human rights

Tomorrow, Sunday, May 21, 2023, at 4 p.m. local time, the city of Kyle, Texas, will host a gathering of Kyles in Kyle Park in an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people with the same first name.

As happened before when an event regarding the name “Kyle” swept the news cycle, the nation’s Kyles convened in groups of 99 via Zoom to determine how we felt as a group about the news-causing event. The online convention was attended by over 90,000 Kyles from around the country, including just under a hundred ex-patriated Americans who go by the name Kyle.

Because this was our second online convention, we were able to dispense with preliminary discussions about how the process would work, and each group agreed from the outset that the representatives we elected at our previous convention would remain in place.

Humbly, this decision made me the de facto spokesperson for the nation’s Kyles. I did not and do not take this role lightly. I understand that my rëelection does not mean that the way I feel about a particular issue is the way all Kyles feel about that issue; instead, it means they trust me to craft the opinion of the majority of Kyles, regardless of how I feel.

With that being said, I offer the following statement regarding the gathering of Kyles in Kyle, Texas, on behalf of the nation’s Kyles:

In 2021, the state of Texas prohibited the right of child-bearing persons to have an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. It also created a civil enforcement measure that allows any non-governmental employee to sue any other person involved in providing or intending to provide an abortion, including those who pay for the abortion. It also banned abortion-inducing medicine from the state, forbidding its delivery by mail, delivery service, or courier.

Between July 2021 and June 2022, school administrators in Texas banned over 800 books from their schools, making it the most censorious state in the nation. Between July and December 2023, Texas added another 438 instances of public school districts removing books from libraries and classrooms. The wave of book bans have caused entire classrooms and school libraries to suspend access to all of the books on their shelves in order to evade potential lawsuits.

Earlier this week, the governor of Texas announced he would sign Senate Bill 14 into law, which will prevent transgender youth from receiving puberty blockers and hormone therapies and undergoing gender-affirming surgeries (which are rare among children). Puberty blockers and hormone therapies are critical tools for improving the mental health of transgender children and stemming the high suicide rates among transgender individuals.

(Speaking for myself and as a teacher of several transgender students, I know that the loss of such medical care would likely cause more than one of my students to descend into irrecoverable depression and eventually result in a suicide attempt.)

Further, the governor of Texas has directed the Texas Department of Family Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender youth, categorizing any attempt at providing transgender-affirming care for their child as “child abuse.” While courts have prevented the state from investigating specific families, it has not issued a universal ban on the state’s policy. Schools have pulled trans students from their classrooms to be interrogated about their medical care. Teachers, who are mandated reporters, are required to report to the state any knowledge they have of families who allow their children to live in a manner counter to the gender inscribed on their birth certificate.

During the 2023 legislative session and its special sessions, Texas legislators put forward 76 bills that targeted the LGBTQ+ community. These bills called for:

allowing Texas residents to file civil lawsuits against anyone who helped another Texas resident receive gender-affirming care, including out-of-state residents
removing the statute of limitations for malpractice claims related to gender-affirming care, allowing people to file a malpractice case against any doctor who provided such care to any person before the person’s 25th birthday
banning gender-affirming care for adults
making it a state felony to attempt to conduct surveys and studies related to Texas’s LGBTQ+ youth population
banning classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten to 12th grade
forcing schools to disclose to parents any request from students to be identified as other than the gender on their birth certificates, as well as any exhibition of behavior for the purpose of exploring their gender identity
banning extracurricular clubs, activities, celebrations, or discussions related to sexual orientation or gender
banning all books a school district deems as obscene, and then registering the vendor of said books and banning all schools in the entire state from purchasing books from that vendor
requiring schools to enforce a separation of bathroom use based on “biological sex,” authorizing a civil penalty of up to $100,000 against the school for lawsuits related to a violation of the requirement
prohibiting teachers and other school employees from affirming a trans or nonbinary student’s gender in any way, including through the use of a student’s preferred pronouns
banning trans youth from participating in all sports as well as any school-based competition
restricting the state from developing forms that include anything other than “male” and “female” as an option for someone’s sex
defining any business that hosts performers exhibiting a gender identity different from the performer’s birth, including makeup or clothing, as a sexually oriented business in the eyes of the law
revoking state funding from municipal libraries that host an all-ages drag storytime
requiring birth certificates to mark down the biological sex of an infant defined exclusively by the presence of a Y chromosome

In 2021, Texas began preventing teachers from talking about “a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs” without giving deference to all sides, regardless of the ignorance that may fuel one or more of those sides.

