So, it didn’t go great yesterday.

Your Daily Lex.

The Board of Ed meeting was pretty well attended, but we’ll call them the anti-woke brigade, or the MAGA folks.

They outnumbered the LGBTQ community and allies by about 2 to 1, I would estimate.

I will say that some of the folks who were on, quote unquote, my side, I thought came overzealous for the meeting.

There was somebody draped in a huge pride flag.

There were a lot of signs.

I don’t mind those things, especially signs, but I also think that there’s like, you want to be seen as serious and civil, and some of it felt extreme.

They were handing out ribbons, and I gladly put on a ribbon, but I thought like, wearing giant pride flags around your body, I thought was a lot.

But anyway, we go in, and from the beginning, it’s clear that the intent of the, what am I going to call them?

I’m going to call them the bad guys.

The intent of the bad guys is to intimidate.

So as we’re walking in, I hear two larger guys being like, I like to stand.

I’m going to swear, by the way.

I like to stand at these things.

That’s what I did in all the COVID meetings when they wanted to force the kids to wear masks.

I like to stand right by the other guys and just to fuck with them.

So I sat down near some strangers to me.

I really wish I had gone with a friend.

It would have made it a little bit easier, but I didn’t have any friends who were gone.

So I’m sitting with some other new friends who I’ve met, and I see these guys standing.

At one point, one of them is going to talk to one of his buddies, and he trips a little bit and plows into some allies.

It’s my assumption that he genuinely did trip, but then he was a jerk about falling into these guys.

He doesn’t apologize or whatever.

Then his buddy’s like, if you’ve got an issue, here’s a tissue.

So I debate, and I actually even posted on Mastodon to get people’s opinions.

But I decided as a tall, straight white male that I could be potentially helpful.

So I moved over and stood between those guys and the allies they were attempting to physically intimidate.

So the meeting’s going, and it’s first very clear the board’s intent is to delay for a little bit to see if that helps by discussing other matters that weren’t on the agenda or that were later on the agenda and pushing things out that way.

Then they get into the topic at hand about the school’s policy on trans kids and how they want to change it to make it violate New Jersey state law.

As I think I’ve mentioned, there are a couple genuine QAnon adherents on the Board of Education.

If you’re not clear 100% on what is QAnon, QAnon folks genuinely believe that there’s a secret leaker in the government who goes by Q, who’s revealing the true information and that Trump is seriously still the president and that JFK Jr.

is still alive.

None of this is things I’m making up.

These are things that QAnon genuinely believes and that Trump is getting ready to blow up some big pedophile ring, whatever.

Two people who are adherents to this idiocy are on the school board, and they each made statements before public discussion began.

One of them even references this idea that school nurses can’t even give ibuprofen or Tylenol without parent permission, but now we want them to help with hormone therapy.

He later denied having said it, but he did.

So the president of the board clearly wants to end the meeting.

He says, hey, if there’s any outbursts or any chaos of any kind, I’m just going to end this meeting just so you guys know, which of course, it’s bogus, right?

Because his side, which is, yeah, let’s change this policy to be less cool to trans kids, is what they intend to vote.

The public comment, certainly there’s going to be plenty of people who speak in support of him saying, yeah, do all the things you’re doing, but there’s only going to be people who say, hey, don’t do it, and here’s why.

But he doesn’t want to hear that stuff.

So he’s like, if there’s any outbursts or anything, I’m just going to shut it down.

There’s only one side that was rowdy during the meeting, and it was the bad guys.

And every once in a while, they’d be like, oh, I’m going to shut it down, which is what they wanted.

They were intentionally being chaotic to try to shut the meeting down early, which eventually did not work.

There was only two people ejected, and they were both the bad guys.

Then they had to call the police to get the ejected folks to actually leave the building because they were still staying in the building and yelling.

So I moved my seat a second time because at one point there was a verbal altercation where some of the bad guys were yelling at, actually, the woman who had the flag draped around her.

They were giving her grief, and she was giving some back to them.

The guy’s like, I’m going to end the meeting, I’m going to count down from 10, and if they’re still going at it.

So I moved my seat and sat next to this person.

Then they took a five minute recess so people could calm down.

I said to these people who I didn’t know, look, I watch a lot of NFL football, and this woman had no idea why I said that.

She’s like, okay.

I’m like, let me explain why I’m telling you that.

