By Gwendolyn Ann Smith
At a time when most are planning their retirement, a seventy-one year old teacher, Lily McBeth, instead left her teaching position in order to manage her gender transition. When she returned, the board at Eagleswood Elementary School in Eagleswood Township, New Jersey welcomed her back.
After a contentious school board meeting, where members of the New Jersey Family Policy Council made arguments against subjecting seemingly-defenseless children to a transgender teacher, it was further reinforced that Ms. McBeth would be welcomed to the Eagleswood faculty.
The New Jersey Family Policy Council is, of course, unhappy, and is urging parents to file legal challenges against the board members. Again, the argument is that young, impressionable children should not have to be subject to the trauma of someone who used to be a man teaching classes.
The head of this group views this as just another part of the push to allow for same-sex marriage: I'm not sure exactly how he came to that conclusion — but I digress. Ms. McBeth is again allowed to serve as a substitute teacher in her golden years.
Lily McBeth is hardly the first teacher to do this. The first I know of was a physical education teacher in the greater San Francisco Bay Area who transitioned from female to male a couple decades ago. Last I heard, he was still teaching. Many others have followed, from Debra Davis — a school librarian in Minnesota — to Diane Giles in California.
One of the better known teachers to go through a gender transition is Dana Rivers, who was drummed out of a high school near Sacramento in the late 1990s. Like Ms. McBeth, Ms. Rivers faced the argument that the students would not somehow be able to handle this.
It was her students who were some of her most vocal supporters.
I am of the firm belief that it is not the students who have the biggest issues with any of this: it is the parents who don't seem to understand what is going on. If anything, it's these same parents that make what would probably make the largely quiet transition of a member of the faculty an issue that hits the National news. Indeed, if they felt that they'd be uncomfortable explaining things to their children before, imagine how it must feel to do it once you have CNN news vans parked at the school.
This all seems to be part of this "think of the children" mentality that fails to address real-world issues to children who really aren't as fragile as their overly-doting parents seem to think they are. These same parents seem to forget that schools are there to prepare their tots for life in the real world — a real world where, yes, they are going to possibly come across transgender people.
That's the shame of it all. I'm not saying that kids should be exposed to all the ways of the world — I'd pass on exposing them to Fred Phelps, for example — but they should be given a full education. This includes learning about tolerance, and respect, and acceptance of all peoples.
I should add that this is not an issue I can wholly sit back at a distance and watch. As I type this, I am in the process of starting to work as a substitute teacher and aide at a local school. I will be dealing with developmentally disabled youth in a classroom setting. Students who, one could argue, might have an even harder time with having a transgender person in their midst.
Do I worry about what some parents might say? You bet I do. It is one of the issues, I suppose, with being transgender in this society. While I am not equating my entry level teaching experience with that of Ms. McBeth or any of the other fine instructors I listed above, it strikes me that some seem to prefer their kids be left without a competent teacher versus one who also happens to be transgender.
This doesn't strike me as saving any children: rather this seems like spreading ignorance — and isn't that, at heart, what teaching is supposed to combat?
