There’s been a lot of talk in the Alaska Legislature over the last week about Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s “parental rights” bill that largely mirrors the notorious “Don’t Say Gay” bill passed in Florida and other Republican states, but very little of it has come from students who would have to live with it.
There’s been legislators on both sides of the issue, and the House Education Committee has heard selective invited testimony from supporters of the legislation, including from a person tied to the campaign against Anchorage’s ban on “conversion” therapy, the bogus practice of trying to force a minor to change their sexual orientation.
The House and Senate Education committees finally heard from two students at a joint hearing on Wednesday with the Board of Education when they gave student advisor Maggie Cothron and incoming student advisor Felix Myers and opportunity to speak end of the hearing with board’s adult members.
Both went right to into addressing Dunleavy’s House Bill 105.
“I think it’s important to address from a student perspective what that looks like and some issues that we see with that bill,” Myers said. “In many of the conversations that I’ve had with fellow students, many of whom identify with the LGBTQ community, and they see many problems and issues.”
The legislation would bar teachers from discussing sex or gender identity in any form without written permission from a parent. The same would go for changing a student’s pronouns, name or nickname. It would also reclassify the state-mandated sexual abuse awareness and teen dating violence courses as sex ed, banning it completely for all young children. It would also dictate who can use which bathrooms and would require teachers to relay any and all information a student might confide in them with a parent, effectively requiring teachers to out students.
Myers said the legislation raises serious concerns about the well being and safety of transgender students. He noted transgender youth already face a far higher risk of dying by suicide than their peers, and said the legislation would take away their ability to feel safe and welcome at schools.
“If, in this case, they feel that in a safe environment such as a school they are not able to be themselves or they aren’t going to be respected in that role, then that leads to far more danger for them in that situation,” he said. “I can safely say transgender students face some of the most dangerous situations, and many of them feel not comfortable in their homes. … (Students) who are not able to get parent permission are the ones who are most likely danger of being in an unsafe situation. Having it so that the schools are not able to protect those students’ safety is a significant threat.”
Cothron agreed with Myers, noting that the purpose of the education system is to provide a quality education to all students, which includes providing a safe and welcoming environment for them to learn. She said not every student has that at home.
“It’s concerning and scary,” she said. “I have friends who don’t come out to their parents because they don’t feel safe, they don’t feel that their parents will accept them and let them be who they want to be. To have that forcibly come out will have a lot of negative consequences that you may not realize.”
Myers also made an important note: That the term “gender identity” isn’t particularly specific and could be expansively interpreted to bar teachers from talking about just about anything dealing with men and women. He even pointed out that the committee even heard about the reading gap between boys and girls in schools.
“Gender identity is a very vague term, and we can go on with semantics all we want, but is that a conversation of: How can we talk about historical figures without talking about their gender?” he asked rhetorically. “With Martha Washington, are we now going to have to send out permission slips for talking about the fact that she was the wife of George Washington? Gender identity is a very vague term. How much are we going to be bearing down on the ability of our educators teach about history, statistics, things like that when we’re comparing genders of men and women, just like what was presented today.”
Beyond Rep. CJ McCormick asking that the students be given an opportunity speak, legislators didn’t engage or directly respond to the student advisors’ testimony.
House Education Committee co-chair Rep. Jamie Allard, R-Eagle River, has praised the governor’s legislation and invited only supporters of the legislation to speak during the bill’s first and only hearing so far on Monday. That testimony included retired educator Kristine Gugel who’s associated with Wellspring Ministries, a religious organization that performed “conversion therapy” in Anchorage before the city banned it.
She told the committee that parents know better than what students “perceive is their sexual identity” and that parents “have a God-given responsibility for the moral, spiritual, sexual, medical condition of their children.”
Stay tuned.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
