Mike Dawson

Middletown Board of Ed Meeting

Added 2023-06-27 14:33:47 +0000 UTC

This didn't happen at the Board of Ed at the school my kids go to, it's at the school system that I personally came up in, one town over from where I live now. It's got a particularly MAGA leadership board, a husband and wife team who rose to power on an "Unmask our kids" anti-vax platform (pretty popular in a very conservative county). They ended up passing these new rules, despite the overwhelming opposition at the meeting, and the fact that they knew they'd immediately be taken to court because these rules break New Jersey State Law. Clearly that's what they wanted to happen, to them this is culture war chum that gives them something to run on now that masking is no longer a salient issue. Nevermind that it's trans kids who are getting hurt in the process.

Now, this might be very naive of me, but I think the horrendous anti-trans anti-LGBTQ backlash politics the right have been trafficking in lately may well blow up in their faces. It's dangerous, and will do a lot of damage along the way, but I am hopeful that at this point, even normies who possibly aren't so progressive on gender issues, will be put off by this. One result of the past decade of increased trans visibility is that many more people have more actual trans kids in their lives. I know a number of trans and nonbinary children, it's not just some abstract concept, these are real kids, and it's not hard to see that they are being targeted. I don't think the big guy at the end of this comic will be the one to save us, but it strikes me that we may all be surprised about how many of us are able to see this effort for what it is, an attempt to stoke anxieties and foment a panic, and rightfully resists it.