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After Angry Public Out-Cry By Anti-LGBTQ Opponents: School Board Rescinds Trans Inclusive Policy

The East Aurora Illinois School Board

AURORA, IL -- The East Aurora School Board voted Friday evening to rescind its just-adopted policy aimed at protecting the rights of its transgender students. There were only four board members in attendance at the time of the vote and all four voted to kill the policy.
The school board found itself the target of a campaign headed by the anti-gay Illinois Family Institute, which has been declared a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The board received thousands of negative emails since the Monday vote which approved the policy. [The policy stated that transgender and gender nonconforming students have the right to be addressed by the name and gender pronoun with which they identify, and that a court-granted name or gender change is not required. The policy also stated that students also have the right to use the restroom and locker room that corresponds to their gender identity.]
By Thursday, some board members began to publicly distance themselves with the board president publicly walking back the decision:

“The board never at any time came up with this (policy) on their own,” School Board President Annette Johnson said Wednesday. Instead, board members simply thought they were keeping up with state code."

Hemant Mehta, the chairman of Foundation Beyond Belief and a high school math teacher in the suburbs of Chicago wrote a defence of the policy Thursday:

On Friday, the school board has a choice to make: Do what’s best for the students in the district who tend to be outcasts… or get pushed around by a Christian group that uses faith as a method to bully others who don’t conform to their radical way of thinking. If the board has a heart, if they care about the students, if they want to be on the right side of this issue, they’ll let their vote stand.

In reaction to the policy, the Illinois Family Institute had sent out a mass e-mail to supporters in which the anti-gay group wrote:

Teens who suffer from gender confusion/gender dysphoria or Gender Identity Disorder have an objective biological sex. That should be all that matters when it comes to school policy regarding locker rooms, restrooms, and sports participation: 

No student should be allowed to use any locker room or restroom other than the one that comports with his or her objective biological sex. 

No student should be compelled to share a locker room or restroom with a peer of the opposite sex, no matter how intensely a gender-confused student wishes to use it. His or her disordered desires and non-factual beliefs about gender should not take precedence over the healthy desires of girls and boys or over objective biological facts. 

Teachers, counselors, and coaches should not be legally required to participate in a fiction by, for example, being required to use pronouns that do not conform to the objective biological sex of students. 

There are two critical questions that this decision raises. First, does accommodating a mental and moral disorder actually help gender-confused teens or does is just make them subjectively “feel” better? Second, is it ethical and justifiable to mandate that all school personnel and students pretend that a boy is a girl or vice versa? 

This is a biased, radical, and offensive school board decision that all Illinois taxpayers—especially Aurora community members with or without children in school—should vigorously and tenaciously oppose. Remember, all schools receive some state funds, so all Illinois taxpayers have a vested interest in this policy.

Hundreds of people turned out Friday evening for the special meeting at the school district's offices. Numerous persons were given the opportunity to speak with several speaking in favour of keeping the policy.