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Judy Williams is a retired educator who lives in Belfast.
“My hope is that all of our students will benefit from the leadership decisions at the local, state and national levels,” Hodgdon Superintendent of Schools, Tyler Putnam, said in an April 15 Bangor Daily News article, after the MSAD 70 school board unanimously adopted language that mirrors that of the Trump administration to recognize just two sexes of students, biological males and females, and to bar students from using private spaces, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, reserved for members of the opposite sex.
Tell me, Superintendent Putnam, how that policy benefits transgender students in Hodgdon’s elementary, middle or high schools? Tell me how those students accommodate their sense of self as they go about taking care of basic bodily needs every day as they attend these schools?
Tell me how it provides these students with the well-established mental health benefits of participation in athletic activities at their schools if, when in order to do so they must deny their very identity? Tell me where the benefit lies from a policy that a 2024 study done by the Trevor Project has shown “has [had] a significant and causal impact on suicide risk in transgender and nonbinary young people across the United States.” This study looked at 2018-2022 data from 61,000 transgender and nonbinary youth living in 19 states where 48 transgender laws were enacted. The study concluded that these laws increased the incidence of past-year suicide attempts during this five year period by as much as 72 percent.
What kind of a society values an athlete’s opportunity to win a basketball game or track and field event more than the very lives of the young people who want more than anything to participate in those and other sports?
We need more voices like that of Charlie Cobb, Nordic coach and venue manager at the Fort Kent Outdoor Center in Fort Kent, who recently asked in a Bangor Daily News opinion column, “Do we really care about winning so much that we would single out trans women to deny them the opportunities to make friends and be part of a supportive team? Are these the values that we want to teach kids? That winning is more important than participating?”
For me, the answer is clear. After the cheers of the crowd have long died down and the trophies and ribbons have gathered dust on an athlete’s bedroom shelf, I would much rather celebrate the fact that all athletes, cisgender or not, are being raised in a society that affirms their right to peacefully live an authentic life among their peers. I hope the SAD 70 School Board reconsiders this vote and works instead to formulate policies that actually do benefit all of their students.
