Gender Ideology's Lies & Abuse Forced Me into Activism
Updated: Dec 7, 2021
This isn't what I'd planned to do with this part of my life.
In February 2019, a friend called me. She’d been looking around the school website for summer school information, and stumbled upon a Transgender Students Policy Working Group Meeting scheduled for that evening. She asked me to go with her. At that meeting of school board members, administrators, teachers, parents, local transgender-rights activists, and transgender-identified students we heard:
that parents are a threat to their children and the school needs to step in to protect “trans kids” from abuse and neglect.
that students’ gender identity should be hidden from parents unless the child wants the parents to know (pre-K through grade 12).
that “thousands” of kids in Virginia’s Arlington Public Schools (a district which at the time had 28,000 students in it) are transgender.
that a reading of I Am Jazz had been scuttled at Patrick Henry Elementary School because the principal was (rightly) concerned about how parents would react. The parent (also an assistant teacher, and a member of the special interest group Arlington Gender Identity Allies) vowed, “This reading will happen.” And it did happen, three days later, at Ashlawn Elementary School.
We also heard the supervisor of counseling say that it’s the school’s responsibility to “help parents along” if the parents have not yet fallen in line with gender ideology. In other words, she thinks that the school knows better than parents what’s true, and what’s good for their children.
That was my jaw-dropping entrée to the world of gender activism. I, my friend, and three other concerned parents started organizing people to go speak to the school board members about this policy during their open office hours. We formed the Arlington Parent Coalition when it became clear that the school board had no ears for our concerns.
We discovered via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that Arlington Public Schools (APS) and the Arlington Gender Identity Allies (AGIA) had been working on this policy together for nearly a year, with no other eyes or input to it at all. Arlington Parent Coalition asked to be included in future meetings about this policy, but a second FOIA request regarding communications between APS and AGIA confirmed that we were not.
As we began to investigate gender theory’s history and activism, it became very obvious that nothing supports this nonsense except ideological biases and methodologically unsound “research.” We took a binder full of solid studies and documentation to the APS administration, outlining facts such as: