Tuesday, October 18, 2016

NWR, Local, and National LGBTQIA+ News

By Mya Barnes

NWR and Local LGBTQIA+  News

     North Warren has recently started a GSA club in the high school and will hopefully start one in the middle school! GSA club is a student-run club in a high school or middle school that brings together LGBTQIA+ and straight students to support each other, provides a safe place to socialize, and creates a platform to fight for racial, gender, LGBTQIA, and economic justice. GSA Network helps LGBTQIA+  students and straight allies organize GSA clubs. It focuses on activism to create safer schools.

     Even though the school’s GSA club has just started and is a small group, we hope to see big strides throughout the year! If interested in joining please see Mrs. Eisner in the media center!

National LGBTQIA+  News

     14 year transgender boy, Kyler Prescott committed suicide after being repeatedly misgendered by hospital staff. Kyler came out to his mom at age 13, and the year before began self-harming. His mother took him to the emergency room at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, which has a Gender Management Clinic to treat children with gender dysphoria and related issues.

     He was placed in the hospital’s youth psychiatry unit for a 72-hour suicide hold, where the hospital staff constantly kept referring to Kyler as a girl, causing him to go into a traumatic spiral. Even though, Kyler’s  mother, Katharine Prescott does blame the hospital for her child’s death, she has filed a civil lawsuit, charging the medical personnel with the violation of federal and state laws that protect against discrimination. She wants to hold them accountable in an effort to “make sure that doesn’t happen to other kids.”

     RCHSD staff assured Katharine that all staff would refer to Kyler with male gender pronouns and would otherwise treat him as a boy,” according to court documents. however, that was not the case. The suit says that the staff continued to refer to Kyler by female pronouns and blocked his mother’s number after she called them “multiple times” to complain about the situation. One of Prescott’s attorneys, Alison Pennington of the Transgender Law Center, told NBC News that the civil suit may be the first case involving a transgender child that claims sex-based discrimination under the Affordable Care Act.

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