Bristol-Warren residents the latest to reject anti-trans hate

"Mr. Chiaradio represents has a well-documented track record of spreading baseless lies, bigotry, and transphobia..."

Robert Chiaradio’s right-wing, Christian Nationalist anti-trans roadshow pulled into the Bristol-Warren School Committee meeting on Monday evening and upped the ante on his bigotry. In his testimony before the Committee, Chiaradio, who has long threatened legal action, claimed that he is “working right now to exempt all six Bristol-Warren schools from the illegal 2024 Biden Title IX rewrite. You’ll be informed soon which schools, if not all, are exempt.”

Yesterday, I learned that, based on a ruling out of Kansas, schools throughout Rhode Island have been taken to court and granted injunctions against enforcing the Biden Administration’s 2024 Title IX regulations. As of October 1st, three schools in Warwick were under such injunctions. Though the Warwick School District Policy has adopted the 2024 Title IX policy for all schools, three schools, according to school committee members, have to use the Trump-era 2020 Title IX policies.

This is a developing story, and I’m still getting a handle on it, but I have reports of similar efforts in Little Compton and, as of last night, Bristol-Warren.

As has become the case across the State in response to Chiaradio’s bigoted screeds, the residents of Bristol and Warren came out in force to oppose him.

I watched the meeting on YouTube from home. Here’s the testimony, edited for clarity:

Board Chair Nicky Piper: Now, we move on to public comment. When your name is called, come to the podium and say your name and where you live. First up, we have Robert Chiaradio. I hope I’ve said your name correctly. It’s important to use people’s labels as they would like them to be used.

Robert Chiaradio: This District’s transgender policy attempts to make parents think that you have the best interest of all students at heart when, in fact, it discriminates against 99% of the students in this District, especially our girls, by placing them in uncomfortable, unsafe, and unfair situations. Cowering to RIDE [Rhode Island Department of Education], you have shamelessly sold out this District’s girls and boys.

There are six pillars of RIDE’s untruthful and unlawful transgender guidance that you must change within your own policy, which many Bristol-Warren parents may not be aware of. Biological boys using the same bathrooms and locker rooms as girls, rooming with girls on overnight field trips, competing with or against girls athletically, compelling teachers to use pronouns, [and] keeping secrets from parents, perhaps the most egregious of them all, regarding the social transitioning of their own kids, which is specifically referred to on page three of your policy and which cuts out parents completely as schools enact gender transition plan behind the parents’ backs.

This is of particular interest to the attorneys that I am working with right now as they’re strongly looking at this, and I strongly urge you to amend or eliminate this policy as your cowardly and evil protocol has been exposed. Your Title IX policy is an unlawful rubber stamping of the Biden Administration’s attempt to erase women, and I will not allow that to happen. Title IX was written to protect biological women from discrimination based on sex, not men who identify as women. Get biological boys out of girls’ sports.

The Rhode Island Department of Education, the Rhode Island Interscholastic League [RIIL], and the Rhode Island Principal’s Committee on Athletics [RIPCOA] are all culpable and will be held to account. RIPCOA carries RIDE's water, [and] works closely with RIIL's Executive Director Mike Lunney to allow biological girls to participate in boy’ sports.

I know it is happening here in Rhode Island. I will never back off on this. No matter how much a boy wants to be a girl, think he’s a girl, [or] dresses like a girl, he will never be a girl, never. Same [for] girls who identify as boys. That is just fact and truth that has nothing to do with anybody being gay. No one cares. That ship sailed years ago. This is pure common sense.

That said, we are working right now to exempt all six Bristol-Warren schools from the illegal 2024 Biden Title IX rewrite. You’ll be informed soon which schools, if not all, are exempt. Get this transgender policy on your next agenda, change it, or eliminate it. Other districts are heeding my advice, ready to do the same thing.

Board Chair Nicky Piper: Thank you.

Robert Chiaradio: Every parent has legal standing in this matter. You would do well to remember that.

