HEATHER: Hi, I'm Heather McNamara. I'm a parent of two Seminole County children. One's a graduate,
very proud of him. I want to talk about the past for a second, because none of this is new,
it's old trash. I really hope the kids here know that -- this is not new. I grew up as many of us
here did in the 80’s and 90’s, and back then, adults did not talk about LGBT stuff with kids.
They were so worried about our freaking innocence, okay, and when Ellen DeGeneres came out on network
television there was a huge outcry. The homophobic Defense of Marriage Act was passed, I don't even
want to talk about that. Parents and children cheered. Adults said ‘God made Adam and Eve,
not Adam and Steve’, and ‘you're not gay, everyone gets curious’. Trans people weren't even discussed
except on Jerry Springer, which was horrible. I didn't know many queer kids growing up. At my
high school, there was only one openly gay kid and his life was a living hell. We had a gym teacher
that we were all pretty sure was a lesbian, but nobody was allowed to talk about that,
especially not her. I think she was afraid for her job. Is that what we want to do again?
It was a dark time, so most of us hid ourselves. And you know what, I was exactly what some of
you want your kids to be. I was afraid even to think about what I might be. I left high school
believing I could live as a straight person – I think most of the rest of us did. 20 years passed,
and I was able to reconnect with a lot of kids I went to high school with on social media.
Scores of us have come out, because it didn't work. Because whatever you complainants may think,
whatever your parental disapproval, just isn't powerful enough. Threats of hell and demons
are not scary enough, and an old stupid book, a thousand times translated, and even a government
isn't convincing enough to change who somebody is. Don't be your kid's first bullies. Thank you.
BOARD: Order. Order, please. Next speaker.
ZINNIA:
Hi, I'm Zinnia Jones, she/her – sorry for the bad handwriting. Heather McNamara is my wife,
she's crying right now because of this. I'm a proud mother of a child at SCPS and
a graduate. And I'm a transgender woman. I'm 34 years old, I've been doing this
for a decade. You call that a phase? I am the ‘gender ideology’ – here I stand. We are many.
We are many!
Board members, restore the censored pages of your LGBT students to their yearbook. Make this right.
Calling us groomers is a historical blood libel that leads to pogroms of minorities. To kids and
parents everywhere, I'll show you exactly how to stop this. Extremist groups are lying to you here
about trans people being too mentally incompetent to know our own genders, and they were lying about
us when they said that being trans is a contagion we're spreading to other people. That's genocidal
rhetoric. Who is responsible? The Christian nationalist legal group Alliance Defending Freedom
just ordered those talking points as a legal argument from a hate group in Gainesville called
the ‘American College of Pediatricians’. They are a fake group, they are not the American Academy
of Pediatrics. They are not mainstream, they are about a hundred people – about 12 core members.
The Alliance Defending Freedom ordered those talking points. The talking points came first,
the evidence was an afterthought, just like Big Tobacco hiring experts to manufacture
doubt that smoking causes cancer. Go read the Southern Poverty Law Center today. Go
read FloridaBan.com today, to see their actual documents we uploaded where they
planned and workshopped these anti-trans talking points themselves. This ends now!
I want these queer and trans kids busting open these conspiracies against their lives
in the pages of that yearbook. That's journalism. You're only coping with the
fallout of this because of a governor who's faced allegations of committing
acts of torture against detainees at Guantanamo who were later freed. That
is not political, that's the Geneva Convention. Torture is a war crime.
[mic is cut]
Committing torture would make someone a war criminal. Is he even following the law?