Let me give you some context.

Back in March, our town’s high school hosted a conference that they’ve hosted for the last seven years. The conference focuses on diversity and inclusion, on acceptance and anti-bullying measures. Students in our predominantly white, upper middle class town get to hear different perspectives from all sorts of different communities, and there are multiple workshops throughout the day that students can participate in. This is all enumerated on the conference’s website, and students cannot attend without parental permission. In other words: your kid can only be at this conference if you give the okay.

Lots of speakers lead workshops at this conference and do so for free. It’s volunteer work, and presenters are chosen from responses to RFPs sent out several months in advance. Workshop leaders talk about topics like racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and other difficult things students might encounter in their schools and out in the real world. These workshops aim to give students ways to respond to those sorts of instances, to prevent them from happening in the first place, and to not be discouraged if they’re the target of that sort of nastiness. 

One of the presenters this year was the Pride chapter from our nearest city. Their presentation began with a performance by a drag queen, a two-to-three minute dance as Karen Smith from Mean Girls, as the movie musical had just been released (and, let’s be real, Mean Girls is absurdly gay). Once the performance ended, the drag queen stepped back to let the other presenter lead the workshop about the history and culture of drag. Students by and large came away from the workshop feeling better about themselves, one student even talking about how it filled them with actual joy to be there.

Except.

Someone took sneaky pictures of the workshop like a peeping Tom. Those pictures got around and eventually, someone brought it up to the school committee (who had nothing to do with the conference, no say in any performances whatsoever, and really seemed more interested in making sure that the budget was balanced than anything else). As our school committee meetings are always recorded, a snippet of the complaint somehow made its way to the Lib of TikTok Twitter–sorry, X, didn’t mean to deadname it–account, and our town has not known a moment of peace since.

(Libs of TikTok, for those not in the know, is an account owned by a woman in California named Chaya Raichik. It’s a hotbed of stochastic terrorism, where followers are given misleading information and outright disinformation in the interest of riling them up and inspiring them to do harm. Libs of TikTok has been linked to an absurd number of bomb and death threats, and in one instance, was a deciding factor in a mass shooting. Of course, Chaya never outright tells her followers to go do crime, but that’s the thing about stochastic terrorism: if you tell the right people that a group is evil, they’ll do unspeakable things)

We’ve had so many Facebook debates about this. We’ve had so many meetings about this. People have said the most vile things, downright evil things about the LGBTQIA+ community, specifically trans people (which is kind of hilarious because the drag queen in question? Gayer than a maypole in a sunshower but definitely not trans). People have been yelling SO LOUD, and it’s been SO MUCH, and even though the people yelling are just a small percentage of the town’s population, their screams just ring in everybody’s ears and do the work of making queer people feel unsafe here. 

We’ve also attracted a LOT of out of town attention, including what seems to be a local church and this group that seems to travel from controversy to controversy, demanding that parents homeschool their kids because, apparently, public schools are brainwashing kids to be soldiers for Satan? (speaking as someone who has taught at many levels, trust me, if teachers could brainwash kids, everyone would do their homework all the time, nobody would call their teacher “bruh,” and nobody would run in the hallway ever again) 

(also one of the people who went on the brainwashing for Satan tangent bragged about getting arrested at the department of elementary and secondary education’s headquarters for “just asking questions,” which is a euphemism, I’ve learned, for “property damage”)

Last night was the long-awaited school committee meeting, and it was just a disaster. Four hours of incoherent screaming and tangents and absolute nonsense that was entirely unrelated to anything (like people were talking about test scores as if this conference has anything to do with that?). Four hours of some of the worst vitriol I’ve ever heard in person. I was sitting with the members of the team who put the conference together, many of whom were queer, and everyone looked so miserable–angry, sad, uncomfortable, afraid. It was awful. And in absolute fairness, some people tried to express their weirdness civilly… but even then, when you hear someone civilly say “acknowledging that someone is transgender is like kidnapping them from the inside,” that doesn’t make it better.

BUT ANYWAY. I spoke, too. Because like… have you ever had an experience where you know that you must do something? You feel sick to your stomach about doing it, but you know that if you don’t do it, things will be so much worse. And that’s how I felt about speaking. 

I wrote a speech. It was seven minutes long to start (and that’s what I’ve copied below), and then I had to trim it down to three minutes, and THEN, when I actually spoke, I got nervous and lost my place and couldn’t finish it. I wanted a lot to wish the school committee and principals and superintendents a good summer, but I didn’t have time. What I said was enough, but I do wish I’d been able to say more and say it in a gentler, calmer way instead of panicking about the clock. 

But anyway. Here is what I wanted to say. It’s a lot. I edited it a lot. 

(also I talk about some negative aspects of my upbringing here, which isn’t me trying to crap on my parents at all; it’s more me saying, they were doing the best they could with what they knew and what they believed were best for me, but those actions did not accomplish the goals that they–and a lot of the people so furiously against this conference–wanted to see)

Good evening. My name is Abby, and I will have been a resident of [my town] for ten years come December. I have three children in the school system, and since my youngest are just finishing up kindergarten, I’ll be around here for quite a while. 

