IFI Wins (For Now)

The Illinois Family Institute are savoring their victory.

Yesterday, I mentioned that the IFI was trying to get the East Aurora School District to rescind its new transgender-friendly policy, which was adopted only four days ago.

The rules allowed students to use bathrooms, locker rooms and other facilities intended for the gender of their minds and spirits.  Of course, that's not the language that was written into the short-lived regulation.  But, for a brief period of time, at least one member of that school board showed an understanding of the fact that our genders are not simply a mater of sexual apparatus or chromosomes. 

Today, the Board is expected to capitulate to the pressure of the IFI--which helped to spur a campaign of negative letters, e-mails and phone calls--and reverse the policy.  

 According to School Board President Annette Johnson, passing the new regulation was a "mistake."  She claimed that board members had been misinformed that the district had to implement the guidelines in order to conform with a constantly-changing Illinois school code.  


The National Center for Transgender Equality says that allowing students to live in the gender in which they see themselves is critical in preventing bullying as well as host of other problems that follow.  When students can express who they actually are, and there are policies to protect that expression, most would-be bullies realize that they can't get away with the violence and harassment they can commit when young people are forced to repress their  expression of gender identity and sexuality.

Maybe the IFI will fall apart, or Board members will see the ight they saw this past Monday, when they voted for the transgender policy. Or so I hope.

IFI: Their Hate Is All About The Family

Why do so many hate groups have the word "family" in their names?

One example is the Illinois Family Institute.  In response to the East Aurora School District's new transgender-affirmative policy, the self-appointed guardians of the "traditional" family issued an ignorant and offensive condemnation in its call for a repeal.

Their missive included gems like the following:

Apparently, all that’s needed for school personnel to be compelled to participate in a fiction is for a student to pretend “consistently” at school that he or she is the opposite sex.

The school board is now imposing non-objective, “progressive” moral, philosophical, and political beliefs—not facts—about gender confusion on the entire school. This feckless school board has made a decision to accommodate, not the needs of gender-confused teens, but their disordered desires and the desires of gender/sexuality anarchists who exploit public education for their perverse ends.

I wonder how many of these board members have thought or read deeply on the issue of gender confusion or Gender Identity Disorder. And I wonder how many of them have read deeply the writing of not just “progressive” scholars but conservative scholars as well.

That gender dysphoria is referred to as "gender confusion" tells you most of what you need to know about this group and the bliss they take in their ignorant hate.  Also, they wonder whether Board members have read "deeply" the writing of "not just progressive" scholars, but conservative scholars as well.

Excuse me IFI, but have you heard of the DSM?  Its editors are hardly known as "progressive" scholars.  But the next edition of the DSM, due to be released in May, takes gender identity disorder off its list of mental illnesses.  And many other scientists with no discernible political agendae affirm that, indeed, some people are born with characteristics that are incongruent with what is considered "normal" for their genital or chromosomal sex.

If anything, the East Aurora school board is simply acknowledging reality.  If the IFI would do the same, perhaps they wouldn't need to be so hateful.