The Eastern Wyoming College Board of Trustees bowed to pressure last week, withdrawing consideration of a policy that would have protected and included transgender students, faculty and student-athletes.
From the account of the hearing in the Gillette News Record, the conversation and testimony around the policy wasn’t remotely productive and included key areas of misinformation.
Steve Davis, who said he lives between Lingle and Fort Laramie, told trustees he’d “experienced a lot of homosexual activity” when he was in the Army and stationed in West Virginia in the late 1960s.
“It was a very evil, wicked environment,” Davis said. After serving a year in Vietnam, he was reassigned to the West Virginia area and “spent some time there experiencing difficulties,” he said.
Oy.
Just to be clear, homosexuality and gender identity are not linked. Transgender people can be gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and a whole host of other sexual-orientation identities. This man’s experiences with gay people serving in the military (which, frankly, he probably has incorrectly vilified) should have absolutely no bearing on a conversation about transgender inclusion.
Hopefully the Board of Trustees will look to the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee, both of which have created policies that pave a path toward trans inclusion in sports.
