VIRGINIA BEACH — A more than year-long debate over transgender students’ rights ended with an emotional vote Tuesday night.
Board member Kimberly Melnyk said the process has been “unfair” to everyone involved.
“It has been painful,” Melnyk said tearfully. “It has been long.”
The Virginia Beach School Board adopted regulation changes that will require parental permission for students to go by nicknames and preferred names and pronouns, to receive counseling services pertaining to gender, and address facility use, such as bathrooms and locker rooms.
The changes passed 9-1-1, with board member Jessica Owens voting against adopting them. Board member Beverly Anderson abstained, saying that though she could support most of the changes, she could not support students having to get permission to go by preferred names.
The model policies released by Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration have been a point of contention. There have been rallies and hours of public comment. Parental rights advocates have urged the board to accept the state’s guidance as it emphasizes the parents’ role while students and LGBT advocates argue the policies could harm transgender youth.
The students who have come to nearly every board meeting since the state guidelines were released in September 2022 wore black to Tuesday’s meeting — a sign of their mourning the loss of many transgender and non-binary identities with the board’s vote.
Jae Cook, a senior at Ocean Lakes High School, left the meeting after the vote with tears in his eyes, like many of his peers.
The policies “will tell us that we are not ourselves unless someone else says so,” Cook said.
Cook said that now it feels like no matter what the students do moving forward, it would “have little to no effect.”
LGBT advocates, including parents of transgender students, have argued these changes could forcibly “out” students to unsupportive families or force them to hide their gender identities entirely, undermining their feelings of safety and acceptance.
Parental rights advocates praise the model policies for their emphasis on parental control. Some cited Bible passages and said it was a violation of their constitutional rights to require teachers and other students to use preferred names and pronouns. Some said it was up to the parents to decide the best way to handle issues relating to their child’s gender identity.
Amy Solares, a Virginia Beach resident and former school board candidate, said body dysmorphia, a condition in which a person has an obsessive focus on a flaw in appearance, according to the Mayo Clinic, is considered a mental disorder by experts and as such needs to be addressed by parents who can best support their children.
“Six of you on this board continue to push for keeping this information from parents who will be the only ones there for their children,” Solares said, criticizing a previous board vote that failed to pass the model policies as presented in the state’s final document.
For some, it came down to protecting girls’ privacy and athletics.
“I would prefer to ensure that we don’t have a loophole to somehow allow a biological male in a female sport,” board member Jennifer Franklin said. “We fought so hard for female sports to get them where they are today.”
She supported board member David Culpepper’s amendment to the regulation changes the Virginia Beach school administration recommended, which would have allowed participation based on gender identity in some cases.
Tuesday’s vote means students will have to participate in athletic activities according to their sex. This applies to middle and high school athletics which are separated by sex.
Currently, the Virginia High School League, which governs high school athletics, allows students to participate in teams that align with their gender identities under certain conditions. In September, the VHSL executive committee discussed changing the policy but no action is expected until February.
Board chair Trenace Riggs described the vote as a compromise. At least seven meetings in recent months have included discussion on the topic in some way or another, whether it was a resolution to adopt the policies just as the state had them or going over the details of the division’s policy and regulations.
Much of the debate was centered around figuring out where there was leniency or loopholes. For example, the new regulations match the state model policies in that nicknames “commonly associated” with a student’s name on the official record do not need parental permission.
Board member Staci Martin raised concerns over teachers who might not be familiar with non-Western names.
Chief of staff Eugene Soltner assured the board that division leadership would be able to put the regulations into effect.
“We can find an exception or a dozen exceptions for every,” regulation, Soltner said.
The administration can now work on rolling out training to school staff. Acting superintendent Donald Robertson said the goal is to have everything ready for the start of the second quarter in November.
Kelsey Kendall, kelsey.kendall@virginiamedia.com
