More than 1,000 students walked out of their middle and high school classrooms across Virginia Tuesday, protesting the state’s reversal of transgender protections by Gov Glenn Youngkin, USA Today reports.
Gov Youngkin at a Back to School Rally in August (Courtesy of Spirit of Virginia/Flickr Creative Commons)The governor’s reversal of those protections will leave decisions about students’ identities and preferred names at school to parents, not the students themselves.
The policy requires students to use bathrooms, pronouns, and names based on their official school records, and they may only be allowed to participate on sports teams aligned with the sex assigned at birth.
“Revoking (transgender protections) now would be like dialing back the clock. It’d be like telling students, ‘We don’t really care, you’re not really who you believe yourself to be,'” the paper quoted one 16-year-old student from John R Lewis High School in Springfield as saying. More than 100 students at Lewis protested the reversal on the football field.
Laws in 18 states now ban transgender athletes from participating in sports that match their gender identity. ESPN lists policies in every state.
“When things like this happen, they give license to violent acts, not just against trans kids, but [against] kids who are members of the broader community,” Education Week quoted Stephen Forssell, a professor in the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department at George Washington University and director of the university’s LGBT Health Policy and Practice Program, as saying. “We do see increases in hate crimes and harassment of community members when these sorts of bills are passed. And it basically says your state thinks you’re not worthy of being protected.”