I wanted to talk a little bit tonight about the impact of sheltering your kids from things like what we saw at the conference versus allowing them access to those things. I don’t expect to change anybody’s mind tonight, because the human mind is primed to defend itself against opposing points of view, but I do want this information on record, first to be considered by the school committee, principal, and superintendent going forward; and second, so that anyone who identifies as LGBTQIA+ (which I will be shortening to “queer” from this point on) in our town knows that they are not alone.

My parents are both ordained ministers through a relatively conservative Christian denomination, and they did their best to raise me with the values passed down to them by that denomination. In many cases, this meant shielding me from things they deemed inappropriate or sinful. We didn’t celebrate Halloween when I was growing up. Certain Disney movies were completely off limits, and others came with a sort of Christian commentary reminding me that Ursula was not the ruler of all the ocean, that Allah didn’t exist no matter what the sultan said, and that magic wasn’t real. We turned off the TV the second anyone appeared in their underwear or a bikini, and the wine bottles my aunts and uncles brought over for holidays were kept well out of sight and whisked away as soon as the parties ended.

But most notably, my parents shielded me from information about sex and sexuality. I learned the vaguest of basics from a Focus on the Family book, one that only mentioned homosexuality enough to say that it was wrong, a perversion. When the topic of further sex ed arose at school, my parents screened every course and liberally removed me from classes they deemed inappropriate. Once, when I was in seventh grade, a sex ed class slipped through the cracks–leading to several meetings like this one–and that, along with my struggles with algebra, pushed my parents to pull my siblings and me out of school altogether to be homeschooled for a year. When I returned for my freshman year of high school in the town just next door, the proud tradition of pulling me out of sex ed classes continued, and so while my classmates learned about their bodies, protection, STDs, and the like, I learned about nutrition in the library.

By the time I reached tenth grade, I’d had no positive exposure to gay people or transgender people. I believed what I’d been taught–by my parents, by youth pastors, by Focus on the Family, by Christian books and other media–that being gay was a choice, and it was a choice that people only made if they were deeply unwell, oversexualized and in a dark place far from God. And I desperately feared disappointing God and falling away from grace. My parents and I did everything in our power to keep me from being anything but a straight, God-fearing woman, to the point where that was my sole defining characteristic to a lot of people in my high school.

If sheltering your child could prevent your child from identifying as queer, I would be a living testament to that–but the truth is that I’m bisexual. I realized this in tenth grade, and the knowledge that I was attracted to people of my gender and people of other genders made me sick to my stomach for so long. It calcified into this tumor of shame and self-hatred that I kept secret and tried my hardest to pray away, crying as I lay awake all night begging God to make me straight. It hurt so much that I found myself wishing that I’d get hit by a truck or fall horribly ill so that something could hurt my body as much as my soul hurt.

I’m not alone in that feeling. We have countless studies on suicidality and self-harm among queer youth. According to a 2017 study, around 70% of queer people experience major depressive disorder at one point in their lives. Another study in 2019 showed that 71% of queer teen girls and 57% of queer boys had seriously considered suicide. Unwelcoming communities are a huge contributing factor in these statistics: a 2010 study in the Chronicle of HIgher Education reported that about a quarter of queer university students had been harassed because of their orientation, and a 2009 survey found that among participants, queer students were three times as likely to say they felt unsafe at school compared to cishet students.

But. There is good news. Acceptance and support are the biggest preventers of suicidality in queer youth. A 2022 study found that transgender youths who had the support of their families were less than half as likely to commit suicide than those who did not have the support of their families. And, more relevant, gay-straight alliances in schools demonstrably reduce suicidality among queer youths, cutting that number in half. To put it plainly: programs like the conference literally save lives.

I’m very lucky. My story didn’t end in high school. I grew up, I’m healing, and beautifully, when I came out to my parents two years ago, they each held me tightly and told me that they loved and supported me no matter what. 

I worry, though, about kids who don’t have this level of support at home, who feel the way I did in high school with no positive examples. Are we to let them drown in depression and lose them to suicide because “school should just teach academic subjects” or something along those lines? Or can we put aside our own discomfort and save some kids’ lives? Because if all it takes for a kid to reconsider suicide is a drag queen giving a workshop on loving yourself as you are, I think we have a responsibility to invite that drag queen back every year. 

We know for a fact that the biggest shield against the messed up twists and turns of the world is community. For many of us here tonight, it’s the queer community. For many of us, it’s this town. For me–and many of us here tonight–it’s both. Our wonderful little town–with its shimmering ponds, its incredible views of the surrounding region, its quaint town common (despite the construction), and its wonderful people–has a chance once again to stand up for those who might not have the ability to do so themselves. The conference team has done an amazing job at this for the past seven years; let’s not allow external provocateurs prevent them from continuing their good work. 

And to the school committee, principal, and superintendent, I hope you all get really great vacations this summer, because you all deserve it so much. Thank you.