Massachusetts Rep. Colleen Garry (D) believes she knows trans kids' identities better than they do.

Several Massachusetts lawmakers are not happy with new guidance from the state’s Department of Education advising on how to respect transgender students in school, based on nondiscrimination law passed in 2011. Notably, they believe that allowing them to use the appropriate restroom is somehow going to infringe on other students’ privacy. To correct that, they are taking the brash step of proposing a bill that define students’ gender by their anatomy instead of by their actual identities. Here are some of the unfortunate anti-trans comments they shared with the Lowell Sun:

REP. COLLEEN GARRY (D): An anatomical male in a locker room could make girls feel uncomfortable and vice versa. The (2011) bill was not to accommodate locker rooms and bathrooms, but the commissioner took it upon himself to provide guidance to schools… This is guidance; it’s not regulation. It’s their interpretation of how schools should handle things.

REP. SHEILA HARRINGTON (R): Obviously we’re very sensitive to people with transgender issues, and we’re trying to be compassionate, but we want to be respectful of the privacy of all people.

REP. MARC LOMBARDO (R): It’s time we say enough to this radical social agenda promoted by the administration and use common sense to protect our children.

Transgender young people do not have “issues,” nor are they in any way a threat to any student. What these lawmakers are trying to do is to force an identity upon a trans students that they don’t have, thereby negating the entire purpose of a nondiscrimination law protecting them.

What needs to happen in both schools and apparently the legislature is some basic education about what it means to be transgender. Women have a legitimate reason to be concerned if there is, in fact, a man in their locker room, but that has absolutely nothing to do with a trans woman. Society may attempt to assign a gender based on a person’s anatomy, but the entire point trans people are trying to teach the world around them is that sometimes society gets it wrong. Forcing someone who is trans into the wrong facility or a separate facility they don’t require for their own sense of safety is a rejection of that person’s identity, and it’s government endorsement of that rejection that fuels anti-trans stigma.

GLSEN reported that in 2011, 63.9 percent of LGBT students reported being verbally harassed because of their gender expression. Thanks to these lawmakers, that number just jumped to 100 in Massachusetts.

Students protested their trans classmate by wearing sweatpants and gym shorts.

In her senior year at South Panola High School in Batesville, Mississippi, one transgender student decided it was time for her to fully realize her gender identity and began dressing as a girl. The ACLU applauded the school’s interim superintendent, Mike Foster, for supporting the student and recognizing her as the gender with which she identifies. But one group of students, clearly uninformed about what it means to be transgender, decided that she was getting “special treatment” — permission to violate the dress code — and held a protest in which they actually violated the dress code themselves by simply wearing athletic clothing:

One of the students involved in the protest says it all boils down to rules.

“Told us, ‘Everybody that has on jogging pants, follow us.’ So we went to the band hall,” said senior Logan Roberson. He says all of the students who violated the dress code were forced to change their clothes.

Roberson and parents say if Leah can dress in female clothing when she is still technically a man, they should be able to wear sweat pants and gym shorts.

“That to me is a double standard. What one rule goes for one, one rule goes for all,” said parent Allen Jones. [...]

“How distracting is it for you walk down the hallway and see a boy you’ve known since kindergarten, now a girl, wearing high heels walking, that’s distracting to you,” continued Roberson.

Roberson did not clarify why exactly the friend had become a distraction, but it’s clear that these parents and students do not understand the basics of gender identity. The student is not “still technically a man,” nor is she violating the dress code at all.

A Facebook group called “Mississippians Support Leah” has formed to support the student, who wishes to remain anonymous. Another Facebook group known as “Prayers for South Panola School District,” now hidden, had the opposite intent, though a parody page now mocks that group for hiding their intolerance.

There is still incredible work to be done to support transgender people, and it increasingly seems that schools are where that struggle is playing out.

If Americans thought the “fiscal showdown” was over, they should think again. Tomorrow, a series of automatic across-the-board spending cuts—a process known as “sequestration”—is set to begin. This series of cuts calls for a devastating $85 billion reduction in spending on federal programs by the end of the year.

These broad spending cuts were originally intended to force both parties to agree on an alternative deficit-reduction plan out of a mutual desire to avoid swallowing such a painful pill. Now at the eleventh hour, it seems increasing unlikely that Congress will reach a deficit reduction compromise.

Millions of hardworking Americans, however, once again find themselves at the precipice of a fiscal showdown that, if left unresolved, will impose real and significant financial harm on them and their families. Among those Americans who will be hit hardest by sequestration are LGBT Americans.

