Respect to the people of Milford, who turned out in numbers to a school board meeting on Monday night to oppose an attempt to deny transgender students their right to use the bathroom.
Milford currently has policy of allowing students who identify as transgender to use whichever bathroom and locker room they find appropriate. This is a humane policy that supports, rather than ostracizes, transgender teens. Naturally conservatives hate it.
In January, the school board's vice chair proposed to roll back this policy. Lest this be seen as an isolated incident, recognize that this is part of a broad, nationwide Republican strategy of building themselves up by demonizing the LGBTQ+ community.
Across the country and in New Hampshire, concerned so-called "parents" groups have been attacking the rights of transgender students - banning books from libraries, banning the use of pronouns, and making sure the trans kid can't play on the field hockey team.
These actions cross the line from "malicious" to "downright evil" when you consider that transgender teens have the highest rate of suicide in America. Its certainly hard enough being transgender and a teenager without national political groups pushing your school to stigmatize your existence and alienate you from your peers. These groups have blood on their hands.
And now these demagogues are in Milford trying to make it difficult for trans kids to the bathroom.
One student described her experience having to plan her day around having access to the few single-stalled bathrooms in a school building: "I just want to use the bathroom. It should take no more than thee minutes but I am forced to wait in line in the hall for five minutes to go to the bathroom." If you want to hear what else she had to say, skip ahead to 1:30:55 in this video.
I wish I could say the School Board covered themselves in glory shooting down this bad idea, but instead they voting 4-1 to move forward a compromise that still entertains the right's desire to attach further stigma to trans students.
While the original proposal of revoking bathroom rights for trans kids was pulled from consideration, it was replaced with a measure to limit the number of kids allowed in a restroom to the number of stalls available. The rule change also prohibits public changing areas and, for some reason, the use of urinals.
The cost of the related urinal-removal project was estimated at well north of $30,000.
Update: Urinals at Milford schools have now been covered in trash bags.