Parents in Rockingham County, Virginia, decried supporters of the state’s transgender bathroom policy during a school board meeting Monday night.
The Virginia Department of Education is set to require updated educational guidelines pertaining to transgender students following approval from the commonwealth’s Legislature in 2020. The policies, which begin at schools in the fall, mandate that administrators allow students to use the name and gender pronouns that align with their identity “without any substantiating evidence.”
The order directs that transgender students must be allowed to use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their preferred gender.
“Biologically, scientifically — when a child is born a male, he never, ever, will biologically or scientifically be female,” a man told the Rockingham County Public Schools Board. “That’s the facts. When a girl is born a girl, she can never biologically or scientifically become a boy. … You can argue it. You can yell about it. You can fuss about it. You can do anything you want about it, but those are the facts.”
“In order to help people, you’ve got to tell them the truth,” he added.
Another woman, who identified herself as a parent of a student in the district, said she will home-school her child if the Department of Education’s orders are adopted, she said.
“My son will not be attending Rockingham County schools,” she said. “I will choose to home-school him if this policy is adopted. It will not be easy to home-school as I’m sure it will be very financially tough, but I will stand for what is right.”
A third parent circulated a petition to oppose the policy at the beginning of July that has garnered more than 1,400 signatures from residents, she said.
“We, the citizens of Rockingham County, say no to the Virginia Department of Education’s recommendations regarding bathroom utilization,” the petition read in part, the woman said. “We stand adamantly against abolishing sex-based facilities and giving gender-confused individuals access to private spaces for members of the opposite sex, including but not limited to restrooms and locker rooms.”
A grandparent criticized school board members who, she said, would be “held accountable to God almighty” if they were to adopt the state’s guidelines.
“Every male that goes into a female’s bathroom is not a transgender. … And he could be after one of my granddaughters, and I assure you, people that pass these policies will be held not only accountable with me, they’re going to be held accountable to God almighty.”
The proposed changes also had supporters as one mother, who said her son was transgender, said attacks by residents on the “boogeyman” in bathroom stalls were misdirected.
“While we’re all declaring that the boogeyman is hiding in bathroom stalls, waiting to assault children, we are missing an opportunity to see that this rhetoric has real-world consequences to the students who are just trying to get an education that they have a right to get without being scared or discriminated against,” she said.
Virginia has become a center for school board debates on public school policy.
In Loudoun County, a school appealed a preliminary injunction that reinstated a middle school physical education teacher who refused to refer to students using pronouns other than their biological gender.
Byron “Tanner” Cross was suspended from his role in May and sued the school system through his counsel, Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian pro-free speech group.
Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia introduced a curriculum, Courageous Conversations About Race, between May and June for all grades at Henley Middle School. The guidance, which district leaders approved in February 2019, includes talks about race, white privilege, bias, and transgender issues.
“What I see now really, truly scares me — what’s going on in tax-supported schools here in Albemarle County,” David Wallace, who noted he is an Army veteran and teacher at a private school, told a school board on July 8. “CRT is a Marxist program that is hell-bent on isolating, dividing, and diminishing our ability to work together as a community, and if you bring forth this policy, it will destroy our community even more and fragment it even more than it is right now.”
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