First, I’m not emotional about the topic. Second, I didn’t go proactively looking for it. Third, I’m in agreement with what you have espoused here about love and support for children and families directly encountering the topic.

But say it unexpectedly becomes a prominent topic at a school where you are on the board?

How would you assess whether the complaints about the reorientation of the curriculum are real or imagined?

Do you investigate? Do you assume it’s a political agenda? Do you evaluate whether the focus is in line with the experience that the school has outlined to the community? Do you care whether a reorientation of the curriculum may be diluting the overall educational quality? Do you assume that parents who object to an intensification of the topic are somehow not supportive of children and families facing the issue? Do you feel an obligation to understand the outcomes the reorientation of the curriculum may be producing and which may not be immediately visible? Do you do nothing and simply wait for aggrieved parents to go to the education regulator and take a spin on how that may work out?

Real questions ….

I’ll reiterate my starting point in my first post. Having spent substantial time on the topic in the past three years, I have never — not even once — heard somebody “deny” that trans even exists. I’m sure that exists somewhere but also can’t believe there’s any kind of prominence to that view.

And the school would face a formal rebuke and get double-downgraded on a four-notch scale.

Which actually happened.

Even though the regulator was explicitly in favor of gender identity as a topic but with “proportionate” attention.

Because the school’s leadership had lost the plot. And the board wasn’t as proactive as it could have been, although the head of school was long gone by the time of the rebuke.

So not a great answer, counsel.

Interestingly, your fellow lawyers on the board effectively treated the school as a client and came up with all kinds of rationalizations and justifications for the skewed emphasis on gender identity.

Most of the other board members were much more comfortable weighing up the degree of emphasis on gender identity and concluding it was clearly “disproportionate” without a single one taking a view that there wasn’t a place for gender identity as a topic or that the impacted students and families were due anything other than all the love and support that could be mustered.

Real questions requiring real answers from real adults. On a non-partisan, objective basis.

In your parlance, your response would have earned an “F”.

By a magnitude that would have required a majority, or even nearly all, of the board to resign.