![]() ![]() Youngkin's proposed guidelines, Rawal said, "essentially say that if a student expresses that they aren't cisgender, a teacher has to forcibly out them. "But when I was coming out of the closet in my junior and early senior year, those guidelines made sure I could be myself, and ask teachers for things as simple as proofreading my college essays." "I've never come out to my parents, and I don't think those conversations would go well if I was to have them," he continued. ![]() The existing guidelines "quite frankly saved my life when I was in Virginia," said Rawal, who graduated from high school in Fairfax County last spring and is now in his first semester at Harvard. Virginia's existing guidelines on trans kids - which Youngkin wants to roll back - "quite frankly saved my life," says 18-year-old Aaryan Rawal.Īaryan Rawal, the 18-year-old director of PLP, agreed. It's likely that doing so will harm some students, especially those who are not in safe situations." "One of the main provisions in the model transgender policy is that schools have the responsibility to out any LGBTQ students to their parents. ![]() "We are worried that trans students will not be safe in their schools and they will not be safe at home," said Ranger Balleisen, a senior at McLean High School in Fairfax County who works with PLP. That last measure was particularly concerning to many of the students who walked out of school last week, following a campaign by the student-led group Pride Liberation Project (PLP). Under the proposal, trans students would be compelled to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their biological sex at birth parents must give written permission before teachers can use students' preferred pronouns or names students can't talk to school counselors about their gender without parental permission and, perhaps most important, schools can't conceal any information they learn about students' gender identity from their parents. So last month, Youngkin proposed a new set of guidelines, which are currently under a 30-day public comment period that has already drawn close to 60,000 responses. But to Youngkin, who was swept into office last fall on a wave of anger around "parents' rights," those guidelines were "a big mistake" that "excluded parents" from vital decisions, as the governor told "Fox & Friends" last weekend. In 2020, Virginia's General Assembly passed legislation requiring school districts to adopt policies granting students access to bathrooms and facilities that correspond with their gender identity, using students' requested names and pronouns, and protecting students' privacy related to sensitive issues like gender or sexuality. Glenn Youngkin on how Virginia's public schools should handle transgender students. There's a backstory: Last week in Virginia, some 12,000 high school students at close to 100 schools walked out of their classes to protest new guidelines proposed by Republican Gov. Lone Star hate: Right-wing activists in Texas drive a new wave of anti-LGBTQ bigotry This week, that quiet part got noticeably louder, as right-wing activists escalated the already-dangerous rhetoric of "grooming" - language that multiple social media platforms have banned from use as an insult related to LGBTQ issues - and graduated into claims that LGBTQ people and liberals are literally kidnapping and trafficking children. It was a shocking but pithy means of demonization as Gira Grant wrote, the "right is using the reality of child abuse to raise unfounded fears and panic about criminal and predatory behavior hiding in plain sight." The quiet part was the secondary implication: If one's "enemies" really are "an ill-defined yet pervasive threat to children, what wouldn't be justified in stopping them?" Last spring, as the right began using the word "grooming" as a slur against LGBTQ people and their allies, journalist Melissa Gira Grant noted at the New Republic that the word provided a way to "say both the quiet and the loud part." Contorting a term long used to describe real instances of child sex abuse into a weapon to be deployed against LGBTQ people and commonplace policies - for example, that their existence can and should be acknowledged in schools - was the "loud" part. ![]()
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