Board Chair Nicky Piper: It’s time. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Board Chair Nicky Piper: Just for the public record, the speaker is from Westerly, Rhode Island.

Brian Chidester: I am a resident of Warren. I have taught foreign languages, Spanish and French, in this building for 24 years. Personally, as a world language teacher, I love pronouns. I’m so happy people are talking about pronouns. Do you know how hard it is to teach kids pronouns? It is amazing. Also, for the record, I wasn’t listening too closely. I apologize, but I heard the speaker use pronouns such as you, it, and me. Just saying.

I have to say that I’ve seen a lot of change over the 24 years I’ve been a teacher in this District. I've been working with teenagers for a long time.

To Robert Chiaradio: I’m sorry, sir. Have you worked with teenagers? Do you work with teenagers?

Robert Chiaradio: Is he supposed to talk to me?

Brian Chidester: Do you interact with teenagers on a regular? I’m just curious because I’d like to know from my own

Board Chair Nicky Piper: Mr. Chidester...

Brian Chidester: Okay, fair. I have seen kids go through a lot of hard stuff in 24 years. People may not know this, but teachers are legally mandated reporters. If we think that a child is being abused, we have to report it legally. And honestly, I think all of us can say we’ve seen more than our fair share of that. I will say that in my time, about ten years ago, in 2014, I had my first openly transgender student in class. It was an interesting experience because it took tremendous courage for that student to stand up and say, “This is who I am; this is the name that I want to go by, and this is how I want to be addressed.”

A couple of years after that, unfortunately, we had a wave of nastiness that swept through the school and the country. It was a rough time. Shortly after, the school committee, under the leadership of Erin Schofield, who was the policy chair, brought in the policy on transgender and gender non-conforming students. It was a major step forward in protecting our children. It is a basic fact that suicide rates among LGBTQ young people are much higher than among the rest of the population. Actually respecting people’s identities, young people’s identities - they’re not idiots - it drives me crazy that adults seem to think that teenagers are idiots. They are not. They’re sentient human beings with valid thoughts and valid personal identities, and if we don’t take that seriously, we are doing violence to those kids.

I don’t know what you all think in terms of “we’re forcing something wrong on them.” My God, if we could force them not to use cell phones? Have you worked with children? Do you know what they’re like? What I know is that we need to respect children. We need to respect who they say they are, and if we don’t do that, we are doing violence to them, and that is why I support this policy. I think it’s one of the best policies on the books in this District. I’ve gone through a lot of them, by the way. I know them pretty well, and I’m in support of it, and I hope that your initiative loses.

Sarah Bullard: I wrote some notes because this is an exceptionally and deeply personal issue for me, and I wanted to keep track of what I was going to say. I’m here tonight, not as a school committee member, although I have proudly served this District for the last four years. I’m here as a parent, friend, community member, and advocate. I want to correct some of the misinformation you just heard. Oh, just as a note, the organization that Mr. Chiaradio represents has a well-documented track record of spreading baseless lies, bigotry, and transphobia. Despite the fearmongering tactics and false concern promoted by this organization, there are facts and scientific and evidence-based data that show that rather than being a threat in the school environment, transgender students are far more often the target of harassment.

A recent survey by the Center for Disease Control [CDC] found that 5% of high school students in the United States identify as transgender or gender questioning. By the way, my pronouns are she/her, just in case you were wondering. The survey found these teens [suffer] much higher rates of bullying, persistent sadness, and suicidal thoughts or behaviors compared with their cisgender peers. Bullying occurs twice as frequently.

This is not a new situation. Transgender folks are not a new trend. Transgender people have existed for as long as humans have been around and are recognized and even celebrated in hundreds of cultures around the world. Sadly, this is not the case in 21st-century America. In 2016, the National Crime Survey revealed that 22% of all youth aged 12 through 18 reported being bullied while at school. A national study of LGBTQ+ youth found that schools are particularly unsafe for transgender youth. 75% of transgender youth felt unsafe in multiple spaces within schools, such as bathrooms, locker rooms, and gym and PE classes.

