The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District, a school district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, voted on Monday evening to ban the teaching or promotion of “gender fluidity” in school, as well as so-called “critical race theory.” The proposal also stipulates that teachers may opt not to use a student’s pronouns if they do not match their gender assigned at birth.
Members of the GCISD Board of Trustees, the district’s school board, voted 4-3 in favor of the group of policies, which also make it easier to ban books in school libraries, limit which bathrooms students are able to use, and for a directive that some local people have dubbed the “Don’t Say Trans” policy, the Dallas Morning News reports.
The aforementioned policy defines “gender fluidity” as any discussion of gender that says that “sex is merely a social construct,” or says that “it is possible for a person to be any gender or non (i.e., non binary) based solely on that person’s feelings.” The policy also states there can be no discussion of the view that sex can be “changed to ‘match’ a self-believed gender that is different from the person’s biological sex,” according to literary news site Book Riot.
The policy says that teachers may refrain from addressing students by pronouns that match their gender identity, even if a parent consents to their use, the Texas Tribune reports. All trans students will also be barred from playing sports.
The meeting at which the board voted to adopt these guidelines included a public comment section that drew nearly 200 speakers, forcing the board to vote on these guidelines around midnight. In attendance was freelance journalist Steven Monacelli, who documented several of the public comments made throughout the night, with accompanying video. One of the speakers included Julie McCarty, the CEO of the True Texas Project, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has named an extremist group.
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In another speech, anti-trans activist Kelly Neidert, who once advocated for “rounding up” people who attended LGBTQ+ Pride events, also spoke in favor of the proposal.
Also in attendance were many people who spoke against the policies, including LGBTQ+-identified students, parents of students, and one pastor who spoke out against the board’s “fascist agenda.”
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One of the board’s trustees, Becky St. John, criticized the policies for hampering teachers’ abilities to talk about ideas in the classroom saying it would “overburden them” and “harm students.”
“I am so sorry for the students in our district whose education is going to be stunted,” St. John told the Morning News.
The ACLU of Texas sounded off against the policies in a fact sheet published earlier this month, saying they would “restrict students’ right to learn and talk about ideas — especially ideas related to Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ identities, systemic inequality, and the history of inequality.”
Several members of the board were recently elected and ran on conservative platforms, the Morning News pointed out. The new policies underscore the reality that school boards are becoming an emerging battleground for partisan politics, which is bad news for queer and trans students, as less than one tenth of one percent of all school board members nationwide identifies as part of the LGBTQ+ community, according to a recent report.
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