As part of the same law — which attempts to target “critical race theory” as understood by ignorant Texas politicians — the state also prevents students from critically considering whether slavery and racism “are anything other than deviations from, betrayals or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States” (ignorant, of course, because slavery was baked into the founding document of the United States and was only outlawed through President Lincoln’s objectively unconstitutional Emancipation Proclamation, which itself was only issued as a war-saving measure, and whose civil-rights legacy continues to be opposed by Lincoln’s Republican party, opposition whose modern form was inspired by the Supreme Court’s decision to ban legalized racial segregation in Brown vs. the Board of Education).

Of course, Texas would not be Texas if it limited its hate to women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and Blacks.

This session, the state legislature is considering a bill, H. 20, which would enact anti-immigration measures in opposition to Federal authority. It would compel the state to create a Border Protection Unit whose officers can arrest, detain, or deter individuals crossing Texas’s southern border using non-deadly force. It would also give those officers immunity from criminal or civil liability. The bill attempts to supersede the Federal government’s exclusive power over immigration by deputizing the state’s citizens as anti-immigrant vigilantes. It would require, de facto if not de jure, that all brown-skinned Texans living along the border carry their identification papers with them at all times or risk the effects of arrest, detention, and “non-deadly” violence.

Adding to its parade of hatred and condemnation, Texas has challenged the Indian Child Welfare Act in the Supreme Court. The act was passed by Congress in 1978 to atone for the United States’s disgusting history of removing Indigenous children from their cultural communities. It establishes a preference for placing any Native American child who has to be removed from their home with another Native family, ideally an extended family member, but if one is not available, with a member of the same tribe, and if that is not available, with a member of any tribe.

If Texas has its way (which it may at least in part, given the Suprem Court’s statements and questions during the oral argument in November), Native children may once again be stolen from their families and cultural communities, adding even more tragedy to our nation’s continuing genocide against the continent’s indigenous peoples.

While the Kyles of the United States welcome the attempt to assemble the world’s largest gathering of individuals with the same name, we cannot stand idly by while Texas threatens by law and by body the rights and privileges of the state’s women and minorities. If we were to venture to Kyle, Texas, this weekend, we would bring with us hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of economic activity, thereby giving tacit consent to Texas’ hatred.

This we will not do.

And so, on behalf of the nation’s Kyles, I have the honor of saying:

Fuck Texas.

One of the cool parts of being a generalist (a job which isn’t available in most school systems) is being able to teach a wide variety of subjects. This quarter, I’m teaching in five.

Advisory

First, and with the direct support of two of my colleagues, I participate in an Advisory of seven students. For those who haven’t paid attention to the changes in pedagogical theory these past twenty years, “Advisory” is kind of like a mix between home room, study hall, and a workshop focused on the development of both personal character and intrapersonal skills.

Sometimes it looks like a bunch of people just hanging around a conference table. Sometimes it looks like a lecture by a teacher or an exhibition by a student. Sometimes it looks like a staff-supported homework club. Regardless of how it looks, it attempts to be an experiential practicum in community building: this is how you maintain a relationship in a healthy community.

The second class I teach focuses on human rights. I want the students to produce a video or audio-recording that connects at least one of the rights listed in the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the biography of an individual or group of individuals who fought to declare or protect that right — but I’m still working on the best way to help them do that.

My ultimate goal is to teach them how to research the progression of a topic through time by analyzing the actions of real-life individuals who were crucial to the topic’s current status. I also want them to understand the ways in which the actions of individuals can influence the actions of an empire, which will hopefully strengthen their conception of what’s possible in their own lives.