According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, we know that throughout their school day, 90% of transgender students are more likely to hear negative remarks about their gender expression. 89% to be verbally harassed, 53% to be physically harassed, and 47% to skip class or a whole day because they feel unsafe or uncomfortable. Crime statistics show that transgender people suffer from assaults, rape, and harassment at an early age, and these experiences persist throughout their lives. In one of the largest surveys of transgender and gender non-conforming Americans ever conducted, 70% of respondents reported being denied access to, verbally harassed in, or physically assaulted in public restrooms.

You can pretend you are conducting this campaign because you care about notions of safety in a bathroom or a locker room, but at the end of the day, it is a campaign of targeted hate. Anyone who truly cares about safe schools, educational equity, and vulnerable students must acknowledge the disproportionate victimization of transgender and gender non-conforming students.

Board Chair Nicky Piper: Thank you, Mrs. Bullard.

Sarah Bullard: These are the children we need to protect, not instead of, but as well as their peers. This District supports, protects, and allows access to their federal and state-mandated education.

Board Chair Nicky Piper: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Bullard: 2,888 of them. Every single one of them. We’re not picking on anybody. And by the way, if you are concerned about what my child is doing in the bathroom. I suggest you look inward because it is none of your business.

Robert Chiaradio: That was an extra one minute and 11 seconds.

Board Chair Nicky Piper: No, excuse me. Please don’t whistle at me in the middle of the meeting. I am the chair of this body. I will not have somebody whistling at me.

Robert Chiaradio: Madam chair, one minute and 11 seconds.

Jessalyn Jarest: I’m a resident of Bristol, and I’m disappointed that we’re allowing someone who is not a member of our community to speak on such matters. You’ve gone around the State harassing people, fear-mongering, and causing chaos.

In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center outlined that the group that you are with...

Robert Chiaradio: What group?

[Editor: There was a lot of cross-talk here as Chiaradio and others objected to what Jarest was trying to say.]

Board Chair Nicky Piper: There’s one speaker. Otherwise, we’ll have to ask the public to leave.

Jessalyn Jarest: Making these kinds of comments in our neighborhood and with our communities is causing division and chaos. The Bristol-Warren Regional School District is a District that cares about its kids. We care about our families, and we care about each other. When people come from the outside and try to do this, it is unwelcome and unneeded.

Jonathan Carney: I live in Bristol. The anti-trans activists who’ve been going around to the different school committees have been attacking things like Title IX, not understanding where it comes from. When schools implement this policy, they're simply following federal guidance, and RIDE simply follows federal guidance. They seem to think it’s unconstitutional. However, the Supreme Court has already decided that gender identity protections also apply to trans people. They did it in the 2020 Supreme Court decision Bostock versus Clayton County. There are also other lower reports that upheld that decision.

The anti-trans activists often say that the whole idea of there being trans people is not based in reality or on facts, but they are dead wrong—the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Medical Association - all the research points in one direction. [Anti-trans activists] have to cherry-pick to say anything else. When they say they care about facts or feelings, they’re wrong. Their accusations are confessions. The idea of trans people existing feels wrong to them, so they shop for their conclusions. They’re subject to a lot of cognitive biases, and that’s why they come to the false conclusion that they do.

Overwhelmingly, it has been shown that transitioning helps people who are trans to have better outcomes related to depression or suicidality if you compare trans people before the transition to after. When [anti-trans activists] go against helping trans people in the way they need to be helped, they are causing harm to society as a whole. This is especially weird because this issue doesn’t affect them directly as much as they like to pretend it does.

When [these anti-trans activists] were in Newport doing the same campaign they’ve been doing all across the State, they accused certain school committee members of getting onto the school committee to push their own pro-trans agenda, which I find funny because it’s usually the opposite. Jessica Almeida, the school committee member - I remember when she was first elected, while she didn’t talk about it while campaigning initially - I knew about her because she would go to school committee meetings complaining about there being books that refer to trans people...

