Lincoln folks push back against anti-trans bigotry at school committee meeting

When Westerly resident Robert Chiaradio began his one-person quest to spread anti-trans bigotry across every school committee in Rhode Island, he was at first ignored. But soon, local people sensing that vulnerable youth were being imperiled by his crusade began to push back. At Monday night’s Lincoln School Committeemeeting, as has become the norm across Rhode Island, residents rose to counter the outrageous lies and bigoted rants.

The following has been edited for clarity:

Cameron Deutsch: I’m a Lincoln resident. I’m a former student of Lincoln Public Schools. I attended Lincoln Public Schools all my life and I’m here today to speak in support of the LGBTQ community, especially students in our schools. I’m not going to be sharing my own story. I’m going to share the story of someone who I knew in high school, someone who does amazing work supporting the LGBTQ community. Their name is Nate Derhagopian1 and they demonstrate why it’s so important to support the LGBTQ community. Please excuse me while I go through this. This is also my first time reading through it. I need to hear it at the same time as you all.

“A building is burning to the ground. Smoke overwhelms the air and the flames ignite the night sky. There’s a boy trapped in the building. He’s glued to the floor and cries out for help. Firetrucks race to the scene to save him, but they can’t find a way into the house.

“I am the boy trapped in the building except the house is my body and the flames are society burning me to ashes. I’m the boy stuck in a destroyed home. I’m a boy in a body that can never be my home. I’m a boy that’s going through puberty in a female’s body. Clothes can only hide so many of the demons that are revealed behind my polos and jeans. I don’t want to hide my body anymore. I want my body to be rescued. I want to be a normal boy. Before my sophomore year, I lived my whole life artificially and ignored my truth. Every single moment of my life felt wrong as if I was living a lie.

“I was an actor and my life was the play. I hid the boy living hostage inside my body from everybody, even myself. I thought to myself, ‘If I ignore my soul then he will go away. Eventually, he didn’t go away. The boy inside of me screamed and cried louder until I couldn’t ignore him anymore. Every single night I would wait until everyone fell asleep in my house and dress in boy clothes. This dress-up game was the highlight of my day. I hid my long hair under a baseball cap and disguised my curvy body with baggy jeans in a collared shirt. The boy I became at night was forgotten by the girl who woke up every morning for school.

“The boy I became at night never saw daylight until the day I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were forced to stare deep into my soul until I found him. I saved him that day. I confronted my demons and turned them into angels to free my soul. The first step to his rescue was telling people and allowing them to know the truth. I forced people to recognize me as Nate and to use only he/him pronouns. Most of my friends had no problem at all with this and supported me in every way possible. I’ve started using the boys’ bathroom and trying my best to appear as more of a boy by wearing a binder (a chest compressor), growing my body hair out, going to the gym, and wearing clothes that hide the disgraceful body underneath.

“The future for me right now is unclear. Transgender teens aren’t offered the resources possible in schools to have full access to a successful life like cisgender teens are in high school. When I am 18 years old, it will finally be legal for me to petition the courts to change my name to match my gender. I can start to testosterone, which is a male hormone that deepens my voice, increases hair everywhere, and give me more defined male features. After a year on testosterone, my goal is to have top surgery, which is the surgery to remove my breasts. My body will be starting over when I am 18, a rebirth. I will have to go through puberty again, but thankfully this time I’ll be in the right body.

“Being transgender affects every single part of my life and I don’t know how to not be who I am. The building is still burning. The boy needs someone to rescue him now. Every human deserves dignity and respect and only through education and tolerance will the world become a place where every person, regardless of their struggle, can look in the mirror and love their reflection.

“Please don’t let the boy burn ashes. I wrote this article when I was 15 years old as the first openly transgender student at Lincoln High School and I never regret a second of my courage. I would not be here today if I hadn’t rescued the boy burning in the building. My body is now home and I help transgender youth become their most authentic selves every day. More than 50% of transgender youth are likely to attempt suicide. The policy to protect transgender youth is non-negotiable because it saves the lives of our youth.”

This is not my story to restate. This is my friend, someone who I know and I hope in the future I can see and learn more from them and continue to grow. They perfectly demonstrate why we need to support all students regardless of their background.

