for LGBTQ+ students and requested support from the school board – that’s why this policy exists. The board has been pressured to consider the ramblings of the uninformed and paranoid parading as the experts – over the requests of their staff, the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ students, overwhelming medical and legal advice, and proof from policies already in place nationwide. We are lost if our authorities only favor the loud over the right, over precious young lives at risk that they are tasked to steward.
I hope pointing out these absurdities helps us remember that as we adults argue over nonsense and nightmares, LGBTQ+ youth are too often living the real nightmare while we debate their existence.
T. Hart
Waterford
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