The Rhode Island Democratic Women’s Caucus’s newly elected chair, Rev. Dr. Donnie Anderson, recently told the Boston Globe she would “weigh in on battles taking place in local school committees and libraries about matters of gender and race.”
Dr. Anderson, a transgender woman who lives in Providence, is the former executive minister of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches. She serves as co-chair of the Rhode Island Commission on Prejudice and Bias, is former co-chair of the State Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights and currently serves as Pastor at Pilgrim United Church of Christ (UCC) in New Bedford.
Speaking on race and gender matters in public schools and libraries, Anderson told the Globe:
[One example is] the group Parents United Rhode Island is asking school committee candidates to pledge to “oppose all efforts to teach our K-12 students any divisive race based or gender based theory and any inappropriate and explicit sexual content” and to support a “RI Parents Bill of Rights.”
“When we talk about denying the existence of nonbinary and transgender youth and we say to people in schools, ‘You can’t talk about it, you’ve got to ignore it,’ those students often have nowhere else to go,” Anderson said, “and they feel like it’s hopeless.”
While the attempted suicide rate in the general population is about 4 percent, it’s about 40 percent in the transgender population, and even higher among transgender youth, she said.
“Some people are fortunate enough to be in families that are supportive and care and get their students the care that they need,” Anderson said. “But then there’s a lot of them that are out there alone. And so they have religious people telling them they’re sinful and bad. They have political people putting this out there. And now the schools can’t be there. This also gets applied to libraries.”
In September, protesters called for a library in Cranston to cancel an Independent Women’s Network event about “gender ideology in schools.” Activists want to keep books such as “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” out of libraries.
Anderson said that when she grew up in Cranston, the library did not have books about gender, but now more information is available.
“There are resources for help, but these people want to take the help away,” she said. “It’s like saying there’s someone out there drowning and someone’s ready to throw in a life preserver and they’re saying, ‘No, let’s make a rule: You can’t throw life preservers to that drowning person.’ That’s what they’re doing.”
Read the complete Boston Globe article here.
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