Posted on 05/13/2015 9:27:11 AM PDT by wagglebee
FALLS CHURCH, VA, May 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Hundreds of parents accused Fairfax County School Board (FCSB) members of endangering their children and caving to the Obama administration as the school board voted to allow transgender teens to use the locker rooms and bathrooms of the opposite sex.
The new policy may also allow transgender teachers to show their gender dysphoria openly in the classroom.
The motion to add "gender identity" as a protected class– which passed 10-1, with one abstentation – was sparked by the Obama administration's threat to deny the district $42 million in federal funding.
According to FoxNews.com and The Washington Post, that would amount to 1.7 percent of the education budget in the nation's largest school district.
The blackmail and the council's apparent secrecy led to outrage among parents who attended the school board's meeting last Thursday, where opponents outnumbered supporters at least eight-to-one.
Several school board members argued that there was no attempt to go around parents, with one member saying that the board acted within its normal routes of communication – a notice three weeks before the vote, discussion at the board's normal meeting two weeks before the vote, and then a vote last week.
Board member Megan McLaughlin said that there was no need for a larger debate, because this was an update to the protected classes of the school system, and not a new policy creating favored groups. McLaughlin also said that school operations would not change in any way as a result of the new policy.
The change was oreceded by a legal opinion from Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, a Democrat, who in March said that school boards have the authority to include sexual orientation and gender identity as special classes. But it was the threat of a loss of federal education dollars that provided the impetus for several school board members.
President Obama's threat to deny children federal money was in keeping with his administration's new interpretation of the 1972 Title IX law.
Last April, the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights decided that gender identity is a protected class, and that Title IX, which only bars sexual discrimination, will now be treated as though it “extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity.”
The FCSB meeting was often heated, with numerous comparisons made to race-based discrimination, including slavery, by board members. After the vote, LGBT activist and Equality Virginia board member Catherine Read told LifeSiteNews.com that "if people really clung to these things, we'd still have slavery, women still wouldn't have the vote, and this would still be a black high school." Read said the issue is "about civil rights."
Multiple board members accused parents who opposed the change of acting out of "fear."
The only board member to oppose the measure, Elizabeth Schultz, argued that implementation costs could harm the school district, which is running a deficit of hundreds of millions of dollars. Its supporters countered that losing federal money would also hurt students.
Supporters frequently noted that adding gender identity to protected classes would change "nothing" at schools, to which Schultz and many parents asked, if that were true, why the change was necessary.
Schultz – who made a motion that the gender identity change be pushed back until October so that the board could investigate the costs associated with the change, as well as whether such a change is necessary, and how schools could adjust if the board backed the gender identity addition – walked out of the meeting when the final transgender recognition measure was passed without such consideration.
Schultz told LifeSiteNews.com that the board was wrong to postpone analyzing the regulations until the policy went into effect.
"Well, [implementation] happens at the end of September," Schultz told LifeSiteNews. "What difference does it make if you say you want to look at the regulations then?"
Many parents reminded school board members that last week's vote would be remembered when the board members ran for re-election.
The full school board meeting can be seen here.
Teen aged boys in the girls locker room. What could go wrong?
Hope, Change and "Mitt Romney is mean" don't exactly convey the minutiae of transgender politics.
The boys' "gender identity" is supposedly female - but what if it's lesbian female?
I have an idea....convince Kim Jong un....to get all these trans people to immigrate..to North Korean People Republic...and let him solve their problems.. it EN MASSE
It’s very possible. I first learned of this yesterday:
Genderqueer (GQ; alternatively non-binary) is a catch-all category for gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminineidentities which are thus outside of the gender binary and cisnormativity.[1] Genderqueer people may identify as one or more of the following:
having an overlap of, or indefinite lines between, gender identity;[2]
having two or more genders (being bigender, trigender, or pangender);
having no gender (being agender, nongendered, genderless, genderfree, or neutrois);
moving between genders or having a fluctuating gender identity (genderfluid);[3] or
being third-gender or other-gendered, a category which includes those who do not place a name to their gender.[4]
Source: Wikipedia
Needless to say, the teacher's unions would never allow it.
The problem with a voucher system is that the government would demand that schools that accept the vouchers abide by the type of government guidelines that created this mess.
To deny gender is to deny science! Only science deniers can support such things.
Get YOUR children out of the government indoctrination centers - NOW!!
I’m not just thinking of the boys in the girls’ locker room as a problem.
Imagine the uproar the first time that a female-to-male transgender teen goes into a locker room strips with a bunch of naked, hormonal teenage boys.
Then we’ll have to hear about ‘rape culture’ and ‘homophobia’ and on and on.
Oh, well, that makes a lot more sense then. It isn't a new policy creating a favored group, it's an old policy creating a protected class. Completely different thing.
These people are seriously, spittle-throwing deranged and they're in charge. For now.
It only takes 1.7% to make liberals sell out? No wonder the economy is tanked.
An uptick in private school enrollment, Ed.
Fixed it.
"We have to implement the policy to see what's in the policy."
San Francisco politics.
Fairfax wouldn't have any problem raising the $42 million because the wealthy leftists would gladly fork it over "for the children." And a large segment of parents there could easily afford private schools for their kids.
One might ask what contingency plans the district has in place to be site that there are no “fakers” and do they have sufficient liability insurance to cover lethal costs in the event that a faker slips through, causing harm to another student. What is their plan for the potential legal liability if something goes wrong?
Such as:
Boys who "feel like they are girls" displaying their weenies and woodies to the actual girls in the locker roomBoys who "feel like they are girls" having consensual sexual intercourse with actual girls in the locker room, claiming they are lesbians
Boys who "feel like they are girls" having consensual sexual intercourse with one another in the locker room, claiming rights to First Amendment freedom of expression of "who they are"
Boys who "feel like they are girls" attempting to rape actual girls in the locker room, again claiming they are lesbians...
That sort of incident?
They need to be tarred and feathered.
And the female board members should be forced to have men, who identify as female, in their bathroom stall while they tend to their feminine hygiene.
Had the same thought. If enrollment were up, they would bleat about enrollment numbers and cost-per-pupil; but if enrollment drops, they will switch over to bleating about total budget dollars in order to extort the maximum from the taxpayer.
I don't know about Fairfax county, but when I was staying in NoVa recently, I couldn't help but notice the large numbers of what appeared to be lower-income hispanic persons in the Arlington and Fairfax shopping centers. Presumably they ride public transport to menial housekeeping and landscaping jobs among the affluent Democrats in the greater DC area. So even if the wealthy leave the Fairfax schools, I guess the school board is counting on a fresh supply of Democrats.
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