The testimony of Westerly resident Robert Chiaradio has been covered many times by me, so I moved it to this footnote.2

Kira: I live in the Lonsdale area of Lincoln. I want to speak because I work in behavioral health. I’m a specialized expert in gender and sexuality. I want to make sure that there is a full context for the committee as this conversation is being had. One of the first things I like to say when I talk about this is that WPATH, which is the World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare Providers, has been in the world for about 40 years.

I like to let people know this because, as a global organization focused on transgender health, it was here before the internet. To me what that means is that [being transgender] is not the most common development, but it is typical in that it would be weird if it didn’t happen. The analogy I make is there are not a ton of people born on February 29th. It’s not typical, but it would be really weird if that never happened on that one day.

I bring this up because gender diversity and identifying as trans is a perfectly normal and healthy kind of development that happens within the natural diversity of humans. I literally have two master degrees in it, so I feel I can speak on that with some level of expertise. I want to make sure that people know that the gender-affirming care children receive is a very well-documented and supervised medical behavioral health and allied professional plan that usually takes years to come up with. It is not happening overnight or without the full consent of family members.

I work with adults who are mentally ill because of how they were treated as kids. So I can speak to the fact that RIDE’s policy is healthy for children. I speak to adults who did not have access to policies like that every day on my job, and I promise you it’s lifesaving.

Bonnie Taylor: I am a parent of a child at Lonsdale Elementary. I am a member of the LGBT community. I love my child, I care about my child. I don’t have an agenda. I love my family members. Our kids and families must learn how to accept each other and learn how we are great in our differences because that helps create more compassionate, intelligent, and empathetic humans who can be nice to each other.

I know that kindness is a big push in this district. I live here in this district. I’m not coming from another town to talk to you. Being kind is important and getting up here and spreading lies and hatred is not kind. I want to say thank you for all the support that you all do and I’m happy and proud to be part of this community and get to work with all of you. I appreciate you.

Paula Carmichael: I’m living over in Lime Rock. I’ve been there for more than 20 years. I have no kids, but I love the fact that I live in a town that values education. I first want to say thank you for all that you do to make sure that our kids get the preparation they need to have excellent lives.

I’m here to say I’m in support of our LGBTQ students and ask you to do the same. I ask you to keep the RIDE policy as it has been rolled out and vetted by experts. I’m a physician in geriatrics. I’ve done basic primary care medicine for many years. It’s kind of bread and butter, diabetes, hypertension, congestive heart failure, all that stuff. But in that capacity, in 20 years, I’ve probably had half a dozen or 10 patients who either were going through transition as adults, 30, 40, 50, or 60-year-olds going through versions of transition, male and female. It’s been life-changing for people who’ve had to suffer – some of them for many decades feeling like they’re not in the right body. To have relief and the support of the medical community and their community has changed their lives – even for people in their sixties. The idea of helping kids before they’re in trouble makes so much sense. I appreciate your time.

Tamara: I’m here with a group of adults. I second everything that was said here in support of the LGBT community and all kids. No matter what, people are people. Everyone who spoke, even with ideas that I may not agree with, has now inspired me to keep on loving and keep on trying to bring everyone together because – I’m an adult now, but I was one of those children.

I was a child that needed help. I am here with my partner. I identify as lesbian. And there was a time when I didn’t know what was going to become of me. I had wonderful parents who accepted me when I finally was able to come out, but there was no conversation [about thos] when I was in school and that was difficult.

There need to be people working together not against each other. There need to be conversations in the school. There needs to be love and there needs to be pride because no person is wrong. If everyone looks around this room, you can see there’s an inner child in all of us.

That’s what we talk about in therapy and it’s important to respect everyone’s inner child. We are all people learning more about ourselves every day. I went to Emerson College. It is a very queer and accepting school and I always felt safe there. I was in school in Boston and I felt so safe.

There are times when I’m out running as a female, and I won’t take the bike paths in Lincoln because I’m afraid, as a female, that I would be attacked. [That is a] concern that I would love, as a female, to tackle. Not to say there aren’t exceptions to every rule, there will be things that go wrong. But things need to be addressed situation by situation and we need to work together. Thank you for inspiring me to speak tonight. I wasn’t planning on it. Thank you all for listening and your continued support. We love this community in Lincoln. We love our schools and I’d like to thank you very much.

