Kevin Jennings, Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar,” has played a key role in the nightmare plan to transgenderize restrooms in Maine’s schools. According to the Bangor Daily News, a GLSEN leader in Maine is a player in the push to end biology-based restrooms:
Representatives from several gay and lesbian rights groups participated in a Dec. 15 workshop with the [Maine Human Rights] commission on the guidelines. One of them was Peter Rees of the Downeast Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network [GLSEN] based in Ellsworth. Rees said people who oppose rights for transgender students — such as allowing them to use locker rooms with people who are biologically of the opposite sex — fear something “that just isn’t borne out in reality.”
“What do they think is going to happen?” asked Rees. “That boy who is identifying as a girl is not going to be displaying herself in a girls’ locker room. She’s going to be acting as much like a girl as possible and being very modest.”
“She” – meaning a boy – will be “acting … like a girl … and being very modest.” But wait! We thought we weren’t supposed to stereotype on the basis of gender!?How confusing!
GLSEN has been very influential in Maine. Check out the 2008 report by the “LGBT Youth Commission” to the Maine Governor, where GLSEN is listed as the authoritative source on what needs to be done in the schools.
Maine’s 2005 anti-discrimination law -- covering the essentially undefined revolutionary concepts “sexual orientation” and “gender identity or expression” --has opened the door to the horror of boys using girls’ restrooms and locker rooms (and vice versa), and playing on opposite-sex sports teams, in schools. Worse, we wrote in our recent report:
As MassResistance has consistently warned, this also opens the door for the discussion in schools of transgenderism and so-called "sex-change" operations for children, even as young as elementary school age. Assemblies and events introducing kids to these concepts have already been taking place in some high schools in Massachusetts.
And a GLSEN-Boston board member gave a talk in a third-grade classroom in Newton, Mass. about a student’s father who was transitioning to “become a woman” – without parental notification, of course.
“Safe Schools Czar” Jennings was one of the masterminds of this insanity being foisted upon young children across the country. He founded GLSEN shortly after his participation in the 1987 gay march on Washington. He apparently also participated in the 1993 gay march on the capitol*, which was the first big event to push “gender identity” non-discrimination alongside “gay and lesbian rights” demands. (See the “Platform of the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.”) One speaker at that 1993 march was a transsexual (“male-to-female”) attorney who told of the oppression married men face after sex-change operations.
Back to the Maine school bathrooms, WorldNetDaily reported (“Biology-based restrooms to be banned?”):
[GLAD attorney Mary] Bonauto has filed a brief with the [Maine Human Rights] commission that says the commission is acting properly in trying to deal with students' "identity" issues.
"Practically speaking, making a transgender student with a female gender identity [a boy] use the boys' restroom would be stigmatizing and have a serious, negative, emotional consequence for the student as well. It would be no less stigmatizing for that student to have to use the boys' room than it would be for any non-transgender girl to be singled out and made to use the boys' room," she claims.
Bonauto suggests restroom usage should not be based on biology.
"Applying these rules, it is clear, for example, that an anatomy or biology-based rule for bathroom usage cannot be used to bar transgender students from using a facility consistent with their gender identity," Bonauto said.
… On the issue of sports, Bonauto supports rules that require the schools to open doors based on the students' sense of identity.
The Slippery Slope is real.
See also:
GLAD (Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders) document targeting Maine’s school children, “Students' Rights in Maine” (lists GLSEN as resource in PDF).
________
*See Jennings’ Equality Utah speech (Part 3 at 1 min. 10 secs.) where he's showing slides of his life story, and bragging that his Concord Academy gay-straight alliance was at the march.
Eugene Tan
