Stand In Support

When we protest for trans rights we are thought of having an axe-to-grind but when an ally speaks up they do it from their heart.

When football players join in to mock transgender people, Kansas high school students protest with a sit-in
Washington Post
By Cindy Boren
September 20, 2017

Holding signs that said “trans rights = human rights” and “I shouldn’t have to be cis to be safe,” students at a Kansas high school cut classes and held a sit-in Monday, protesting an extracurricular text conversation that included slurs about transgender people and involved more than 200 students, including football players.

More than 100 students refused to budge in the Lawrence High rotunda, citing derogatory comments and slurs that compared transgender issues to mental disorders and asked, “if a [slur for transgender person] hits you, is it still hitting a woman or no?” Yet another stated that the gender listed on a person’s birth certificate should determine a person’s identity. One issue being protested: Football players who were in on the conversation were allowed to play in a game Friday night. That decision, sophomore Elliot Bradley told the Lawrence Journal-World, led students to believe that “LHS is valuing their players over their minority students.” So Etana Parks and Jonavon Shepard, co-presidents of Total Equality Alliance at the school, organized the sit-in.
[…]
Students decided to hold the sit-in because of what they perceived to be administrators’ reluctance to take action for something that happened outside school and was unaffiliated with clubs or staff. “The entire protest,” senior Rollin Love told the Kansan, “was purposed around the inaction we as students saw from the administration in dealing with transphobia and discrimination going beyond the groupchat.”

Administrators spent the day interviewing students, and the protests ended peacefully at the end of the school day.

Why does it seem like that if you are a football or basketball player you can get away with murder as long as you are good on the playing field? We have a new idol that we worship and put up on a pedestal, the athlete.

I want to thank all those who came out to protest for us.