In the NFL, if there’s a penalty after the play for unsportsmanlike conduct, meaning somebody hits a guy or something, one guy hits another guy, then that guy who just got hit is mad, and he hits the first guy back again, and it’s that second guy who always gets the flag because the refs don’t see the first thing.

It happens so fast.

But then there’s a commotion, so they turn and look, and they see the victim go ahead and throw his own punch.

And that’s the guy who gets flagged.

These guys are trying to get you kicked out, they’re trying to get us amped up.

You have to just sit here, I’m going to sit here right next to you, nobody’s going to screw with you, and we cannot rise to the bait.

She’s like, okay.

So that’s where I sat for the rest of the day.

Then it was very clear that it wasn’t going to go our way.

Everybody had been heard.

One of the QAnon guys was going on a rant again.

I was thinking, I’m just going to leave now.

But then people were like, hey, can you not leave early?

Because we want to stay, and we’d like you to walk us out to our cars.

Because I’m big and tough, I guess.

I guess I’m tall, is really all I am.

By the way, I did give my talk that I shared on this podcast yesterday, and it went pretty well.

My talk, my three-minute whatever.

They do the vote, and it’s unanimously supporting the policy.

Again, the policy violates state law, and it violates federal law.

I guarantee you it will not be upheld.

Parents who I think are well-meaning but who are uneducated on this topic can make a reasonable argument.

I get it.

They can say, because one of the policy changes is, if a kid confides in a guidance counselor or a teacher to say, hey, I’m thinking about, I’d like to be referred to by a different name, or I’m thinking I’d like to use different pronouns.

Even if that kid says, I’m not comfortable telling my parents yet, the school’s policy is they have to notify the parents.

I understand the argument that some parents might say, of course we should know.

If something’s going on with my kids, the school should know.

The school should tell me.

That’s a reasonable case to make, but the question is, why aren’t the kids telling you?

Sometimes the kids will feel endangered from telling their parents.

If you have very conservative parents who won’t be supportive of your trans status, let’s say, and you don’t want to tell them, the school forcibly outing you.

This policy also dictates that the principal has to say, by the way, we may have to forcibly out you if this is what you’re saying.

The whole policy is meant to intimidate kids.

The whole policy is meant to not have kids acknowledge their transness, or to have their parents be able to, I don’t know, conversion therapy them or other bullshit.

The problem is, if the kid isn’t telling the parent but is telling a teacher, there’s a reason.

The teacher should not be obligated to tell the parents.

It’s bad.

It’s demonstrably bad.

It’s provably bad.

Suicide rates and depression rates are much higher for trans kids than for anybody else unless they have a supportive community.

In every case where they study what it looks like if you forcibly out these folks to their parents, it’s much worse.

Things get much worse for them.

It’s not safe at home.

The arguments being made were, well, that’s the parent’s decision, or if it’s a dangerous house, then the kids can always call Child Protective Services or the New Jersey equivalent.

Those are insane arguments.

Some teachers spoke.

Some former teachers from the district spoke.

We’re like, kids have come to us to talk about their sexuality, about gender, about other stuff for years and we’ve never spoken to parents because if they’re opening themselves up to us in this way, there’s a reason.

We need to be a safe place.

They need to be comfortable talking to us.

We can’t violate those trusts.

If a kid said, hey, I’m going through this and I’m suicidal, then of course they’re going to tell the parents.

If a kid said, hey, I’m thinking about harming myself, of course they have to notify people.

But if a kid is saying, hey, I’d like to try using a different name here at school.

Listen, kids, especially young kids, can’t keep a secret for all that long.

So if all their friends are calling them a different name and then some of those friends come over to the house, somebody’s going to slip up and then there’s going to be an organic way for it to come up at home.

But it’s got to happen on the kid’s schedule.

And there were a lot of LGBTQ and trans folks at this meeting who spoke to exactly that.

Some of them got forcibly outed and then had to basically be emancipated from their parents.

Others got to come out to their parents in their own time.

One person talked about how it was that the parents were the last people they came out to.

And that was after a couple of years of coming out to other folks.

Then the vote did happen and it was unanimous about passing this restrictive policy.

So the next thing will be court cases and the school will end up having to pay, I assume, ridiculous amounts of money.

And the school doesn’t have money.

So that’ll be quite a thing.

Anyway, I hope you’re having a great Wednesday and enjoy the double length of your daily Lex.

And yeah, we’ll talk soon.

Lex.

Lex.