Board Chair Nicky Piper: No personal attacks or comments on any people [allowed].

Jonathan Carney: There’s no criticism of elected officials?

Board Chair Nicky Piper: Not in this venue, no.

Jonathan Carney: Okay. Yeah. Anyway, if I could get my train of thought back. They want to convince people at school committees to go against what the State Department of Education and the Federal Department of Education say to do. I find that to be an unwise decision. And yeah, I’ll cede the rest of my time.

Amber Ward: [I’m a] resident of Bristol and the parent of two teens who have attended schools in this District since 2014. With my child’s consent, I will add that I’m proudly the parent of a transgender teen. I’m here tonight to speak in support of the policy that has been referred to and voice my support for transgender and expansive students in this community.

This policy aligns with RIDE guidance created by health and education experts rooted in federal and State law and research into evidence-based practice. While I do support the policy and urge the continued support of this committee, I [also] believe there is work needed to ensure the schools are following, enforcing, and acting in alignment with the policy. I would implore you - this community, this committee - to not accommodate extremists who peddled misinformation, harmful propaganda, and seek to dehumanize transgender and gender expansive students [via] institutionalized discrimination, attempting to replace policy with views that are rejected by all respected medical and mental health organizations.

As has been referenced, expanding evidence of how closely transphobic agenda like that presented here this evening and the mental health of transgender, non-binary, and gender-expansive youth are interlinked. There’s a reference to what I believe was a 2021 National School Climate Survey that [found] that 80% of [trans] students do not feel safe in school, and that leads to higher rates of depression, anxiety, substance use, truancy, and suicide ideation, not because of their gender identity or their expression but because of transphobia. That’s the cause of that.

Just last month, Nature Journal revealed that states enacting anti-trans and non-anti-non-binary laws and policies have increased suicide attempts among transgender non-binary teens by up to 72%. This direct correlation is being made in science - not based on opinions. These and other studies have shown that school-based supports, such as supportive staff and inclusive and supportive school policies, as we have here in this District, can positively affect LGBTQ+ students' school experience, attendance, and performance and truly can be lifesaving.

When our transgender child shared that he did not feel safe continuing in the school district, we enrolled him in a private high school, compromising access to 504 academic support in favor of his safety and mental health. In closing, I urge you to continue to uphold and enforce the current policy, take steps to ensure the schools provide a safe and inclusive learning environment for all students, and that transgender and gender-expensive youth are treated with dignity and respect and safeguarded against bullying, discrimination, and stigmatization. Providing protections for these students, as Ms. Bullard said, takes nothing away from anybody else. I also urge you to continue supporting school administrators, teachers, and staff who act to uphold and enforce the transgender and gender non-conforming policy. Thank you for the opportunity to speak, and thank you for your service.

Susan Razza: I live in Newport, right over the bridge. I’m also a volunteer with The Womxn Project. We are an activist group that works on reproductive rights issues at the State level.

“BS is easy to spot. You can see the fill line in the eyes.

“Blow that dog whistle. Hear it clear. The ignorance patrol is here.

“Blow that dog whistle. Say the words that tickle the spine and rally the herd.

“Blow that dog whistle. Tell all the lies but keep them straight, tee hee, for when the time comes for the pearly gates.

“Blow that dog whistle. Say, ‘God told me to.’ Say it proudly, but give me a clue.

“Blow that dog whistle. Show me the Bible verse where Jesus said, “I’d rather be straight, not gay, trans, or dead.”

“Blow that dog whistle. Tell them what you want them to know or feel. To Hell with what the child wants or needs.

“So blow that dog whistle. Try to ban books. Demonize the different and foreign - for knowledge is power, and that scares the crap out of the Christian right, GQP, Heritage Foundation, Koch Brothers, et cetera - Moms for Liberty, too, I guess.

