NO CLASS

School Board Drops Trans-Student Protections Five Days After Passing Them

On Monday, the East Aurora School Board in Illinois passed a policy protecting trans and gender-variant students—and then quickly rescinded it five days later.

The measure asked teachers to use appropriate pronouns and names, and to allow trans students to engage in activities like phys ed without disclosing their birth gender.

By midweek the Illinois Family Institute (IFI) was up in arms: In a blogpost, IFI Cultural Analyst Laurie Higgins called the trans-inclusive measure a “radical policy on gender confusion.”

The school board is now imposing non-objective, “progressive” moral, philosophical, and political beliefs—not facts—about gender confusion on the entire school. This feckless school board has made a decision to accommodate, not the needs of gender-confused teens, but their disordered desires and the desires of gender/sexuality anarchists who exploit public education for their perverse ends.

I wonder how many of these board members have thought or read deeply on the issue of gender confusion or Gender Identity Disorder. And I wonder how many of them have read deeply the writing of not just “progressive” scholars but conservative scholars as well.

Gender confusion affects approximately .003 percent of males and .0001 percent of females. Aurora East High School is now accommodating the disordered impulses and unproven beliefs of a statistically miniscule segment of their population and in so doing ignores the beliefs of the majority. Some would argue that this policy also reflects a gross distortion of compassion and profound ignorance about what truly helps the few students who suffer from gender dysphoria or Gender Identity Disorder.

Do we even need to mention that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the IFI as a hate group?

Bowing to criticism, the school board withdrew the policy at a special meeting on Friday, despite the fact that the policy was drafted by the assistant superintendent and parents and community members spoke in favor of it.

Board president Annette Johnson tried to make it sound like the district wasn’t caving in, but wasn’t very successful: “It’s not a question of are we backing down or being intimidated–we are not.” she said. “It’s just… we have to try to make everybody happy.”

Isn’t that essentially caving in?

Johnson did reveal that, of the more than 1,000 emails she received about the change in policy, a majority of complaints came from non-residents.

So, the school board is trying to placate people that don’t even have children in its schools? Someone needs to work on her comprehension skills.

Photo: Ryan Yuk/The Dartmouth

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