The Shocking and Ridiculous Events in My School District

And the even more shocking and ridiculous way they've been covered by the media

I sent this op-ed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Free Press, USA Today and The Hill. None took it. It is written to appeal to a general liberal audience.
—LD

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Snacks and masks.

Across the country, schools have become epicenters of cultural battles over gender identity and trans kids. Even before an onslaught of executive orders from President Donald Trump, regulating everything from pronouns to surgeries, we’d seen screaming matches, arrests, and unrest over school policies that allow young people to use facilities, participate in activities, access medical interventions, and identify themselves based on their gender identity, as opposed to their sex.

The common refrain is that conservatives and Republicans feel one way, and liberals and Democrats another. But that framing, not to mention the viciousness of the battles, prevent us from debating and understanding the implications of these policies. When we assume that all dissent is bigotry, we’re doomed to fight, instead of to craft fair, ethical, and science-based policies.

Fighting is exactly what’s happening right now in my own children’s school district, Community Education Council District 2, in New York City. Our 25,000-student district spans the island of Manhattan, with 33 schools downtown, uptown, on the east side and west, and on Roosevelt and Governors Islands. Our large and diverse community includes poor immigrants and rich immigrants, middle class people of color and white people.

Last year, our CEC—the New York City version of a school board—overwhelmingly passed Resolution 248, which called for a “Comprehensive Review and Redrafting” of the public schools’ guidelines, which currently allow kids to play sports based on gender identity. The resolution requested the creation of a panel which would include “female athletes, parents, coaches, relevant medical professionals and evolutionary biology experts,” and could propose “amendments, changes and additions to the Gender Guidelines.” It envisioned “an inclusive, evidence-based process concerning the impact on female athletes when the category of sex is replaced by gender identity.”

Among the supporters on the CEC were gay people and a Black man. Among the supporters in the community were people like me, liberal feminists who embrace gender diversity, and also believe that good policy is based on cost-benefit analyses, requiring the consultation of multiple stakeholders. Ignoring costs, and silencing dissenting stakeholders, prevents good policymaking.

But that’s what most people in my liberal bubble have done. A community board official denounced Resolution 248, calling it “anti-trans”—as opposed to “pro-girl.” The schools chancellor at the time, David Banks—whose house was raided by the FBI as part of an effort to root out corruption in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration—denounced it, too. Another group called it “hateful”—even though many polls show that the vast majority of Americans agree with the sentiments expressed in the resolution.

For over a year, an activist group, Aunties & Friends for Liberation, has organized disruptions to our CEC meetings. Though most participants don’t have children in the district, they’ve shown up month after month, chanting and dancing and humming, turning their backs when anyone they disagree with attempts to speak. Media stories claim that Maud Maron, CEC member and lead sponsor of Resolution 248, created chaos at these meetings—yet it was the protestors themselves who sowed that chaos, rendering the conducting of basic school board business nearly impossible. This month, Aunties & Friends will distribute a zine called the “CECircus” at the meeting—a circus atmosphere they’ve created, and which the New York City Department of Education has at the very least permitted, and at most, encouraged.

The group is led in part by a trans woman named Alaina Daniels, who was accused of sexually harassing a student where she taught—a fact I’ve almost never seen mentioned in advocacy materials or media stories. The Aunties brought in celebrities like Elliot Page and ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, who ironically once said, about a book on children harmed by transition: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” I often feel like I’m living in the upside down, when the supposed progressives silence and censor, and when a reasonable resolution in support of women’s rights is decried as hateful.

In the past few months, I’ve witnessed a concerted campaign to rid the CEC of those who supported the resolution—not just from activists, but from the media, outside advocacy groups, and within the schools themselves. They take as a foregone conclusion that everybody feels the same way—or that they should root out those who don’t. At one school in the district, the grade rep sent an activist group’s recommendation of whom to vote for, violating the Chancellor’s regulation, which risks the PTA’s nonprofit status. Eventually, they rescinded the email, but it was too late. Every recipient had already gotten the message: to be in favor of free speech, open inquiry, and sex-based policies is to be right wing. To be right-wing is to be morally bankrupt.

cd_clifford

A post shared by @cd_clifford

It's true that Maud Maron is now a Republican, but not long ago she was a liberal Legal Aid lawyer who fit into the deep blue fabric of New York City (minus the red borough of Staten Island.) In fact, over the years, as I’ve worked on a book about how we came to fight over gender identity as trans kids, I’ve seen many objecting left-leaning people driven into the arms of the Right, thanks to the censoriousness and cancel culture of my own supposedly liberal people. Female students and lefty parents in my district have told me that they agree with Resolution 248, but don’t feel they can say so, because they will be perceived as right wing. We alienate or shun dissenting liberals, and then say no liberals dissent. Meanwhile, Maron’s affiliation with Moms for Liberty is shorthand for “vote her out,” by the same people who haven’t scrutinized the membership or motivations of Aunties & Friends for Liberation.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after eight years of researching, it’s this: it’s not a left/right issue. It’s not even a sports issue. It’s an issue of belief versus science.

There are lesbians, gays, trans people, feminists, liberals, and Democrats who disagree with the basic tenets of what some call “gender ideology.” This is a belief system based on the idea that everyone has a gender identity—a gendered soul, independent of the body—and that we must elevate it, in policy and law, above sex. But gender identity, despite what my kids learned at New York City public school, is not a fact. It is an idea, with a long and interesting history. It’s a modern, Western understanding and interpretation of the gender nonconformity that has been seen throughout history, in many cultures. But it’s not an understanding or interpretation that we all share.

Sex, on the other hand, is a ubiquitous fact. Each human being walking the planet is here because male and female gametes combined. How masculine or feminine someone is, how they dress or behave or conceive of themselves—of those things, there are endless variations. But it’s indisputable, that, on average, males are bigger and stronger than females, however they identify.

Whether to divide society by self-conception, rather than reproductive categories, is something we need to be able to discuss and debate. To do so, we must create environments in which multiple viewpoints can be heard, and multiple stakeholders feel safe speaking up. What we desperately need on our school boards, and among school leaders, is ideological diversity and open inquiry.

Instead, the schools, the media, and advocacy groups demand ideological conformity and close down inquiry, portraying a complex story as a simple case of kindness versus bigotry. As parents, few of us would want our children learning to navigate the world in such reductionistic terms, blinding themselves to facts and treating nuance as a threat. Why should we have school boards, and school leaders, who do?