ATLANTA — Georgia legislation that would have prohibited classroom discussions about gender identity without parent permission stalled in a committee hearing Wednesday, undermining its odds of becoming law.
The current downfall of Senate Bill 88 was that it applied equally to private as well as public schools, and private institutions such as camps.
Mike Griffin, spokesman for the Georgia Baptist Mission Board, testified at a Senate hearing Wednesday that his group originally supported the legislation but had qualms after lawyers and activists raised concerns that it could have “dramatic unintended consequences.”
The Senate Education and Youth Committee then voted to table the measure. Under normal procedures, there is not enough time to get the bill approved for a vote by the full Senate before the “crossover day” deadline Monday.
The bill by Sen. Carden Summers, a Cordele Republican, is similar to a Florida law that critics have called “Don’t Say Gay” because of the way it censors teacher speech about sex and gender in schools.
Georgia’s GOP-backed proposal sought to ban teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity “other than the child’s biological sex” unless they first obtained parental consent. It also would have prohibited teachers and others overseeing children under 16 from providing sex education without consent, a major shift for schools that must by law offer sex ed. And it would have mandated that schools use a child’s legal name on records, forcing them to ignore student requests to use a name that connotes a different gender than the one on their birth certificate.
SB 88 would have made schools a less accepting place for transgender students, Christine Knox, the principal for Westchester Elementary School in Decatur, told the senators. Teachers are supposed to be an “ally and a friend” for students, and their classrooms should be “an oasis of safety,” she said. The bill would have created an “additional layer of surveillance” in schools.
Tracey Nance, a former Georgia Teacher of the Year, testified that such a law would drive teachers away from Georgia schools. She criticized a provision that would have prohibited teachers and caregivers from dressing “in a sexually provocative manner,” noting that schools already have dress codes and wondering aloud if it was targeting women who make up the majority of the teaching workforce.
“And if that’s not it,” she said, “I’m wondering if this is really trying to get at this drag queen story time that many states seem obsessed with, and if that’s true that’s kind of an underhanded and unfair way to handle it.” (Nance was referring to book readings by men dressed as caricatures of women in libraries, bars and schools in many states.)
Summers said his bill applied only to those in charge of children younger than the age of consent. It’s intent was to ensure parents were included in gender identity conversations, he said.
The bill follows a trend by GOP lawmakers in recent years who have targeted books in school libraries and classroom discussions about race. They have been pushed by activists who assert that schools are behind a “social contagion” of gender questioning that is ideologically driven.
High school and college students who have banded together in a group called the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition say it isn’t so. They have been lobbying against SB 88, which they said would have deprived LGBTQ+ students of a crucial support network: clubs that address gender and sexuality and can only exist on campus with the support of a teacher.
“I was definitely always the way I am,” Kalei James, 17, said in an interview. The club at her school, Seckinger High in Gwinnett County, has “safe place” stickers on the door, she said, adding that she has known she is gay since middle school and that no teacher could have made it so, even if they had tried, which they didn’t. “Teachers don’t really cover LGBT topics unless I ask,” she said, “especially in elementary and middle school.”
Isabelle Philip, a junior at the University of Georgia, said in an interview that she realized she was gay by her freshman year of high school. No teacher encouraged her to be gay, she said, adding that it has been difficult because her family rejects homosexuality.
“And even if it was pushed, at the end of the day we all know that this isn’t something that you get indoctrinated into,” she said. “People are just born like this. That’s kind of just how it is.”
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