Last week, I reported that author Robin Stevenson said school officials cancelled a talk she was scheduled to give at an elementary school in Illinois because her latest book profiled Harvey Milk, among other famous activists. It seems a parent did complain about Milk—but the school was also concerned about the inclusion of Janet Mock, who is transgender.
Stevenson’s book profiles the childhoods of 16 famous activists. Mock and Milk are the only LGBTQ ones, and Stevenson has said she hadn’t even been planning to focus on them in this particular talk.
After the school district initially said the talk was canceled because parents had not been properly informed (a point Stevenson says is false, since she has a copy of the flyer that was distributed), the Daily Herald reported that Wheaton School District Superintendent Jeff Schuler e-mailed a former student to say that gender identity was a topic in Stevenson’s book that “caused concern.”
Schuler noted that gender identity will be covered in the curriculum next year, per a new law requiring the inclusion of LGBTQ history and people in the curriculum. He said it was important to “take a thoughtful approach to this topic and introduce it in a supported environment for our students” as with other topics. “I did not feel like we were prepared for this or had provided context or notification to our parents.” He said, “The topic itself is not inherently controversial,” but there were concerns about the age at which it is introduced.
Stevenson (rightly, in my opinion) calls that out. She noted in an e-mail to the Daily Herald that some kids come out as transgender in elementary school; others have transgender parents. (See this brand-new Newsweek piece on transgender children, for example.) I’ll add that Stevenson’s own explanation in the book of what it means to be transgender seems clear and thoughtful and age appropriate—and introducing the topic via a sympathetic portrait of an inspirational transgender person would have been as good a way to do so as any (though again, Stevenson hadn’t even planned to focus on Mock for this talk).
It also appears from the Daily Herald coverage that at least one parent was concerned about the inclusion of Harvey Milk in the book as well.
We’ve seen this sort of attitude before, too, in relation to same-sex parents. As a U.S. circuit court wrote in a 2008 (2008!) case involving two couples from Lexington, Massachusetts who said their school district violated their constitutional rights when it included LGBTQ-inclusive books in its elementary school curriculum:
The mere fact that a child is exposed on occasion in public school to a concept offensive to a parent’s religious belief does not inhibit the parent from instructing the child differently. A parent whose ‘child is exposed to sensitive topics or information [at school] remains free to discuss these matters and to place them in the family’s moral or religious context, or to supplement the information with more appropriate materials.’ . . . There is no free exercise right to be free from any reference in public elementary schools to the existence of families in which the parents are of different gender combinations.
The same could be said about the existence of people with various gender identities. I’d like to think our society has collectively learned something in the past decade, but perhaps that’s too optimistic.
The good news is that Stevenson will speak in the area after all, though not at the elementary school as originally planned. After hearing of the school cancellation, the Chicago Tribune reports, state Rep. Terra Costa Howard invited Stevenson to speak at a free, public event at 7 p.m. tomorrow, too be held at at Glenbard West High School in Glen Ellyn. The DuPage Convention and Visitors Bureau and Equality Illinois, the state LGBTQ advocacy organization, will cover her travel and hotel expenses.