As the Center for American Progress and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force outlined last November in the midst of the last fiscal showdown, sequestration would cut federal programs that are vital to the health, wellness, and livelihood of LGBT Americans and their families.

The sequester was a bad idea then. And it’s a bad idea now. Here are six ways sequestration would impose real and significant harm on LGBT Americans:

• Sequestration will hurt LGBT workers. LGBT Americans face extraordinarily high rates of discrimination in the workplace and it is still perfectly legal in a majority of states and under federal law to be fired for being LGBT. Sequestration would exacerbate this situation by, for example, reducing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ability to investigate claims of discrimination against LGBT workers.
• Sequestration will compromise LGBT health and safety. Sequestration will cut funding to a number of federal programs—like programs suicide and bullying prevention—that are in place to support the physical and mental health of LGBT Americans, a population that disproportionately lack access to health insurance and culturally competent health care services, and suffers from a host of health disparities.
• Sequestration will exacerbate homelessness among LGBT youth. Already facing higher rates of homelessness compared to the general population—LGBT youth comprise 5 percent to 7 percent of all youth and 40 percent of all homeless youth—sequestration will exacerbate LGBT youth homelessness by reducing grant funds to community organizations working to addressing the issue and homelessness shelters that house the LGBT homeless.
• Sequestration will make higher education less accessible for LGBT students. Furthering inequality gaps in accessing higher education, sequestration will result in significant cuts to federal work-study programs for LGBT students and a reduction in supplemental educational opportunity grants for low-income LGBT students.
• Sequestration will limit the ability to prevent violence against LGBT people. Sequestration will reduce the funding that supports the government’s ability to tackle the disproportionate levels of abuse, harassment, and violent crime suffered by LGBT Americans. It will also limit resources available to investigate, prosecute, and prevent hate crimes.
• Sequestration will limit U.S. capacity to protect the human rights of LGBT people worldwide. The Department of State has become the world leader in promoting a comprehensive human-rights agenda aimed at protecting all human rights of LGBT people. Sequestration will deal a blow to worldwide LGBT equality by cutting funds to federal agencies and thereby limiting public diplomacy efforts conducted by U.S. embassies

Our guest bloggers are Chris Frost, intern, and Crosby Burns, Research Associate, with the LGBT Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress.

Tyler Clementi

In November, Jennifer Roback Morse, head of the National Organization for Marriage’s Ruth Institute, warned parents that they shouldn’t let their children in college have gay friends or else they’ll learn tolerance. But speaking to a group of Catholic students at Iowa State University earlier this month, she reversed on that position and encouraged the students to make gay friends so they can help save them from being “confused and lonely.” In doing so, she evoked the story of Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide after his roommate violated his privacy with a webcam, and claimed that somehow Clementi’s struggle was more related to the gay relationship he had than the way he was bullied:

MORSE: What happens I think for people who have some gender confusion or some gender issues, is that they think they’re going to be lonely if they can’t get married, if they can’t be just like everyone else that they’re going to have a lonely life, they’re going to be isolated in some way, they’re going to be so different that their life is going to be terrible… I think that what you can do that would be helpful is to be friends with people. You don’t have to agree with what they’re saying they want, but you can still be a good friend to them. [...]

In friendship, as friends, you can support them and say, ‘maybe this person is trying to exploit you.’ Sometimes you hear about these things and you don’t hear the whole story in the media. That kid Tyler Clementi who killed himself, who threw himself off the George Washington Bridge? Do you know this story? Okay, then I’m not going to tell it. There was a much older man in the picture. There’s usually more to the story, right? And so I think friendship is what you have to offer. There are a lot of situations where people are doing something sexual that’s probably not the best thing for them and that would be better if they had somebody who would be friends with them without coming onto them or without judging them and that kind of stuff.

Morse went on to claim that gay activists are manipulating gay youth for “some sort of political vision.” Listen to it (via Equality Matters):

Morse refuses to acknowledge the reality that the sense of rejection LGBT youth experience is the rejection she promotes, not some sort of inherent consequence to have same-sex attractions or a different gender identity. The evidence shows that Clementi was upset because his roommate had violated his privacy, and he even requested a room change just a day before he committed suicide. For Morse to impose her own interpretation of events without any evidence is a gross distortion of events and an insult to every gay youth who has ever been bullied for his sexual orientation. Of course, she won’t even acknowledge they have a different sexual orientation.