I just need to figure out how to get them from point A to point Z.

I also have to teach this subject to two different sections, one of which meets for 90 minutes a week, the other of which meets for 45. Obviously, the latter section will need to go from point A to point Z while skipping over points such as E, F, and G.

Dungeons & Dragons

My third class is, once again, Dungeons & Dragons. This quarter, I am the Dungeon Master for a party of six students, five of whom have significant experience playing the game.

I’ve written previously about using Dungeons & Dragons in the classroom, so I’ll just say the difference this time is that I’m trying to create a campaign that requires the students to investigate, analyze, and report back on a series of diverse cultures. The students won’t be “adventurers” as much they’ll be “scouts.” There will be fights with monsters and magic and perhaps, if I get particularly inspired, the tracking down of a conspiracy, but the goal — the academic goal — is give them the experience of thinking critically and in an anthropological way about the concept of “culture.”

Basketball

The fourth class is Basketball. A colleague and I are trying to develop close to a dozen rebellious and poorly coordinated teenagers who don’t understand the rules of the game into a servicable (and fun-having) basketball team capable of playing in some kind of official capacity on behalf of our school.

We run two 90-minute practices per week; so far, we’ve had one. I have my work cut out for me, but I love basketball, and while I doubt my coaching skills, I don’t doubt my knowledge and passion for the game.

I’m hoping to get a whistle.

Military Tactics

The last class I have to teach (also with a colleague) is Military Tactics. The name wasn’t my first choice. I wanted to call it “Jedi Training,” but my colleagues convinced me otherwise, since “Jedi Training” would make the students think it was a Star Wars thing, and it most definitely is not.

Instead, it’s a The Men Who Stare At Goats thing.

If you haven’t seen the movie, The Men Who Stare At Goats is a fictional representation of a nonfictional account of true-to-life programs sponsored by various agencies in the United States military-industrial complex. It explores the nation’s real-life effort to create a team of super soldiers trained in the art of extra-sensory perception and capable of “remote viewing” and even “remote assasination.”

I haven’t read the nonfiction book that the movie is based on, so I don’t know which parts originate in reality and which parts are wholly fiction. With that being said, the movie presents one of the initiatives as the brainchild of a soldier played by Jeff Bridges, aka, “the Dude,” and based on a real-life lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who, among other things, was part of the team that came up with the slogan, “Be All You Can Be.”

In the movie, the lieutenant colonel was given a mission in the early 1970s to explore the ways in which the wisdoms of the counterculture might inform the military’s ability to successfully complete a strategic and tactical mission. Eight years later (in the movie), the soldier returned with an operations manual and the intention to produce — with military funds — a battalion of warrior monks to be armed with countercultural principles, paranormal abilities, and the ability to generate peace when possible and deadly violence when necessary.

There’s a lot to be doubted about some of the claims of the First Earth Battalion, but its existence is not one of them.

My colleague and I have both reviewed real-life documents produced for the First Earth Battalion, and I’ve done several hours of research into its history. My colleague and I also possess many years of knowledge and experience informed by the principles of the counterculture, most extensively in terms of the music of the Grateful Dead but also in more academically inclined ways.

Our general goal is to produce in our six or seven students not only a fascination with what our government is willing to pay for when it comes to achieving a military victory, but also a rudimentary experience of going through the training, an experience that will be one part intellectual, two parts physical, and three parts spiritual.

I am least prepared for this last class, but one becoming a Jedi warrior requires you to sometimes close your eyes and trust in the Force.

The Other Classes

I have more than those five classes on my schedule. Most of the others are one-on-one, where I’m either serving the student in a project-manager capacity or the student is serving me in an internship capacity (with tasks related to the school’s marketing needs and benefits related to the student’s communication skills).

Finally, for the last block of the week, I have a class where I join four musicians in the school’s music studio for a forty-five minute exploration of the realm of improvisational sound. It’s ideally suited to cleanse the soul after a hard week of school.

Looking over my classes for the quarter, I thank whatever experiences and people led me to become a generalist. It really does make teaching a hell of a lot more fun.