I remember how it was -- JR
Sunday, October 08, 2023
Pennsylvania School Board Reverses Decision, Bans Boys From Girls’ Restrooms
A Pennsylvania school board is reversing a prior decision and choosing now to ban boys from girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, following pressure from parents and students.
Last month, the Perkiomen Valley School Board in Montgomery County voted against a policy that would have required students to use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex. School board members reversed that decision on Monday, on a narrow 5-4 vote.
In response to the school board’s previous rejection of the policy, Perkiomen Valley high school students staged a walkout. Some 400 students left their classrooms and stood outside school buildings to protest the school board’s decision.
In comments to The Washington Stand, Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at the Family Research Council, said, “This reversal is significant for many reasons. I regret that it came down to the students themselves to shame the adults into protecting women and girls, but that’s where we are on the timeline apparently.”
She added, “I’m so grateful to these students, their parents, and the school board members who did in the end protect all students with this policy. They will now be treated to relentless retribution from the state leaders in Pennsylvania government and [President Joe] Biden’s Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.”
The new policy defines “sex” as a student’s “biological sex classification based upon chromosomal structure and anatomy at birth” and states:
In all school buildings in this District, restrooms, locker rooms, and showers that are designated for one (1) sex shall be designated for use only by members of that sex. No person shall enter a restroom, locker room, or shower that is designated for the use of the opposite sex.
The policy was first introduced earlier this year, after a father complained that his daughter reported encountering a male student in the girls’ bathroom and expressed fear. School district officials reportedly told the father, Tim Jagger, that nondiscrimination policies meant students could use whatever bathroom corresponds to their “gender identities.”
After a contentious school board meeting last month that lasted four hours, Republican board member Don Fountain cast the tiebreaking vote in favor of rejecting the proposed policy. Later that week, students staged their walkout, drawing attention from national media, including The Washington Stand, Fox News, and the New York Post.
On Monday, school board member Matthew Dorr moved to reconsider the bathroom policy and was seconded by Fountain, who changed his vote to adopt the policy.
During the meeting, board member Rowan Keenan told his colleagues that he never even knew the previous policy allowed students to use opposite-sex bathrooms and locker rooms based on “gender identity,” noting that he and other conservative board members would have addressed the issue years ago had they been aware.
He alleged that school administrators “intentionally” avoided discussing bathroom-use policies with conservative school board members. Left-leaning board members asked Keenan to explain how teachers are supposed to enforce the new policy.
One asked, “Can you tell me how you know it’s a boy versus how you know it’s a girl in the bathroom, just by looking? Because essentially, these teachers have to be able to enforce this policy.” Keenan, a bearded man with a receding hairline, responded, “I mean, I’ve been identifying as a woman for more than a year.” He was interrupted by other board members telling him that he was “being actually hateful and triggering towards people.” Keenan replied: “I am here to protect women.”
Another policy, introduced by leftist board member Sarah Evans-Brockett to allow students to “use the restroom that corresponds to the gender identity they consistently assert at school,” was rejected at the same board meeting.
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Why did it take three brave young women swimmers to give their spineless, cowardly university elders a lesson in how to defeat the latest trans sports fiasco?
This may be, dare we hope, a revolutionary moment for women’s sports, one we'll look back on as the fight that changed everything.
On Thursday, elite female swimmers at Virginia’s Roanoke College revealed the trauma they’d suffered after a transgender athlete had joined their team without consultation.
Shockingly, they said they had been abandoned by their coach, their university and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) — which still has no rules or practices regarding trans athletes in women’s sports — and left to deal with the ramifications entirely by themselves.
How remarkable these young women are. Such a public stance would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.
All you have to do is look at the backlash suffered by anyone who has dared speak up against Lia Thomas. Even parents of female swimmers at the University of Pennsylvania, where Thomas began swimming on the women's team after transitioning, had to write a letter of protest anonymously. That was in December 2021.
Flash forward to this week when three captains of the Roanoke team spoke exclusively to DailyMail.com about their ordeal.
‘There’s so many grown-ups around that should be making these decisions,’ 19-year-old co-captain Kate Pearson said.
‘That’s part of their job… I was going to bed at 3am just thinking about it, thinking what could happen, what couldn’t happen, constantly stressed, crying just all the time. Every single day. We just could not get a break from it — and we have studies. There should be a blueprint for this kind of thing.’
A key point: Every single member of the 17-person female swim team unanimously agreed that swimming against the trans athlete — who several knew as a male, and who all team members supported as a trans woman — was unfair.
‘Our coach had even said to us that he had never seen our team so unified on one thing,’ 20-year-old co-captain Lily Mullens said. ‘We’re all on the same page. Because we have other people on the team who identify in the LGBTQ community who were sitting right there, right there with us.
‘Once the ball started rolling, people just started letting everything loose — every issue that they had with this. Every thought, every feeling, they let it out. It was very needed.’
Indeed — it is needed.
It says something when female athletes at a small liberal arts university, who support the LGBTQ community as well as transitioning students, can all agree on one premise: It is — as World Athletics, which governs track and field, has ruled — fundamentally unfair for anyone who has gone through male puberty to compete against biological females.
The trans swimmer was well-known to Mullens and Pearson — as well as third co-captain Bailey Gallagher — as a star.
Swimming as a male, the athlete had finished ninth in the 500 freestyle in their Division 3 conference and eighth in the 100 fly.
Pearson says that the athlete told the team last year that they were transitioning, and that everyone was ‘very supportive. We were like, “Yes. Do what makes you happy”.’
