Action4Canada - May 01, 2023


12 year-old Educates School Board - There are Only Two Genders

Topics
protected class
Hosted by
Tanya Gaw
A4C Chilliwack Walk4Revival - April 14, 2023 Gods Law Over Government's Law With Pastor Matthew Trewhella

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

206.8

Word count

533

Sentence count

48

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the 7th, 10th grade at Nichols Middle School, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today. I never thought that the shirt I wore to school on March 21st would lead me to speak with you today, but it did.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 In the 7th, 10th grade at Nichols Middle School, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today.
00:00:05.560 I never thought that the shirt I wore to school on March 21st would lead me to speak with you today.
00:00:12.300 On that Tuesday morning, I was taken out of gym class to sit down with two adults for what turned out to be a very uncomfortable talk.
00:00:18.940 I was told that people were complaining about the words on my shirt, that my shirt was making some students feel unsafe.
00:00:25.540 Yes, words on a shirt made people feel unsafe. They told me that I wasn't in trouble, but the shirt felt like I was.
00:00:32.680 I was told that I would need to remove my shirt before I could return to class.
00:00:37.740 When I nicely told them that I didn't want to do that, they called my father.
00:00:42.060 Thankfully, my dad supported my decisions and came to pick me up.
00:00:46.420 What did my shirt say? Five simple words. There are only two genders. 1.00
00:00:51.700 Nothing harmful. Nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact.
00:00:56.580 I have been told that my shirt was targeting a protected class.
00:00:59.920 Who is this protected class? Are their feelings more important than my rights?
00:01:04.380 I don't complain when I see pride flags and diversity posters hung throughout the school.
00:01:08.900 Do you know why? Because others have a right to their beliefs just as I do.
00:01:12.940 Not one person, staff, or student told me that they were bothered by what I was wearing.
00:01:17.620 Actually, just the opposite. Several kids told me that they supported my actions and that they wanted one, too.
00:01:24.520 I experienced... Wait a moment.
00:01:26.800 I was told that the shirt was a disruption to learning.
00:01:29.100 No one got up and stormed out of class. No one burst into tears.
00:01:32.720 I'm sure I would have noticed if they had.
00:01:34.660 I experienced disruptions to my learning every day.
00:01:37.560 Kids acting out in class are a disruption, yet nothing is done.
00:01:40.500 Why do the rules apply to one, yet not another?
00:01:43.300 I feel like these adults were telling me that it wasn't okay for me to have an opposing view.
00:01:47.500 Their arguments were weak, in my opinion.
00:01:49.880 I didn't go to school that day to hurt feelings or cause trouble.
00:01:52.900 I have learned a lot from this experience.
00:01:54.960 I learned that a lot of other students share my view.
00:01:57.820 I learned that adults don't always do the right thing or make the right decisions.
00:02:01.960 I know that I have a right to wear a shirt with those five words.
00:02:05.400 Even at 12 years old, I have my own political opinions, and I have a right to express those opinions.
00:02:11.220 Even at school, this right is called the First Amendment to the Constitution.
00:02:17.180 My hope in being here tonight is to bring the school committee's attention to this issue.
00:02:21.920 I hope that you will speak up for the rest of us so we can express ourselves without being pulled out of class.
00:02:26.960 Next time, it may not only be me.
00:02:28.800 There might be more students that decide to speak out.
00:02:30.800 Thank you for your time and good night.
00:02:32.820 Thank you.