Last April, high school student Amber Hatcher announced she would be participating in the National Day of Silence, a nationwide protest to raise awareness about anti-LGBT bullying, and sought permission in advance from her school administrators in Desoto County, Florida. Her principal threatened “ramifications” if she participated and even called her parents suggesting they keep her home because there “would be consequences.” Lambda Legal reached out to the school informing administrators of students’ rights, but they chose not to respond, instead emailing teachers to notify the principal if anybody was participating. Amber followed through, and was subsequently suspended for the day.

Lambda Legal has now filed suit against the school on Amber’s behalf. The complaint includes the full text of the email Principal Shannon Fusco sent to teachers advising about the protest:

Teachers:
Please note that we have a group of students today who have an intention of protesting. The district has an absolute policy against protesting on school campuses.

If you have students who are wearing placard [sic] in protest of an issue or disrupting the hallways or classrooms, please notify the dean or administration, and we will handle it.

If a student refuses to participate in class by taking part in a silent protest, that is considered a disruption. Again, please notify the administration, and we will handle it.

Thanks you,
sdf

It’s been over 40 years since the Supreme Court ruled that students have a right to participate in protests in schools. In the 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Court ruled that it was a violation of students’s First Amendment rights to suspend them for wearing black armbands to protest the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam. Like the students in that case, Amber was participating in class and simply remaining silent to indicate her position. The school was completely in the wrong for blocking her free expression, and it’s unfortunate a lawsuit is required for the administrators to learn that lesson.

Matt Barber

The Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber has penned a letter to gay teens — which he condescendingly qualifies as “gay” teens — that confirms the clear animus he and his fellow conservatives have for LGBT people. His outright condemnation that homosexuals are sinner going directly to Hell is offensive enough, but worse yet, he suggests that gay teens are not depressed because of the homophobia they experience, but merely because they’re sinners:

God’s word also says that when we sin sexually, it’s particularly egregious because our bodies are the temple of Christ. This separation from God – a natural result of sexual sin – can lead to depression and even despair.

If you feel such despair, know this: it is not “homophobia” causing it, as adult enablers might tell you, but, rather, it is the sin itself that causes it (or struggling alone, absent Christ, with the temptation to sin). [...]

If you continue down this wide, empty path, make no mistake: it will not “get better.”

It gets much, much worse. [...]

Kids, take your sexual confusion – your struggle with sin – to Christ.

No one else can give you rest.

Of course, by telling young people to reject the very core of their identities and deny themselves the opportunity to experience love in their lives, he is reinforcing the very despair many LGBT youth struggle with. (HT: Jeremy Hooper.)

Robert Gagnon is a close ally of the National Organization for Marriage, including being a regularly featured speaker at its national conference for college students; he’ll be there again this year. But Gagnon is also an outspoken advocate of harmful ex-gay therapy, and has helped to found the new ex-gay splinter group called the Restored Hope Network. Restore Hope broke away from Exodus International when that group’s president, Alan Chambers, admitted that there is no “cure” for homosexuality.

Equality Matters follows Gagnon closely, and noticed this week some outrageous comments he made on Facebook about gay-straight alliances (GSA). Chambers suggested in a recent video that if Christian young people attend a school that has a GSA, they should attend its meetings to learn and listen from those who utilize such a resource. Gagnon thinks they might as well attend a “Klu Klux Klan” [sic] or Nazi Skinhead group or one that advocates for “women abusers”:

GAGNON: More ridiculousness by Alan Chambers of Exodus (will it ever end?): Christian young people should respond to a “gay-straight alliance” in public school by going to such meetings “not to speak but to serve and listen and to offer to help, finding common ground.” There is no “speaking the truth in love” here (Eph 4:15). So if there is a “polyamory appreciation” group or “prostitutes for Christ” group or Ku Klux Klan / Nazi Skinhead group of “women abusers advocacy society” at a public school, Christian students should go to such meetings, not speak, but serve and find common ground? How can sane evangelical Christians support any longer any organization led by Alan Chambers? The man has become as “useful” to homosexualist advocacy as naive Western leftists of the 1920s to 1950s who extolled the virtues of Leninist and Stalinist Russia were useful to these dictatorial regimes.

Gay-straight alliances make schools safer for LGBT students and even help improve their academic performance, but Gagnon probably isn’t interested in such data.

No doubt, this is a man with fierce animus against gay people that extends well beyond just the question of same-sex marriage. It’s no stretch to conclude from these comments that he actually believes homosexuality will destroy modern society. NOM’s pride in highlighting him annually at its conference for young people is further proof of the organization’s clear anti-gay motives.

The Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) has released a new study today analyzing the impact of anti-LGBT bullying on middle and high school students who participate in athletics. Though the climate in athletics can be quite toxic, there are still many LGBT students participating, and when they do, they benefit academically from having the experience. Unfortunately, many are dissuaded from participating at all.

Here’s a look at some of the findings:

• LGBT students are about half as likely as their non-LGBT peers to participate in interscholastic sports (23.2 percent vs. 47.8 percent).
• The more involved LGBT students were in athletics, the higher their GPA, with team leaders averaging a 3.4, team members averaging a 3.2, and non-athletes average a 3.0.
• Over a quarter of LGBT student athletes have been harassed or assaulted while playing because of their sexual orientation (27.8 percent) or gender expression (29.4 percent).
• Most students (79.4 percent) felt uncomfortable talking to school athletics staff about LGBT issues.
• Even P.E./gym classes continue to be unsafe spaces for LGBT students, with about half of them reporting bullying or harassment because of their sexual orientation (52.8 percent) or gender expression (50.9 percent).
• As a result, many LGBT students avoid P.E. classes (32.5 percent), locker rooms (39.0 percent), and athletic fields (22.8 percent) out of fear of victimization.

GLSEN’s overall study of school climate for LGBT students found that 82 percent have been verbally harassed because of their sexual orientation. The new results seem to indicate that athletics is an environment where these students might be particularly vulnerable, and yet where they could greatly benefit. Indeed, anti-LGBT climates hurt academic performance and even increase drop-out rates. Advocating for LGBT-inclusive bullying prevention strategies not only protects the safety of students, but increases their ability to succeed in school and beyond.

The thought of a school banning any conversation about LGBT diversity is disconcerting, but teaching untruths about sexual identities is even worse. That’s exactly what has been taking place in seventh-grade classrooms in Maryland’s Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) system, just outside Washington, DC. Health classes have been showing a video called “Acception” that promotes harmful ex-gay therapy under the guise of an anti-bullying message:

The 21-minute anti-bullying video, called “Acception,” at first appears to promote the acceptance of gay children. In the video, four students are assigned a project on homophobic bullying, with the group splitting up to study the issues of bullying and the origins of homosexuality. Two of the students encounter a cavemen parable about the origins of bullying, but the teens researching same-sex attraction soon find themselves in a different kind of scientifically dicey territory. While the video initially explores gay teenagers being bullied and a young man coming out to his parents, it soon features a student talking about how his once-lesbian cousin used therapy to become attracted to men. Then, the students in the video “watch” an interview with a gay-to-straight therapist.

In the following clip from the film, a woman talks about how depressed she was when she was coming to terms with her same-sex orientation because she was too afraid to tell anybody. When she finally admitted to her family, they “helped” her, essentially by forcing her to not be gay if she wanted to be accepted by them. Then magically, her same-sex feelings went away:

Disturbingly, nobody in the school district seems to understand what’s problematic with this message. In fact, the infamous ex-gay therapist Richard Cohen, who was permanently expelled from the American Counseling Association in 2002, sits on the PGCPS Health Council for some inexplicable reason. The district’s recently retired supervisor for health education, Betsy Gallun, thinks students deserve to learn about ex-gay therapy and she “feels very badly that it’s coming under scrutiny.” A district spokesman explained that the district has now pulled the video, but only “because there was too much focus on alternative lifestyles.”

Ex-gay therapy has been roundly condemned by all major medical organizations as being at best ineffective and at worst quite harmful. Encouraging young people to reject their own identities is tantamount to shaming them for being who they are. That proponents of this quackery are making decisions in a school district is inexcusable. Talking openly about LGBT issues has been found to make schools safer for LGBT youth, but educators have to actually be informed about what is valid support for sexual diversity and what is blatant anti-gay propaganda.

Today is National Gay-Straight Alliance Day, an opportunity to celebrate the work that GSAs are doing in middle schools, high schools, and on university campuses across the country to create safe learning environments for LGBT students. Increasing the visibility of these 3,000+  groups is essential to ensuring their efforts reach as many students as possible:

Violence and discrimination against LGBT students is the rule, not the exception, in American schools. It is a national disgrace that students feel threatened in school simply because of their real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.  While Americans need to know that thousands of students each day go to school or college and endure LGBT violence and harassment, they must also know that GSAs are a tool in helping end violence and that these student groups save lives.

Indeed, research has shown that LGBT students at schools with a GSA hear fewer homophobic marks, experience less victimization, and generally feel safer. Even the mere presence of a club can help mitigate students’ depression and improve the likelihood they’ll succeed in college.

Show your support for GSA Day by standing up against bullying: