Another busy week in the war on young people.

Updates from the South Carolina State Board of Education and Senate Medical Affairs

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Update on South Carolina book challenge regulations:

Yesterday was another uncharacteristically long day at the South Carolina State Board of Education. In both the early morning Policy meeting and the afternoon Full Board meeting, there were enough speakers to require motions to shorten public comment. I was able to speak in the morning session, but there was a only time for about half of my planned remarks.

The State Board, usually a fairly sleepy bureaucratic entity that focuses on the nuts and bolts of implementing state education law (the parts the state hasn’t reallocated to other entities, like the Education Oversight Committee over the years— with the apparent intent of weakening the State Board’s reach) has been roiled for months by a book censorship regulation evidently introduced by Superintendent Ellen Weaver. Committee meetings and Full Board meetings have been packed, public comment procedures have been somewhat chaotic, and an organization that usually spends most of its time hearing district challenges to teacher certificates has instead had to weigh intense feelings on all sides of the issue, as well as potential obligations and responsibilities that go far beyond its usual purview.

A view from the door of the the Board meeting room shows a packed, energized crowd.

This section has been updated to add some context about Superintendent Weaver’s remarks [2/16]:

It’s been an odd first major step for Weaver, who ran on an at-times explicitly anti- government/ “grassroots” platform to radically expand the role of the Board in this way. And for her part, Weaver blamed the concerns voiced by students and educators as the product of some kind of misinformation campaign by unnamed “national organizations” who had “misled” them.

Students who had come to testify were quick to point out that they had read the regulation, and that they understood what it meant:

Weaver’s rhetorical strategy was both familiar and heavily ironic. After all, Weaver, as head of the SC Department of Education, presumably introduced and had a hand in crafting the regulation, which the public first learned about in September. In July, Weaver was a featured guest at the Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warriors” national conference in Philadelphia. And it is isn’t exactly a secret that groups like Moms for Liberty— you know, national organizations— have been a huge factor in pushing legislation that looks a lot like the one Weaver was addressing.

Once again, spectators heard essentially identical, long-form testimony during both meetings on the bill from the Federalist Society’s Miles Coleman, who mostly summarized amendments which had been introduced by the Policy committee, and with which he didn’t seem to have a great deal of familiarity.

The regulation did pass second reading, meaning it now goes to the state legislature for approval.

Coleman also seemed to be a little fuzzy during questioning, about the process through which the regulation will be approved by the committee, stating that it would go to the House and Senate for amendments. If the regulation follows the state process, it looks a little different, but it will go to the House and Senate for further discussion.

From the South Carolina Standards Manual.

The version passed by the Full Board was amended in several ways from the original version, including:

• The Policy subcommittee removed a requirement that texts meet “FCC guidelines”. This requirement was the source of a great deal of confusion, since the FCC does not set explicit content requirements or prohibitions, but generally uses a you know it when you see it approach.

• The Policy subcommittee added a requirement that book challengers be parents or legal guardians (previously all “taxpayers” could file challenges). This would likely reduce the overall number of challenges, since as FOIA requests have shown, many current book challengers are not parents of current students, and rather are members of politically-motivated groups like PACE for Lex 2 and Moms for Liberty.

• Board member Maya Slaughter further limited the number of challenges possible under the election when she successfully introduced an amendment to limit challenges to five per person, per calendar month.

• Districts can choose to refer challenges to the State Board.

• Districts are no longer required to review all existing materials, a process librarians and other experts said would require significant and burdensome increases in the workloads of school employees.

My take is that these changes make the regulation better than most current school district policies and procedures in SC, at least in districts where there have been significant numbers of challenges already. If there are opportunities to clarify the “age-appropriate” language to include the context of literary, artistic, and educational value, as current state law on obscenity already does, the regulation would be a lot more useful. (In the current language, a major issue that hasn’t been addressed is that any text with so-called “sexual content” could be removed from every school in the state.)

Update on anti-trans legislation:

Today, the Senate Medical Affairs Committee heard testimony on H. 4624, a bill that bans gender-affirming care for minors and prohibits state funding for gender-affirming care for adults. It also requires educators to out students they believe may be experiencing gender dysphoria. It’s a good time to review the arguments proponents of the bill used in the House, which I wrote about last week:

The Senate committee (video here) called a total of three out-of-state “experts” to testify in favor of the bill, none of whom had a background in medical care for children. These were Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist and anti-gender-affirming care activist who testified remotely from New York, Matt Sharp of the Alliance Defending Freedom (an anti-LGBTQ+ organization labeled a “Hate Group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center), and a young woman from Wisconsin, who testified she had received inappropriate gender-affirming care as a young adult.

Under questioning from Senator Brad Hutto, these experts acknowledged that their statements didn’t align with the recommendations of the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and a list of other medical organizations. They provided no examples of surgeries performed on minors in South Carolina, and they repeatedly pointed to and mischaracterized research performed in other countries (see the article above for more detail). Hutto at one point asked Sharpe, “You are not a doctor, I am not a doctor, no one up here is a doctor, so why should we not listen to medical experts who are board-certified in their areas?”

In opposition to the bill, experts in the area of child health testified to the committee, including SC pediatrician Elizabeth Mack, who again pointed out that the “concerns” of proponents don’t apply to South Carolina. She outlined current, peer-reviewed research. She also patiently guided Senator Richard Cash, a proponent of the bill, on how to actually review medical research, rather than only looking at the studies you like.

Texas counselor Adam Sauceda testified that policies banning gender-affirming care harmed the mental health of transgender youth and their families.

Parents David and Rebecca Bell from Charleston, SC, testified as to their experiences with their daughter, who needed gender-affirming care and ended up in in-patient care due to a mental health crisis. “We know,” David Bell said, “that receiving gender-affirming care saved her life”. He described a long, careful process, involving many professionals leading up to their daughter being approved for puberty blockers. Her behavior, Bell testified, improved, and her grades went up.

I was proud of the many parents, experts, and students who showed up today to speak, but especially one of my former research students, Alyssa. Although I didn’t get the opportunity to speak myself, I did prepare some remakes; you can read them here. After the hearing ended, many more speakers who came to testify against the bill took to the State House steps and continued to share their stories.

That we’re spending so much time talking about censoring books in schools and attacking gender-affirming care (while placing speech requirements on educators, with the forced outing provisions) doesn’t seem like a coincidence. A loose coalition of interests without much documented interest in the wellbeing of children and young people continues to use kids as a prop. To them, “parental rights” seem to be a kind of property right, the right to do whatever they want to their own kids, and to seize control over decisions about other people’s children, as well.

When Senator Hutto asked Alliance Defending Freedom’s Matt Sharp whether he supported the rights of parents to make decisions for their children, Sharp— who is supporting a law that would restrict the kinds of decisions parents can make— responded that he did support parents’ prerogative to make decisions for and with their own children— within the law. That would seem to give the game away about the kinds of “rights” and “freedom” many such groups support better than anything else the experts said today.