JoJo Clark: It was during Covid that I transitioned. I had lived for decades with steep depression and anxiety, but that has all lifted. My best life has come to me in the past five years. I often wonder what it would have been like if I had been able to be myself throughout all those years. I did not grow up in Rhode Island, but I’ve lived in Rhode Island since I was 12 years old. I’m 60 now. I moved here when I was 12…

I was thinking about my hometown, New Orleans. As I was growing up, it was around when segregation had ended. It was interesting because the park that I played in down the street from me had to take away all the segregation. There were two bubblers colored and white. They were mandated to remove and paint over them, but they didn’t paint over it – they whitewashed it. I remember being with my friends and schoolmates and we’d tease each other if you drank from that bubbler. I don’t want to see a world like that. I don’t want to see a world whitewashing and continuing a sense of bigotry. I’m here to support the RIDE policy and I thank you very much.

Susan Branch: I’m from Smithfield, Rhode Island. I’ve been coming to meetings for quite some time. My first meeting was a little over a year ago at Smithfield High School. My daughter and I walked out of there dumbfounded and mortified because we had found out that a doctor had been invited by a staff member into a middle school to speak to children about transgender. This doctor was encouraging the school committee – and the people there did not vote in favor of parental rights.

I have a problem with that. Everybody should have a problem with that since the place that this doctor was from, he’s treating these kids [and] creating a pathway for them to go behind their parent’s back and making their way straight into a transition. Being coached [into] a transition when in fact some of these kids may have mental health issues. They’re going through puberty. For many of these kids, that’s what’s going on. I’m not saying that there aren’t those kids who are, maybe, transgender. If they decide that that’s what they’re going to be, school is not the place for this to be happening.

At the end of this meeting, I found out that the principal came up and he stated that he lies to parents every single day. How can we have that kind of thing going on? That’s not right. You’re encouraging children to lie to their parents. They’re in middle school and that’s where they’re going after them. I understand that transition is difficult for anyone who wants to do it, but it doesn’t belong in school and it certainly doesn’t belong at that age where with cutting parts off and hormones and every other thing.

Research done by Dr. Miriam Grossman, a world-renowned psychiatrist states that there’s a 5000% increase in teen girls in particular wanting to be transgender [sic] in middle school. That’s a big increase. It’s become a contagion for some of these kids. Many of those kids have mental health issues and I’m not saying there are not those kids that may want to transition – that’s their business at another point in life. I don’t think that decision should be needed [at that age] and it certainly does not belong in our schools.

[Note: I was at the Smithfield School Committee meeting that Susan Branch is reporting on. Little that she said about Dr. Will Giordano-Perez’s testimony is accurate. You can watch the video of his comments here. You can also read my transcript of Dr. Giordano-Perez’s comments at the footnote.]3

Frank Spezzano: This was more than I was expecting tonight. I had no idea that this was going to happen and I’m surprised. I’m surprised to hear about the RIDE guidelines. Ever since I’ve been in Lincoln, for 12 years now, everybody says how great the Lincoln School District is and what a great education kids get here and that’s great. I think it’s wonderful.

It’s no secret to anybody who goes to financial town meetings [that] about two-thirds of our town budget goes to public schools. Okay, that’s what people want. But how that money gets spent should be towards education. Tax dollars come from people’s work. That’s their time and their life. If our tax dollars are being spent on programs like this, either at the state or local level, I would strongly disagree with that.

If some of these programs are in place -and I don’t know that stuff is being kept from parents but it sounds like that’s one of the pillars that this program proposes – I can’t disagree with that more stridely if I were a parent with a child that had issues or not. The school should be keeping parents involved on a humanitarian basis if not for legal protection.

The third thing is we’ve all seen male athletes competing in female sports.Lia Thomas being one of the most notorious, and then it was boxing at the Olympics [Note: Imane Khelif is a woman Olympic boxer falsely identified as being transgender], and all kinds of things where genders are different and identifying as something doesn’t make you something.

I’ve got a little homestead. I made goat milk cheese this morning, [and it] came out great. I know you’re all very interested in this, but I got that goat milk from my goats. And not once did I think about going out and milking my buck. There’s a difference between men and women, thank you very much.