Be the “I” in Kind

I work for my local school district. Currently, the entire district is celebrating a “Month of Kindness.” Every school is decked out in decorations and posters with messages like, “Be Kind”, “One Kind Act a Day,” and “Be the ‘I’ in Kind.” Teachers are wearing kindness t-shirts, and all students and employees have wristbands.

Your reaction, like mine, to a school district promoting kindness might be “Ugh!” Before trans-ideology hit my house and my family I would have welcomed the opportunity to help spread kindness at school. It would never have crossed my mind that telling kids to “be kind” could be problematic. But not anymore. Because this is what I know: 

• I know about the school to clinic pipeline.

• I know that kids are being therapized at school.

• I know that there are professionals from my local behavioral health department coming into classrooms in my district to teach breath-work and mindfulness to help students cope with “trauma.”

• I know that I was standing in an elementary school office when a 4th grade boy came in from recess sobbing and reported that he was playing tag at recess and “felt threatened” when another boy told him he was tagging kids too hard. Good thing he’s going to be learning breath-work for his “trauma.”

• I know that when a boy in my district complained about the “trans kid” (a girl) in the boys’ bathroom at school, the incident was used during a district-wide training as an example of harassment. You get the picture. The boy was framed as a harasser, with no mention that this boy was actually experiencing sexual harassment himself by being obligated to be in a state of undress in front of a female student.

• I know that there is a trans-identified child in a 4^th grade classroom in my district masquerading as the opposite sex and that some parents with kids in the class know the truth, but the students in the class do not. At least one mom is incredibly worried about losing her own son’s trust when he finds out she knew and didn’t tell him.

• I know that in an online district training presentation there is a slide of an androgynous looking school-aged child with the following specifics on the slide:  age 10, he/him pronouns.

• I know that there is a principal in the district who, after attending a seminar, decided to purposefully dress androgynously to “help all students feel accepted,” and that, until parents complained, she had pronouns in her email signature.

• I know that until parents complained there were two school counselors at a junior high in our district with engraved pronoun signs on their office doors.

• I know that there is a junior high in a neighboring district with a trans-identified assistant principal.

• I know that an “expert on LGBTQ+ students” has been invited to give a presentation at an annual statewide Outreach Conference I will be attending.

• I know that in this year’s annual district “Belonging and Inclusion Training” there was a whole section dedicated to the risk of suicide in LGBTQ+ students, with statistics and information provided by the Trevor Project, an activist organization that gets money “supporting LGBTQ+ students at risk for suicide”, which of course is a conflict of interest.

• I know that last year my district expanded its Office of Equal Opportunity which now has 11 full time employees who investigate incidents of harassment against students in “protected classes”; that one of those protected classes is “gender identity,” but that no one can explain how to reconcile the rights of “gender identity” when it’s in conflict with the protected class of “sex”, or why every student in the district belongs to one protected class or another except for straight, white male students who must then, by default, be the harassers, and who don’t seem to merit any type of district support or services.

So, you’ll have to excuse me if I feel uncomfortable wearing my Be Kind t-shirt and wristband, because based on what I know, I don’t actually trust my school district to provide a reasonable definition of what it means to “be kind.”