But when told by their coaches that the trans swimmer would now be competing against them, they were flabbergasted. Biologically, the swimmer still retains greater muscle mass, lung capacity, height, strength and speed.
Even the best female swimmer on the Roanoke team would have no shot. Imagine sacrificing your entire childhood and young adulthood to get to that level of elite athleticism — and the short window of time to perform at your peak — only to be told it's all been for nothing.
Compound that with the complete abdication of responsibility by their coach, school and governing body. College students do not have the psychological training to deal with a situation this fraught and delicate. This is not something that should ever have mushroomed as it did.
Roanoke, of course, is most likely afraid of a lawsuit.
The same probably extends to the team’s coach – but his seeming betrayal, his cowardice, cuts deeper.
After that first team meeting, the three co-captains say they told their coach how anxious and hopeless the whole team felt. His response, they say, was that ‘the athletic department told me I can coach a team of one and still have a job.’
What a complete dereliction of duty. How much more demoralized could these swimmers have been? Perhaps Roanoke would do well to hire a female coach for their women’s team.
After that callous reply, the co-captains say their coach encouraged them to write a short letter to the trans athlete, expressing their concerns. Four times they repeat the same sentiment: ‘We all love and respect you… this is not anything personal.’
The letter, which the team says was meant to remain private, was shared by the trans athlete with student advocacy groups, though Pearson — a health and exercise major — says the athlete ‘mentioned that she didn’t even read it.’
Their coach, rather than take a leadership role, decided the best course of action would be to set a meeting between the women’s team and the trans athlete. It did not go well.
‘I was giving how the whole team felt,’ Pearson said. ‘Like: We support you… But when it comes to the athletic side of things, we just think it’s biologically unfair.
‘After I was done speaking, the individual immediately jumped to saying: I was suicidal, I wanted to kill myself.’
Pearson said the room went silent.
‘I was like, I don’t know how to respond to that.’
Of course not. What 18, 19 or 20-year-old would? Why did this coach and this university let it get to this point?
To put such a level of stress and responsibility on any student is unconscionable. To keep them fearful of defending themselves by tacitly allowing them to be tarred as anti-trans is spineless.
College is as much about academics and athletics as it is learning to become a functional, independent adult.
To read the first letter the Roanoke team wrote to the trans athlete is to see their quite understandable limitations: They write of their only biological difference being menstruation, when it’s so much more than that. They write fulsomely of their support and respect for the athlete without explicitly asking for the same in kind.
Again, absent any institutional backing, from the university or the NCAA, this letter put these young women out on their own.
Finally, after getting in touch with The Independent Council on Women’s Sports and activists Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan, changes were made.
Roanoke apparently began investigating which forms of competition were fair to all involved. Last week, the trans athlete quit the women’s swim team.
And their priceless coach, the co-captains say, spat this at them: ‘You got what you wanted.’
The female swimmers of Roanoke have done a brave and difficult thing, but they should be the first and the last. Others shouldn’t have to worry, as Mullens says, about the cost of standing up for themselves.
‘We had our doubts about speaking up,’ she says. ‘We’re like: Oh gosh, what’s going to come at us next? What’s going to happen to us when we try to get a job?’
It is well past time for a governing body to stand up. If the NCAA won’t do it, perhaps a new, independent one needs to be formed.
There is no shortage of athletes, biological and trans, who would surely want to help navigate this new landscape, one that can be made fair for all.
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Teaching in Australia has become a refuge for the least able
Why? Because anybody with options would not want to spend their days in front of an unruly mob
Problems with the Australian school system are a favourite topic for our newspapers, especially around the time of the final examinations for school leavers. The Sydney Morning Herald in particular publishes the notorious leagues tables on which many parents rely in making school choices, but at the same time loves to expose scandals and extravagant spending at big private schools and regularly gives a forum to writers demanding an end to funding for private education.
The problems are real, and it is wrong that parents should have to pay so much for a good education; it would obviously be preferable to have a high-quality public educational network such as the French lycée system in which I spent the first four years of my own schooling. But that is not going to happen in Australia; we are too resentful of excellence. Our education system, meanwhile, is dominated by bureaucrats and pseudo-academics with little idea of the real purpose of education.
Mediocrity starts with the abysmally low entry requirements for teacher training courses; individuals can be admitted with low ATARs. A report from the University of Sydney a few years ago showed that half the student intake into teaching degrees in NSW and the ACT in 2015 had ATARs below 50. Can we be surprised then if the performance of our schools in international rankings has been in steady decline in recent years? Or is it any wonder that the profession of teaching, so vital to a successful society, is no longer held in the high regard it once enjoyed?
But the poor quality of the intake is just part of the problem. Equally to blame is the training students get once they are admitted to teaching courses, which ostensibly emphasises techniques of teaching rather than subject content, and yet seems to leave young teachers unprepared for the realities of classroom management. And all of this is based on a body of academic theory that is in reality an intellectual pyramid scheme, in which each vacuous and jargon-ridden piece of writing cites 10 others of the same kind and quality.
Finally there is the educational bureaucracy. As school standards have declined, these bodies have relentlessly increased the demands they make on teachers, from tabulations of so-called educational “standards” to regular “professional development” and annual “professional reflection” forms – all of which are frustrating and distracting to good teachers and of course incapable of making the bad ones any better than they are. The fact that the increase in bureaucratic demands has coincided with an even more dramatic decline in educational outcomes should tell us something; but the response of the “academics” and the bureaucrats is always to do more of what doesn’t work.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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