When Trans kids confide in a school teacher and cry for help

 Teachers who value each and every student will do everything within their ability to ensure that their pupils feel safe in their classrooms and that it is also a safe place to share, vent, and open up about deeply personal life stressors, or that those resources remain available to all.

With new regulations in certain states making it against policy for teachers or school counselors to provide support mechanisms for their pupils without circling back to the parents, this gets challenging when policy forbids a teacher from affirming a child’s wishes. When a child explicitly states that he/she/they  does NOT want their own personal vents to a teacher to be shared back at home, but the teacher is restrained by new laws targeting trans community to have no Avenue to do anything in their own good faith and conscience, this is most certainly an unfortunate dilemma for teachers   (my sister-in-law having been one of those academic teachers).

As a source for remedy, the teachers may convene in an assembly amongst each other to come together on ways to solve these problems such that the kids can feel safe and have trust in others when the kids wish to not share certain deeply personal issues at home. Teachers ideally wish that all the kids they teach can know that there is a safe place they can vent, and not have to bottle up their emotions inside if they are uncomfortable to share something back home.

This is what a number of Midwest teachers decided to do in an online self-help forum and instead was Mis-narrated by a Conservative Twitter group.The tweet read as:

“Headline-Dozens of Midwestern teachers met online this week and traded tips on helping trans students change gender at school without their parents' knowledge, while criticizing a raft of new Republican laws on sex and identity”

In response to this false narrative was this type of Twitter reply:

“This is the devil's work, these people are evil.”   

This is heartbreaking that good human decency can be so easily twisted as done in these tweets. After reading my blog, maybe we can all shed light on a fuller picture of what actually is happening and what brought these teachers together to discuss a complicated situation. It is certainly a difficult time to be a public school teacher.