INTERVIEW – Fairfax County Republican Chairman TIM HANNIGAN — discussed how a public school in Arlington is teaching Kindergarteners about transgenderism and how Fairfax County led the crusade locally on this.
- In a Virginia school, a celebration of transgender students in a kindergarten class. When Jaim Foster began teaching nearly two decades ago in Nebraska, he said he was discouraged from being an openly gay educator. He had championed LGBT causes at his liberal arts college but suddenly found himself switching pronouns when telling students about his boyfriends. “I was told I had to stop being that advocate, and I had to go back into the closet because it wasn’t really safe,” the teacher recalled. “You could be fired.” On Thursday, Foster reflected on how far the country has progressed, he said, as dozens of kindergarten students sat cross-legged in his classroom at Ashlawn Elementary School in Arlington, listening as an advocate for transgender rights paged through a children’s picture book about a transgender girl. “I have a girl brain but a boy body. This is called transgender. I was born this way,” the advocate, Sarah McBride, read to the students from the storybook “I Am Jazz.” McBride, a spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign, who drew national attention when she came out as transgender the day after her term as American University’s student body president ended, wanted to relay a message of tolerance on a national day of reading led by the country’s largest teachers union. After her reading, McBride told the children, “I’m like Jazz. When I was born, the doctors and my parents, they all thought that I was a boy.” “Why?” asked a girl in a blue sweater and ponytail. “Because society, people around them told them that was the case,” McBride said. “It took me getting a little bit older to be able to say that in my heart and in my mind, I knew I was really a girl.” The kids began discussing hair. “Can some girls have short hair?” McBride asked. “And can some boys have long hair?” Yes, the youngsters seemed to agree, answering in unison. “Anyone can be anything,” one girl chimed in.