“Spew your filth, but take to heart [that] we know who and what you are. We see that your eyes are full. You all be yourselves. Goodnight.”

Robert Medeiros: I’m a resident of Warren. I have three students in the District. Just so you know, my pronouns are he/him. I have permission from anybody I talk about to talk about their gender identity, so I’m not outing anybody. One of my children is non-binary. I didn’t know what I would say when I came today. I looked up facts and statistics, and a lot of people have already said that.

What the first speaker said hurt me: my child being referred to as a predator in a bathroom, or they want to be in a changing room with someone of a different gender. That’s not who my child is. I know my child.

When my child sent me a text message five years ago that said, “Dad, I’d like you to call me Lex, and I’d like you to use they/them pronouns,” I honestly didn’t even know what that meant. I had to look it up. I had to Google it. All I knew was that I loved my child and wanted to support them. I wanted them to succeed in school and life. Anybody who is against policies like this that protect and support my child doesn’t know any transgender people and has never had any interaction with them.

I would urge you to please find a transgender person, sit with them, talk with them, ask them what they want in life, and ask them what their agenda is. I guarantee you it’s just to live. To exist. To not live in fear. My child has been honored by this committee multiple times for their academic achievement. I can tell you that before they came out to me, they were reserved, anxious, and scared. They always got good grades but didn’t go the extra mile. Now, there are every extracurricular activity you can think of. I can’t track where they are every day after school - what clubs they’re in or what activities they do.

It was a night and day transformation when my response to that text message was, “Okay, Lex, what would you like for dinner?” We just moved on with our lives. We say they/them and their name is Lex. Nothing has changed in our lives except that my child is happier, more successful, and has blossomed as a human being.

I urge you if you think this policy is bad, to talk to a parent of a transgender or non-binary child. Talk to a transgender person. Educate yourself by talking to the people you’re talking about. Don’t just parrot right-wing phrases that you’ve heard online because you think there’s some threat. Go and be a human being and talk to another human being about it.

Mr. Hewitt: After listening to what’s been going on tonight, I’m tempted to depart from my script and extemporize, but I’ll stick with the script. I appreciate the opportunity to say a few words that I hope you’ll [find] have some merit. Not long ago, a previous superintendent of this school District promoted the goal of top five and five years. While I do not believe he or his successor has made that a reality, and that is a shame for everyone involved in our public school education process, I believe a good part of the reason he failed in achieving his goal is that he was an enthusiastic subscriber to diversity, equity, and inclusion and critical race theory modes of priorities in public school education. He believes that equity should take precedence over providing every child with the assurance that they would be given every opportunity to achieve excellence in their education, predicated upon their aptitude and application to serious study habits.

The subject addressed by Mr. Chiaradio exemplifies the absence of common sense among too many of our public school educators, administrators, and, obviously, parents. The fact that RIDE promulgates guidance on policy does not obligate school administrators and school committee members to adopt its guidance. As a mandate, you are free to accept or reject its guidance as a whole or part of it. Your decision to reject RIDE’s guidance may result in their withholding, to some extent, State funding. But if so, that is the price of doing what you are responsible for and doing what is in the best interest of providing the best possible education to your students.

There is no reason for you to believe that the guidance provided by RIDE is any smarter, wiser, or contains more common sense than what you as a group can determine for the children you are responsible for. The school’s transgender policy Mr. Chiaradio spoke about is an example of what I mean. You should make your judgment on the merits of such policy and decide for the benefit [and] best interest of all your students whether [or not] the RIDE guidance is in the best interest of all of your students and feel free to decide what portion of the guidance you will choose to endorse and implement and what sections of such policy you choose to reject.

Mr. Chiaradio asks you to do that and suggests that no [place for] policy guidance defies common sense and basic morality. I urge you to listen carefully to what he has advised and act accordingly on a matter well within your authority and responsibility as elected and appointed officials. You owe your students and your constituents no less.

Here’s the video: