The East Aurora, Illinois School District passed a new policy Monday affirming transgender students, guaranteeing that they can use the bathroom and chosen name that match the gender with which they identify. The Illinois Family Institute (IFI), which has been identified as an anti-LGBT hate group, published an outraged response rife with offensive condemnations of transgender people. Here’s a sampling:
Apparently, all that’s needed for school personnel to be compelled to participate in a fiction is for a student to pretend “consistently” at school that he or she is the opposite sex.
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.
IFI does not have the most basic understanding of transgender identities. First, it’s important to note that in the new version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Orders (DSM-V), set to print in May 2013, trans identities are no longer classified as mental illness under “Gender Identity Disorder.” Instead, they will be replaced with a non-disordered classification of “gender dysphoria.”
Regardless of how gender dysphoria has been classified, the treatment is the same: affirmation. The goal is not to somehow fix gender “confusion” (IFI’s word, not the scientific community’s), but to nurture mental health through a harm reduction model. The APA released new position statements for supporting transgender care in August, which not only include eliminating public and private discrimination — as East Aurora has done in an admirable way — but also declaring that “no burden of proof of such judgment, capacity, or reliability shall be placed upon these individuals greater than that imposed on any other persons.” IFI’s reaction is in direct opposition to the young people who may benefit from the school’s new inclusive policy. By attacking trans and gender-questioning students as “perverse,” the group proves it has no interest in the well-being of children.
IFI concludes that the decision must be repealed and the entire school board replaced so that anti-trans discrimination can be implemented into policy. It’s not hard to see how the group earned that “hate group” label.