Tearful Mom Begs School Board for Change After Daughter's Secret Trans Counseling - Then Hulking Man in Dress Steps Up to the Mic
There are times when appearances can be deceiving — this wasn’t one of them:
On one side was an emotional mother, appearing to choke up occasionally as she described how school administrators kept a secret about the woman’s 11-year-old daughter. On the other side was a hulking, bearded man, garbed in a dress, who started off his spiel boasting about at least three current lovers.
Guess which one the Chico Unified School District board voted with?
To be fair, there was a whole parade of speakers who turned out for the board’s April 5 meeting in north-central California to weigh in on the district’s policy regarding whether parents must be informed when children are considering their sexuality.
For two hours, according to a video of the meeting, parents spoke forcefully about their love for their children — gay and trans activists made the case that some children can face abuse from intolerant families.
But few contrasts were more useful than Aurora Regino — who talked about how her own daughter’s confusion was kept from her by a school guidance counselor — and a figure who called himself “Squeaky Saint Francis” — the guy in the dress and the beard.
Check out Regino’s address below.
She started by identifying herself as the mother suing the school district, then explained why:
Sometimes verging on tears, Regino described how her daughter was hit with the twin shocks of a grandfather’s death and her mother being diagnosed with breast cancer during the previous school year. The young girl had confided to a school guidance counselor that she “felt like a boy.”
“My daughter was distressed and began questioning her sexuality,” Regino told the board. “The counselor immediately affirmed this new identity. From then on, the counselor continued to have one-one-one meetings with my daughter without my knowledge.”
At one of those meetings, Regino said, her daughter told the counselor she wanted her mother told about what was happening, but the counselor “ignored her request and did nothing to support her letting me know what was going on at school.”
The transitioning girl was bullied at school
“Because her school kept the transition a secret from me, she was on her own,” Regino said.
Of course, someone could wonder why the girl simply didn’t talk to her mother on her own. Someone could just as easily remember that kids are kids and do kid things. It’s one of the big reasons they need parents. (Someone could also wonder exactly what kind of poison this oh-so-tolerant “guidance” counselor might have been spilling in the girl’s ear, but that would pure, irresponsible speculation.)
In January, Regino filed a lawsuit against the Chico Unified School District, according to the Chico Enterprise Record.
Represented by Harmeet Dhillon, a top Republican lawyer, Regino isn’t seeking money, according to the Enterprise record, but “rather seeks to have the court issue a permanent injunction against what the lawsuit calls the CUSD’s ‘ongoing violations’ of the U.S. Constitution.”
Speaking in favor of the district’s secrecy policy was “Squeaky Saint Francis,” a man whose persona is about as believable as the name he uses.
“I am a proud he/she, they/them, whatever,” he introduced himself to the board, before describing three lovers (all of them apparently female) but no children of his own.
While his own mother accepted his difference, he said, he had “friends in school who would bring an entire change of clothes with them, so they could dress the way they felt inside,” he said, in a statement that’s difficult to take at face value, but whatever.
If the school district changed its policy to allow school teachers, guidance counselors and administrators to keep parents informed about the sexual struggles of their children, he said, it could put some children in danger of being abused, abandoned, or at risk for suicide.
Right. And the answer, according to progressives, is to put the guidance of young people at a critical juncture of their lives solely in the hands of salaried school staff, men and women whose sole contact with the young people in question is, at most, a few hours a day, over maybe one, possibly a handful of years of the children’s lives.
However well-intentioned they might be, as a group, teachers and guidance counselors and administrators are never going to match the love parents, as a group, feel for their children.
Are there bad parents? Of course there are. Humans are a fallen species. Are there bad, warped, cynical public school teachers? Sites like Libs of TikTok wouldn’t exist without them.
Should a school district’s policies be written as though all parents are tyrants and abusers, waiting solely for the opportunity to torture their offspring? No sane person thinks that, but that’s exactly how liberals decide policies on such searingly personal matters as a child’s developing sexuality.
To liberals, the state is the ultimate answer, and nothing personifies the state better than unionized public school employees more interested in political priorities than the education of children.
Which brings the topic back to the question this story started with: Which side do you think the school board voted with?
On a 3-2 decision, as Fox News reported last week, the school board voted to keep the “parental secrecy policy.”
“It was a really sad decision that they made, but unfortunately, I wasn’t extremely surprised,” Regino told “Fox & Friends First” on Tuesday. “This policy that they have in place, to keep these situations a secret from the family, is incredibly damaging.”
Toward the end of her Fox interview, Regino summed up the situation perfectly.
“This is a time when our children need us the most, when they’re confused about any sort of matters when it comes to sexuality. They need that support from their families,” she said. “And to just assume that every parent is not going to be supportive, to me, is just outrageous.”
Actually, whether parents are “supportive” is up to the parents. No responsible parent agrees with everything a child thinks — or there would be ice cream for dinner in every house on the block.
The role of parents in children’s lives is natural: To guide them to adulthood the best way they know how. Parents fighting to preserve that role — at school board meetings and in voting booths — is just as natural.
What’s unnatural, is public employees — agents of the state no matter what their job titles — stepping into that role.
It’s as unnatural as a hulking, bearded man, wearing a dress and boasting publicly about his amorous relationships being taken seriously in a public forum.
That was the contrast on display in Chico, California, earlier this month. It’s the contrast — the natural versus the unnatural, the logical versus the illogical, the rational versus irrational — that’s on display virtually every day in the cultural wars of this country. (Who’s pushing drag shows for kids again?)
Appearances can be deceiving, but in the U.S. today they’re not. One side is right, the other isn’t. And it’s a good bet even some of the ones on the wrong side know it.
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