Middle School Transgender Bullying?

Bullying of "transgender children" in middle school?! This is a serious threat, according to Kathleen Henry, head of the new independent Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth (soon to add Bisexual and Transgender to its name). A new curriculum guide on middle school bullying now in the works in our state government will be the new indoctrination tool in the public schools. Soon 6th-8th graders will learn that some boys must wear skirts and fingernail polish to express their true inborn identities, and cannot be made fun of.

"Romney administration delays anti-bullying guide" (Bay Windows, 10-10-06) points us to the 170-page curriculum guide on bullying, edited by -- we're not kidding -- the head of "the now largely inactive Governor’s Commission on Hate Crimes." In other words, if a kid is overheard saying, "Yuck, that boy's wearing a dress!," it's bullying -- or worse, a "hate crime". Do you see where this is headed?

Apparently, the outrage over the "Youth Pride" event last May (after MassResistance exposed its excesses to the Governor's office) had some lasting effect -- even though Romney eventually chickened out and didn't disband his Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. The activists behind this curriculum guide are convinced that their work is being more closely scrutinized now. As a Dept. of Public Health publication, their inclusion of transgender youth has raised eyebrows.

[We also suspect that the Little Black Book (also exposed by MassResistance) -- the pornographic guide to homosexual sex parading as a "safer sex" manual -- triggered greater vigilance in the Governor's office. The LBB acknowledged support from the DPH.] From the Bay Windows report:

...Yet as of last June the project [middle-school bullying curriculum guide] has been awaiting approval at DPH, and the activists working on the guide have received no word about whether that approval is forthcoming. They worry that the guide has been intentionally delayed because of its LGBT content, including a discussion on bullying directed at LGBT youth.

“Something decidedly changed over the fallout from the controversy of the gay and lesbian youth commission,” said Don Gorton, editor of the guide, referring to Gov. Mitt Romney’s threats to disband the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth after a press release for Youth Pride went out with his name and the state seal without approval from Romney’s office....

The guide was first researched and written in 2002 and 2003 as a project of the Governor’s Task Force on Hate Crimes, but in late 2003, after the initial draft of the guide was already complete, Romney cut funding from the task force, prompting layoffs of the task force’s student civil rights director ... The guide was left unfinished until Gorton picked up the project in 2005. Henry agreed to bring the Governor’s Commission in to help provide some funding to help pay to print it, about $2000-$3000, and also to expand the guide’s section on LGBT bullying from a couple paragraphs into its own three-page section.

"I turned to my associates and friends at the Department of Public Health and asked would they write up the LGBT youth chapter, not realizing that once you do that, once you ignite the government per se, then you’ve entered into this approval chain that under Romney especially is particularly onerous. So it stalled in its channels,” said Henry, who now chairs the new commission on gay and lesbian youth created by the legislature. She praised the work of the DPH staff in the department’s Safe and Healthy Communities for Gay and Lesbian Youth (SCHGLY) program, who authored the section, but she said she believes involving DPH in the project has led to the project being delayed. ...

Neither Gorton nor Henry have received direct word from DPH that the guide is being delayed because of its LGBT content, but the timing of the delay prompted their suspicions. Henry said she believes the inclusion of information about bullying against transgender students may be a sticking point since discussion of transgender youth was one of the most contentious issues around the Youth Pride press release. She also said in discussions with staff at DPH ... there is a sense in DPH that any project that might be too controversial for Romney, who has been laying the groundwork for a run for the White House and whose term ends next year, should be delayed until a new administration is in place.