Testimony to the Highline School Board on 9/7/22
By Gem of the Sound Reporter.
Good evening school board directors. I am here to ask you to lobby for the postponement of the revision of Title IX. These changes expand the definition of discrimination based on sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Please use all the influence you have to enlist WSSDA and OSPI to petition the Department of Education to postpone the adoption of the proposed modifications.
The changes sound accommodative and egalitarian, but this is only on the surface. It is an attack on reason, logic, and education itself. It is anti-teacher, anti-student, unconstitutional, and will likely raise animosity levels among students.
Because the common definition of transgender and cisgender pertains to subjective feelings, these are categories one can opt into and out of at will. As a trans-activist revealed, your gender can change many times a day! Since teachers cannot be sure, at any point in time, the gender their 30 or 150 students may be identifying as, they may be walking into minefields on any given day. If that isn’t enough, the proposed changes lower the bar for what constitutes “sexual harassment” to include speech that is merely “unwelcome. ” So no matter how compliant a teacher may try to be to these impossible demands, they are at risk, every moment of the day, of being accused of “unwelcome speech”.
The case is similar for students. Students may be trying to comply with the imposed “you-are-whatever-you-think-you-are” concept, but they also may find themselves unwittingly embroiled in a case of “unwelcome speech.” Such a case was reported recently regarding a shy Wisconsin middle school student who was charged with sexual harassment for misgendering a classmate.
The modification to Title IX inserts the subjective concept of “gender identity” into every protection previously reserved for sex, with no thought to the cascade of unintended consequences that might follow. Do we really want administrators spending their days adjudicating subjective feelings? Do we want our teachers resigning, as some have already, because of this false, impossible and unconstitutional Orwellian doublethink? Do we want our students charged with sexual harassment?
When issues cannot be discussed openly and freely, we have made schools into hostile indoctrination centers, not educational institutions. The remedy for prejudice is reason and free speech. The cure for almost everything is more reason and more free speech, not totalitarian compelled speech.
Public comment on the proposed changes to Title IX closes on September 12, 2022, so this is a pressing matter. Please use your official role as an elected school board member to lobby for the postponement of the changes to Title IX. It is full of unconsidered unintended consequences. Thank you.
